Ben
Box Boy
Posts: 65 
|
Post by Ben on Mar 15, 2013 16:36:45 GMT
|
|
|
|
Post by fitztightly on Mar 25, 2013 14:49:39 GMT
Wow that was fascinating, some great memories of childhood too. Thanks!
Funny the way that LU touts our upgrade programme as something so fresh, vibrant and new when they were saying the same words 40 years ago.
Don't get me wrong, anything that serves the customer better and makes the railway more common sensical to operate is great in my book. It just goes to show the amount of disrepair that we have all been in, how long it's taking.... and whatever words the Comms department pour down our throats, it still means huge change and weekend closures.
|
|
|
|
Post by tulip on Mar 25, 2013 22:33:46 GMT
That brings me back to the fact that LU were trumpeting about 30 tph on the Central some time back, but someone found a handout about 48tph on the District back in the mid 1950's!!!
|
|
|
|
Post by GentlemanJim on Mar 25, 2013 23:02:41 GMT
That brings me back to the fact that LU were trumpeting about 30 tph on the Central some time back, but someone found a handout about 48tph on the District back in the mid 1950's!!! I remember this Tulip, 48tph in the 50's with men in Signal Boxes and if I remember rightly the Central required 2 more trains for service in the 60's than they did in the 2000's....... that's backward progress. |
|
|
|
Post by GentlemanJim on Mar 25, 2013 23:35:11 GMT
Excellent film Ben thanks for sharing.
If LU made one it would be called 'Comedy of errors' or 'You really couldn't make this up'
|
|
|
|
Post by railtechnician on Mar 26, 2013 0:42:39 GMT
Excellent film Ben thanks for sharing. If LU made one it would be called 'Comedy of errors' or 'You really couldn't make this up' Yep great film, I can watch those endlessly. Assuming you were a 'yellow helmet' seeing that work in today's OTT H&S environment I wonder how many 'breaches' you'd notice? LT used to make lots of films, I wonder whatever became of Brian Stimpson and his film unit who were based at Telstar House in the 1980s. I can recall sitting through many LT films in my early days in the job, one I particularly recall had the title 'Delay day' and highlighted the difference between getting things wrong at the sharp end and getting them right. I recall it was known popularly by staff as 'Awayday', we all recognised portrayal of the ticket collector reading the paper and the platform staff who couldn't give proper assistance etc I have a feeling that LT/LU switched to using external film makers like the ITB who put celebrities in the key roles as they would probably attract more attention. |
|
|
|
Post by fitztightly on Mar 26, 2013 12:17:21 GMT
That brings me back to the fact that LU were trumpeting about 30 tph on the Central some time back, but someone found a handout about 48tph on the District back in the mid 1950's!!! Too true. I remember Dave Bolton getting in my cab, telling me about when he was a Driver there were so many homes at Charing Cross (Embankment) they went up to H. That's 8!!!! I saw a picture on Flickr posted by a chap who was a Regulator at Cobourg Street from when he was a Signalman at Morden in the 1950s. I won't mention his name as he uses an ID on there. (I've been trying to post a link but Flickr's down at the moment). Bearing in mind there was one Signalman and the trains were crew operated, they operated a 1 1/2 minute service in and out of there in those days. That's with shutting down and opening up 1938 stock, (4 minutes to fully charge the Auxiliaries!) no ugly new crew accommodation block, not even Programme Machines and IMRs. (I'm pretty sure that was without stepping back, too). It was with sleeves rolled up hard work, dedication, skill and common sense. And I bet the Driver and Guard still managed to make tea. They tried it again a few timetables ago, with OPO and stepping back and it was a dreadful disaster. |
|
|
|
Post by Nortube on Mar 26, 2013 12:46:30 GMT
They used to have speed signalling on the Picc at every station (I think) between Hyde Park Corner and Kings Cross both roads when I was on there for the year in 1976. I don't really know if it made any difference. It was all removed a while later.
