Another long day and not a good one; a serious signal failure at QUE had made a complete mess of the timetable and when I booked on we were running HAI-EAB with shuttle services between EPP-LES and WER-WHC. By the time I took over one of the EPP-LES trains the Techs were on the track trying to fix things, shutting down the line between MAA and WHC. When I reached WOO EB for the second time Wood Lane proudly announced that the problem had been solved but then halfway between DEB and THB we got a noticeably sulky retraction.

Sometime while I was on “grub” the problem was finally fixed but with trains and TOps all over the place there were delays and extended intervals. At MAA EB I was told that I would be held for about five minutes by the Group Station Manager, the Station-side equivalent of our TOMs, as the next train was 15 minutes behind me and with all the extra people up in town for the Jubilee celebrations that would be long enough for the station to become overcrowded.

On the plus side it didn’t rain much but it was getting quite cold when I walked off to get the bus and we had very few trains running with a lot of people wanting to get home. Bring on the Olympics!