The quiet station

Damn. I must have forgotten to change the battery in the Somebody Else's Problem field. It only has a life-span of ~100 year.

Although I worked for LUL/TfL for 16 years mainly on the Met and Northern line I did sometimes wonder about the stations on the Hainault loop particularly the likes of Roding Valley etc. However I could never get my head around Upney. Always gave the impression it shouldn't be in London ( Always reminded me of Upwey).

However for a quiet station Croxley on the Met took some beating don't know about now though.

That's was always the trouble with operating staff, most of them never got around the system, especially those not aiming too high in the promotion stakes, and nowadays with staff tied pretty much to one line general system knowledge is quite limited!

I installed the Lift Telephone system at Tufnell Park circa 1981 and the nearby pub is where the LUL Comms section of the RMT used to hold its union meetings. Between Tufnel Park and Archway is the industrial estate where LT Cleaning Services used to have a depot and also where Seeboard/Powerlink LU substations staff had a depot, workshops and the training centre where susbstation access courses were run before it moved to (IIRC) Waterloo.

I worked the District all the way from Whitechapel to Upminster on various projects, I walked the Hainault loop hand tracing cables and Croxley was just one of the Met stations I worked at when commissioning the Met longline PA system all stations to Amersham, Chesham. Watford and Uxbridge and the East London line from Baker Street.

In 28 years I worked in many capacities from labourer to supervisor and acquired many skills, including all the necessary safety critical skills for working on or about the track, as well as the more mundane skills of lift & escalator operator, trolley operator, fire watchman and driving company vehicles
I worked at almost every station, most substations, offices including 55 Broadway, control rooms, signal cabins, depots, including several former tram depots and walked most of the tunnel sections and a great deal of the open sections of the combine. I worked in several engineering divisions installing and maintaining signalling and communications on all lines and delivering training to signals, comms, HT Mains and LT Cables staff.
In my career I booked on at Whitechapel, Arnos Grove, Golders Green, Wood Green, Kennington, South Woodford, Earls Court, South Kensington and Acton Town depots but was also based elsewhere for long periods such as Wood Lane, Baker Street and Leicester Square and Tottenham Court Road.

I pity today's LU staff who simply don't have the opportunity to gain the knowledge and experience that I enjoyed in the days before devolution of engineering to lines and the outsourcing of so many projects.

How can one forget Totteridge & Whetstone, one of the last LUL stations to boast a ground frame as I recall. Gosh I haven't worked there since 1980 ish although I used to frequently pass by it on my way home to Enfield from Edgware, Kingsbury and Queensbury and beyond, road transport being far superior to rail when working at those locations.

I hope it wasn't being used at the time! ;D

Err horrid! My Dad grew up in Tuffnell Park so I know of it.

Quiet stations for me would be somewhere like Theydon Bois or Farlop (or anywhere on the Hainault-Woodford line!).

A busy day at Betchworth...

You can tell you've never tried to get from Preston to Chorley!

Was this Back In The Day? On the small handful of times I've used Ladywell in the last couple of years, always at peak or peak-shoulder kind of times, there were plenty of people using it, including in the contra-peak direction.

And Lewisham is, of course, an overcrowded, cobbled-together hellhole that needs razing to the ground and magically replacing.

Haha! I have toyed with the idea of changing my username to Hideous Park Corner or Down The Street as I spent so much time working at those places doing routine maintenance but I like the handle I have been using online since 1999, long before I joined DD.