I remember that if you were following a train EB and were stick to stick, you could end up waiting half way down Leicester Sq platform until the train for the train in front to get out of the way.
If you wanted to catch the driver behind at one of the stations that had a policeman in the platform, you would crawl along very slowly. The inner home would drop off, their train move into the platform and bang, they'd get tripped!
|
|
|
|
Post by railtechnician on Mar 26, 2013 19:18:10 GMT
They used to have speed signalling on the Picc at every station (I think) between Hyde Park Corner and Kings Cross both roads when I was on there for the year in 1976. I don't really know if it made any difference. It was all removed a while later. I remember that if you were following a train EB and were stick to stick, you could end up waiting half way down Leicester Sq platform until the train for the train in front to get out of the way. If you wanted to catch the driver behind at one of the stations that had a policeman in the platform, you would crawl along very slowly. The inner home would drop off, their train move into the platform and bang, they'd get tripped! I think that came out in 1979 when we were doing the Stage 1 east end resignalling. I worked on the section from Cockfosters to Russell Square headwall and I recall we did a lot of work at Kings Cross just before I transferred from Whitechapel signal new works to Earls Court telephone installation in that year. Earls Court signal new works were working on the central section through HPC, I recall declining overtime on the HPC/Down Street changeover as I had a previous engagement that weekend. It was as I recall a very labour intensive changeover, as many of the big jobs were in those days, attracting additional staff from Whitechapel, Baker Street and Wembley Park new works. There were plenty of LER long toms to remove and recovering bedplates was graft requiring both muscle and stamina, I hated missing changeovers, especially the big jobs. |
|
Ben
Box Boy
Posts: 65
|
Post by Ben on Mar 26, 2013 23:47:01 GMT
Excellent film Ben thanks for sharing. If LU made one it would be called 'Comedy of errors' or 'You really couldn't make this up' Yep great film, I can watch those endlessly. Assuming you were a 'yellow helmet' seeing that work in today's OTT H&S environment I wonder how many 'breaches' you'd notice? Thanks all! In fact, RT, its quite funny you say that! I 'borrowed' this video from an internal page at Lboro for Civil Engineers. This was for the 'Health and Safety' module we were required to do last semester! In the introductory lecture, this film was shown with the lecturer basically pointing at various working practicies observed and saying things like 'You can't do that', 'Look at how unsafe that is!', 'no recognition of the dangers', 'not a single hi-vi', 'total lack of understanding of risks', etc etc. This then lead onto a critique of LUL culture (of total lack of a fire safety culture, as put) with regards to the Kings Cross Fire of 1987. Having read the Fennel Report several times, seen the news clips of it, the documentaries of it, known people who worked for the company at that time, and being in possession of the Lifts and Escallators appendix, and the Fire and Floods appendix to the Rule Book that were in vogue at that time, it was difficult not to stand up and denounce his summary of it as over simplified, fatuous, and without mincing words, b*ll*cks. However, in a room of 300 peers I bottled, said nothing, and simply didnt return after the interval. The guy is, or was, heavily involved at TfL via his consultancy business working on the risk management stuff for the upgrades going on. So, you know, that kind of approach and attitude is whats going to guide the future development limits within the company. Have fun with that... Its a grand shame films of this style aren't made anymore. Clipped voice, language as complex as is required to put the idea across succinctly and honestly, animations not trying to be photo-realistic constantly. There are certain tones of confidence, pride, and even righteousness that just seem to re-enforce a sense of purpose throughout it. Even the score, frequently referencing the leitmotif of 'London Bridge', has a confidence and feeling of prosperity to it, in the best tradition of 20th century British orchestral works, and clearly makes use of someones intelligence to write it. Compare this to the (IIRC) HS2 marketing video which used an anemic and lobotomised version of 'We built this city' by Starship, fading in and out now and again. |
|
|
|
Post by railtechnician on Mar 27, 2013 13:05:14 GMT
