Tunnel Telephone

[Deleted]

T boards on display at virtually every (if not all) tunnel section station yesterday and the day before. Is there some sort of major problem with the TT equipment?

[districtinstuctor]

Haven't seen all the T-boards out on the picc since coffeegate a few years back when a whole coffee got spilt over the TT panel! Lit up like a Christmas tree!

[railtechnician]

I wouldn't be surprised, I bet the wires haven't been cleaned since I retired and the stalactites are probably tripping the circuits at Finsbury Park, York Road and Hatton Cross!

The supervisor at Heathrow used to leave the T boards on show all the time, I was forever telling the controller they needed to be put away unless he wanted me to take the TT out of commission!

[Deleted]

Mar 3, 2013 12:14:41 GMT districtinstuctor said:

Haven't seen all the T-boards out on the picc since coffeegate a few years back when a whole coffee got spilt over the TT panel! Lit up like a Christmas tree!

Superb. Did it actually cause TC to discharge?

[districtinstuctor]

Fotunately not. It did take about a week for the whole panel to dry out enough to be electrically tested afterwards.

Given that I was attempting to train as a controller at the time, I think the fall out should all the T/C have discharged, would have been a little over my head! oh, and no... it wasn't my coffee, I treasure my caffeine more than that!

[railtechnician]

Mar 4, 2013 12:20:55 GMT districtinstuctor said:

Fotunately not. It did take about a week for the whole panel to dry out enough to be electrically tested afterwards.

Given that I was attempting to train as a controller at the time, I think the fall out should all the T/C have discharged, would have been a little over my head! oh, and no... it wasn't my coffee, I treasure my caffeine more than that!

That event must've transpired before Picc T/T maintenance was my responsibility, I looked after it from late 1996 until 2004. Working on it could be a nightmare at times as there was so much other stuff in the desk beneath it and the old wiring was somewhat brittle.
If anything the coffee probably held it all together!
As the control room was a Picc asset I looked after the District T/T panel too. It was often a trial when the controllers looked after each other's desks in the days when the Picc had enhanced line clear leaving T/Ts tripped in engineering hours and the District didn't so they were left reset.
My recollection is that the most common fault on the District T/T panel was passed to me by LSC as 'bell/buzzer not working' !!!!!!! 

[HiRoGliffick]

Mar 4, 2013 12:20:55 GMT districtinstuctor said:

Fotunately not. It did take about a week for the whole panel to dry out enough to be electrically tested afterwards.

Given that I was attempting to train as a controller at the time, I think the fall out should all the T/C have discharged, would have been a little over my head! oh, and no... it wasn't my coffee, I treasure my caffeine more than that!

I did trip out the Heathrow Central to Heathrow T5 section and there was a very quick call to have the overriders put on before the desk started smoking.

I miss my time there too.

[MonkFish]

I was there during that time too. I don't think the management were too pleased.

I think the bloke who came to fix it was asked to come out of retirement and spares had to be sourced from a museum. Or so I was told.

[railtechnician]

Mar 4, 2013 22:43:49 GMT MonkFish said:

I was there during that time too. I don't think the management were too pleased.

I think the bloke who came to fix it was asked to come out of retirement and spares had to be sourced from a museum. Or so I was told.

That 'might' be so but I don't believe it, it really depends who the maintainer was at the time. Before the Earls Court control room T/T panels became my responsibility in late 1996 they were maintained by SE&C Acton and prior to that by the Earls Ct T/T night maintenance supervisor and his staff. His senior staff member and former night chargehand was still working, albeit at SE&C when I retired in 2005. 
In 1996 the Picc maintenance contact for T/T maintenance moved from SE&C to Picc Line Engineering.

As for spares the keys and lamps were in common use on all lines in many areas but with the replacement of the Strowger telephone system with MD110 in the mid 1980s the Stores division decided to have a mass clear out of comms spares which coincided with the closure of 10A Wood lane stores in the late 1980s. SE&C held lots of obsolete spares in stores across the combine in disused signal cabins, spare rooms on stations such as Sloane Square, St James Park, Embankment, Farringdon, Hammersmith, Victoria, Earls Court and others as well as the 'official' Earls Court maintenance telephone stores, South Kensington and Stamford Brook telephone installation stores but most of those were cleared of obsolete parts as maintenance and installation contracts were being handed wholesale to external contractors. In many cases the 'baby was thrown out with the bathwater' and subsequently obsolete parts had to be bought back in to keep all the obsolete kit on the railway working. I remember the Picc Comms Support Engineer at Pelham Street trawling the internet for suppliers in the late 1990s so that we could keep the old Earls Court signalman and controller telephone panels working before they acquired the autophones to replace the old magneto and cb panels. 

[Ben]

Brian,

The numerous 'useful rooms for putting things in;, were they subsequently filled with other odds and ends? Without wishing to espouse an hoarder mentality, surely if a room is effectively spare then keeping spare equipment in it isn't doing any harm?

[Nortube]

It is sods law that whatever you get rid of you will want the next day! I used to do a lot of electronics as a hoby before computers came along and I got sidetracked with them. Many things, including old electronic components, equipment etc. I've kept thinking "I may be able to strip a few things out of there" or "I'll probably need that". Every so often I'd have a clear out and inevitably I'd wish I hadn't when I wanted a part or something a couple of weeks later.

[railtechnician]

Mar 15, 2013 15:19:50 GMT Ben said:

Brian,

The numerous 'useful rooms for putting things in;, were they subsequently filled with other odds and ends? Without wishing to espouse an hoarder mentality, surely if a room is effectively spare then keeping spare equipment in it isn't doing any harm?

Ben,

The short answer is no. Back in the day on the Comms sections when a man made it to chargehand grade his supervisor would tell him to 'find a room'. We'd then ask around station managers that we had known through working at their stations whether they had any spare rooms we might use and of course if their comms went faulty they had staff based on site who would deal with them as a matter of priority unofficially. Many such relationships were fostered across the combine so we had rooms all over the place and most other engineering sections did too in disused bus garages, tram depots, old mess rooms, relay rooms, lift shafts etc. However, during the 1980s with a massive station upgrade programme in progress stations were being remodelled and new equipment rooms were required to house the equipment to provide additional facilities and so the operating division reclaimed the spare rooms on stations and many of those at trackside were demolished which was presumably to cut the cost of maintaining heat, light and general building maintenance in what were officially disused sites.

I worked out of Embankment station as a senior wireman and when I first made it to chargehand, later I used equipment rooms as an operational base working out of Leicester Square, Baker Street, Charing Cross and Kingsbury. Embankment was also home to Bill Posters staff in the room next door along the District platform and upstairs a room at street level was home to the Lighting department staff. In those days days we all booked on at our depots and then travelled to our 'rooms' where we kept stores, had messing facilities and workroom facilities like bench vices and bench drill and could make and prepare equipment for installation. The whole combine was littered with such places and one could get almost anything done if one knew someone else who would do it, for instance the local blacksmith had a room at Earls Court just off the station  in a disused P-Way cabin so that was the place to go to get any ironwork made. When I was at Baker Street and needed a bench vice I used to use the one in the Lighting department stores area and so on.

Knowing where and how to get things done without having to 'go through channels' was often the key to getting work done efficiently, we all had our contacts and we used to help each other out, the blue collar equivalent of the management 'old boy network' but I used to use that as well as one of my exec managers had lots of contacts in other divisions which made life much easier when I needed access to certain places or last minute arrangements etc.

That is all long gone now swept away with the outsourcing of engineering and decimation of the internal engineering departments over the last three decades.