Charing Cross Visit

Well there were a few pale faces at the LU induction. Again of the 35 Graduates on the various schemes only 3 were engineers. I think the mini-management scheme has 25. Feeling a little out of place we settled into yet another presentation from various manager. It would have been better to hear something from the graduates as the managers appeared to use a common set of LU slides that I'm sure I can find on the intranet later in the week. Waste of time really. They showed us 'The Plan' so many times I could name the 40 main LU projects with my eyes closed and a train on my head. We also had a 'Welcome on Board' briefing from Operational Learning which was very....basic. It made us feel like we were in primary school and almost went as far as saying "This is what a train looks like... You may have seen one around" seriously insulting. I understand they have never done a graduate induction before but that was just way off the mark.

So after feeling like I was in the wrong job and getting stuffed on more free lunches we managed to get onto the fun part of the day. We visited Charing Cross and the Jubilee Line platforms which I am advised are Abandoned, not disused. The track is live and it even has the new JUB line signalling installed. We interrupted the filming of "The Death of Jean Charles De Menezes"on the left hand platform or rather they stopped us walking mid step for a few mins whilst they finished a scene. They were paying £££££ per hour for a train and platform so we let them. We (well I was, mini-management were baffled) were more interested in the cooling rig being tested on the other platform. The large air handling unit is still in development but is basically a cooling device which works off the piston effect of the trains. I think it is going well but the prototype is due to be replaced with a cut down smaller version, as the current design is 10m long. HUGE!!!
I believe the new one will go to G. park station as its the hottest point on the network. But don't use me as a reliable source of information as I'm not.

I've also found out I'll be doing an operational placement next week, ie CSA training for a week and then CSA (Customer Service Assistant for non-Londoners, platform dudes for those less in the know) at a Station for 3 weeks. After that I'm getting trained how to drive a train. Which is pretty exciting. Although making 1200 people late for work or screwing up the Tube network would really make me unpopular.