London Banter - Earl's Court SCC empty?

"chunky munky" wrote in message
ups.com...
Spose that's what happens when you cut the number of staff.... It is
very common to have a few desks closed during the day there - meaning
longer suspensions if there is shutdown somewhere.

No, no little white lie required. What happened this morning was that the
signal main [1] fell over at Acton, causing a total loss of signals in the
Acton area. There was a night SSO [2] to man the Hammersmith desk so we
could reverse trains at Hammersmith (Piccadilly) and run trains to Richmond
(District). At about 07:00 the night SSO reached the end of his shift and
despite the fact that due to the service disruption no early turn SSOs had
arrived for work, he booked off and went home. As we now had no way of
reversing anything running west of Arnos (we had about 15 trains at various
points in the pipe at that time) A "Code Amber" [3] was put out by the
controller and trains worked to platforms and the service suspended. The
Picc was reduced to running a two train AG CK shuttle between about 07:00
and 07:45 when we got some SSOs in via special taxi to enable us to run some
sort of service. That was a 25 train CK HAM shuttle and a shuttle (not
sure how many trains) NF HR. As we had no signalling at Acton, the
Rayners branch had no service. This continued until about 10:40 when we got
the signal main back enabling us to run a CK HR service and a AT RL
service. Because by now crews were hopelessly out of place and all early
turn crews had booked, on this state continued until midday when we started
to attempt to recover the service using the afternoon book ons. At about
13:00 my relief arrived at Arnos which is why I'm sitting here sucking on a
beer writing this and not sitting on the desk at Arnos with coffee running
into an IV and a wild look in my eye. On a personal note I'd like to thank
any Picc drivers reading this for their help and assistance this morning, it
was much appreciated. Currently top-man award goes to the Arnos night turn
driver (rostered book off, round about 06:40) who got stuck up the Rayners
branch and due to a series of mischance's, finally managed to get back to
Arnos to book off at 12:15 this afternoon.

[1] Signal Main - term used to describe all the various bits of kit that get
air and electricity to our signals.
[2] SSO - Senior Signal Operator, signalmen that control the Picc west of
Turnpike Lane.
[3] "Code Amber" - We have two "Oh Fcuk" general radio broadcasts that the
Line Controller can use, "Code Red" means ALL trains, stop right where you
are and do not move until you are told to. "Code Amber" means ALL trains run
to the next station and do not move until you are told to.
--
Cheers, Steve.
Change from jealous to sad to reply.