Yep great film, I can watch those endlessly. Assuming you were a 'yellow helmet' seeing that work in today's OTT H&S environment I wonder how many 'breaches' you'd notice? Thanks all! In fact, RT, its quite funny you say that! I 'borrowed' this video from an internal page at Lboro for Civil Engineers. This was for the 'Health and Safety' module we were required to do last semester! In the introductory lecture, this film was shown with the lecturer basically pointing at various working practicies observed and saying things like 'You can't do that', 'Look at how unsafe that is!', 'no recognition of the dangers', 'not a single hi-vi', 'total lack of understanding of risks', etc etc. This then lead onto a critique of LUL culture (of total lack of a fire safety culture, as put) with regards to the Kings Cross Fire of 1987. Having read the Fennel Report several times, seen the news clips of it, the documentaries of it, known people who worked for the company at that time, and being in possession of the Lifts and Escallators appendix, and the Fire and Floods appendix to the Rule Book that were in vogue at that time, it was difficult not to stand up and denounce his summary of it as over simplified, fatuous, and without mincing words, b*ll*cks. However, in a room of 300 peers I bottled, said nothing, and simply didnt return after the interval. The guy is, or was, heavily involved at TfL via his consultancy business working on the risk management stuff for the upgrades going on. So, you know, that kind of approach and attitude is whats going to guide the future development limits within the company. Have fun with that... Its a grand shame films of this style aren't made anymore. Clipped voice, language as complex as is required to put the idea across succinctly and honestly, animations not trying to be photo-realistic constantly. There are certain tones of confidence, pride, and even righteousness that just seem to re-enforce a sense of purpose throughout it. Even the score, frequently referencing the leitmotif of 'London Bridge', has a confidence and feeling of prosperity to it, in the best tradition of 20th century British orchestral works, and clearly makes use of someones intelligence to write it. Compare this to the (IIRC) HS2 marketing video which used an anemic and lobotomised version of 'We built this city' by Starship, fading in and out now and again. Ben, Before I joined LT I was a PO Telephone Engineer for six and a half years, in that time from my apprenticeship through to being a Technical Officer in a switching centre with keyholder and fire safety responsibilities I had been trained intensively to embrace H&S, the PO being quite advanced in this area. When I joined LT in 1977 from an H&S viewpoint it looked very much like walking back in time to the 1950s as far as working practices were concerned. Having said that there was in my view nothing inherently unsafe in what we did as long as common sense was applied. I can think of several incidents that might have been disastrous like the night we took a large 6' cable drum down the stairs from the lower concourse to one of the platforms at Kennington. The last trains were still running and there were passengers on the platform as the chargehand told us to get the drum to the platform. We had a chain through the drum and ten of us on each side to arrest the drum on the stairs and walk it down. The chargehand told us to take the strain and he leaned on the drum to shift it off the top step. The drum moved down the steps but it was heavy and put the chain under tension trapping the hands of those closest to it so they quickly let go. Gravity quickly took over and as it did so some of the guys lost their nerve and let go afraid of tripping on the stairs and being trampled, the drum then slipped the chain and ran away down onto the platform. It ran along the platform and passed amazed passengers just as the last train was approaching. Luckily there was no accident, the drum was heavy enough to damage the train, had it hit it, and hitting a passenger would have caused serious injuries or even a fatality. Such incidents were not unknown but were relatively rare, in fact I witnessed only one similar incident in my career although the circumstances were different, a closed station in engineering hours, a smaller but awkward drum, a rope tied off to a hand rail with staff on one side only rather than a chain with staff on both sides and not enough men to take it down the longer and narrower staircase, basically the rope snapped and the drum careered to the foot of the stairs and straight through the wooden fence wall! Another cable related incident was dropping a full 500 metre drum of 2 core 1/064 LCC on the track in the tunnel. The trolley was just big enough to carry the A frame and bar with a full drum two men and a second drum. The idea was to run out the drum, unmount it and mount the full one in the tunnel. Dodgy stuff as that meant having to rotate the A frame and full drum as the bar was too long to pull out and put in with the whole at a 45 degree angle to the tunnel. There were six of us present but only really room for four men to shift the drums around while I held the trolley in position (no brakes on trolleys in those days!) and the chargehand gave the orders. At the time the chargehand was God unless the Inspector was on site in which case he was God! When the drum rolled onto the track we couldn't get it back onto the trolley without calling another gang for assistance and in such a confined space it was not easy as men had to stand on the trolley to counter balance it and prevent tippage. On another shift as a young wireman we needed to access a platform invert to run in some lead covered cable and the access cover was unusually large, enough for 8 or 9 of us to get around it and lift it when it was prized up with a screwdriver and a couple of chisels (proper manhole cover keys were always hard to find then, they used to disappear from stations). It was a backbreaker as it was also thicker than usual. You had to have real faith in your colleagues to put your fingers into the scissor like gap and lift on the call "1-2-3-lift". We did but one of the weaker chaps on one corner didn't get his corner up and let go for fear of losing his fingers, the guy next to him followed suit and so all the weight suddenly transferred to that corner and down it went into the invert as others on that end decided to let go. It took some time and additional staff to recover the cover and repair the damaged cables beneath. These incidents were not common and IMHO were due to lack of common sense though I accept that there was also bad practice but one has to see it in the light of the time. Back then the job was run more on military lines, yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir etc and if one was told to paint coal black or grass green that is what we did, we all knew that answering back and speaking out of turn could mean a 'four hour walk' to Acton Offices and instant dismissal especially while still serving the three month probationary period and we all knew people that hadn't even managed a week or a fortnight before the chargehand disciplined them for the one and only time. Indeed I recall a chargehand having six new starters in his gang on a Tuesday night shift (first shift of the week at the time) and none of them lasted the shift, all were told to attend Acton Offices in the morning and await a hearing, we never saw them again. The world was a different place all those years ago, people were tougher and more responsible in many ways, but work ethics IMHO were better than they are nowadays too. Unfortunately H&S is like the universe, infinitely expanding and a licence to print money for those engaged in the 'what if' culture which has made so many tasks almost impossible to do now. Don't get me wrong, there are many excellent and needed H&S measures but they are wrapped up in so much b*?&%£it that at times they actually lead to unsafe working practices. |
|
Ben
Box Boy
Posts: 65
|
Post by Ben on Mar 28, 2013 1:28:37 GMT
Its an interesting and complex one, isn't it? Though no-one can argue with the main principal behind legislation (that an employer has a duty of care for people he employs and persons present within the area he is responsible for) it seems that as the management of industries have become increasing detatched from what their actual industry does and how it works, and instead become ever tighter bound into a new industry of 'management', that effective and efficient ways of justifying working practicies have simply been lost. Because the leaders of most public services rarely seem to be people who've worked up from the bottom, they don't actually know in intimacy how the decisions they make are put into practice. So they, and their analysts, make decisions that are not as efficiently matched to the requirements of their industry as decisions that result from bespoke processes.
I would make a contentious comment wrt your last paragraph. It seems, from an outside view, that especially in the railways there has been an ever increasing conversion of blue collar jobs to white collar jobs. Technology has undoubtedly played a part in reducing the manual aspect of much work, but it seems that as the rise of the graduate business manager has occured, so too have the ranks below him slowly filled up with (or been altered to consist of) more white collar workers, who approach tasks through theory and paperwork than experience and labour. I wonder whether this in some respects is due to a clique effect of people trying to surround themselves with other people who work, think, and do in ways understandable to themselves? Perhaps managers surround themselves with mini-managers because they dont understand or recognise a process of working any different from the way they do?
There must be a finite limit as to how detatched and abstract you can make the heirarchy of an organisation from the ever decreasing number of people at the sharp end before problems arise because too few people are in a position to know what to do and why to do it.
I suspect that this position has already been reached though, because methods and achievements which were once common place are now considered impossible without question or comment. Yet when it is pointed out to have occured previously, its dismissed as 'history', as though somehow the arbitary number of times the Earth has gone round the Sun is a crucial factor in whether something is plausible or not.
As fewer and fewer people enter into anything with a background of actual physical work, less and less people will be in a position or willing to undertake hard physical graft, or recognise when they have cocked it up for themselves.
|
|
|
|
Post by railtechnician on Mar 28, 2013 3:01:18 GMT
Its an interesting and complex one, isn't it? Though no-one can argue with the main principal behind legislation (that an employer has a duty of care for people he employs and persons present within the area he is responsible for) it seems that as the management of industries have become increasing detatched from what their actual industry does and how it works, and instead become ever tighter bound into a new industry of 'management', that effective and efficient ways of justifying working practicies have simply been lost. Because the leaders of most public services rarely seem to be people who've worked up from the bottom, they don't actually know in intimacy how the decisions they make are put into practice. So they, and their analysts, make decisions that are not as efficiently matched to the requirements of their industry as decisions that result from bespoke processes. I would make a contentious comment wrt your last paragraph. It seems, from an outside view, that especially in the railways there has been an ever increasing conversion of blue collar jobs to white collar jobs. Technology has undoubtedly played a part in reducing the manual aspect of much work, but it seems that as the rise of the graduate business manager has occured, so too have the ranks below him slowly filled up with (or been altered to consist of) more white collar workers, who approach tasks through theory and paperwork than experience and labour. I wonder whether this in some respects is due to a clique effect of people trying to surround themselves with other people who work, think, and do in ways understandable to themselves? Perhaps managers surround themselves with mini-managers because they dont understand or recognise a process of working any different from the way they do? There must be a finite limit as to how detatched and abstract you can make the heirarchy of an organisation from the ever decreasing number of people at the sharp end before problems arise because too few people are in a position to know what to do and why to do it. I suspect that this position has already been reached though, because methods and achievements which were once common place are now considered impossible without question or comment. Yet when it is pointed out to have occured previously, its dismissed as 'history', as though somehow the arbitary number of times the Earth has gone round the Sun is a crucial factor in whether something is plausible or not. As fewer and fewer people enter into anything with a background of actual physical work, less and less people will be in a position or willing to undertake hard physical graft, or recognise when they have cocked it up for themselves. The classroom is no replacement for working knowledge and experience, managers these days seem to have less and less responsibility in areas that were once 'led from the front' and buck passing and derriere protection have replaced it, made ever easier by more and more H&S practices and procedures. Many of those practices and procedures were written by managers who had little or no knowledge of what was involved in getting tasks done. In H&S on site hazard assessments copious notes were expected even to the point of complete irrelevance and the emphasis always seemed to be to find every way to avoid doing any given task rather then to describe effective methods of completing a task safely. Thus H&S empire building in real time. I first saw managers shrinking away from responsibilities in the 1980s, something which I never entertained myself as a 'can-do' supervisor leading from the front a few years later. I preferred the pre-OTT 1974 rule book (1/8" thick with various supplemental appendices of 1/4" thickness each) which preceeded the heavily inflated procedural multi volume working manual. Key safety was spelled out well enough for the fully trained in-house staff and any grey areas were covered with the once well used "All parties must come to an agreement as to what is to be done" which was an excellent way for qualified and experienced railway staff to get virtually anything done safely using common sense and logic. Just as police officers no longer have discretion regarding law breakers, professional railway staff must follow the rules, regulations and procedures even if they don't lead to the successful completion of a task. Of course it would be much safer and much cheaper for everyone to stay at home and for no services to operate at all. Having said that there are probably more accidents in office environments! |
|
