ABV                London Transport and me

Sometime in the 1950s I worked for London Transport as an electrical fitter.  I originally applied for a job as a bus driver, but there were no vacancies and they offered me a job as an electrical fitter.  I had worked as an electrician for a large London contractor on a number of different sorts of work around the country, so I thought this opportunity would broaden my experience.  It certainly did.  I also worked during the war as a boy electrician for a small contractor in Teddington where I met a variety of work, mainly for the MoD.

Although I was paid as a tradesman, I really worked as a mate for most of the time I spent with the LTE.  I earned my keep but relied most heavily on an older chap to direct me in what to do.  I suppose it was a fair deal for both parties.

I don't know what the situation is today, but it was a very cushy number in those days.  The base for our team was a substation on Hammersmith Broadway.  We all had bus and tube passes that allowed us unlimited travel on all LTE vehicles except Greenline Buses and the Richmond to Broad Street north London LMS line (that to an outsider appears to be part of London Transport).

We clocked in by telephone to a central depot and we generally spent the first hour drinking tea before we headed off to the site where we did some productive work.  One of out team was a failed Catholic initiate into the priesthood.  I can see why the Church didn't want him.  If he got up late he would clock in at a pole-telephone outside his house in Camden.  How he got one of the keys to open the box on the pole is unknown to me.  The cylinder lock key had a unique form that no locksmith I tried could obtain.  London Transport had a number of specially-manufactured devices that looked standard at first sight, but were anything but.  Another example was steel conduit fittings with a half inch gas thread.  Gas pipe is much more robust than standard conduit, and it was possible to install conduit in underground tunnels using gas pipe instead of normal conduit as screwed barrel.  Even more robust was steam barrel, and it uses the same thread as gas pipe.  'Almost bomb-proof' was the going phrase.

I visited quite a number of substations.  Some were manned by a Superintendent; quite a few were unmanned and only visited irregularly.  These were the ones that had mercury arc rectifiers.

Worple Road Wimbledon was the station that I spent most time at.  It had three huge rotary converters whose power transfer I never enquired.  These machines, with suitable transformers, converted the 11kV power from one of the LTE power stations into 600V DC that was fed out on to the overhead lines.  I spent several weeks grinding down the commutator of one of the machines where a badly synchronised connection caused a flat to be burned into the segments of the commutator.  It was the first time I had ever wore a dust mask, and the design was quite different to those used today.  There would have been minute fragments of copper in the air where the hand-held stone ground away the surface of the copper.

When the commutator was sufficiently smooth, I then had to undercut the mica insulation between the segments.  Tedious and lengthy work.   I suppose, as the 'new boy' it was reasonable to give the job to me.

I remember the meter that the station Superintendent  watched when he engaged power on to a machine.  The huge mass of the rotor was run up using a pony motor.  The rotor was run up to a speed in excess of the requirement, and air and friction gradually slowed the rotor.  The Super watched this meter and the two needles would swing back and forward crossing a centre point very rapidly to start with and more slowly as the rotor got closer to its synchronous speed.  At the point of centre crossover, the Super would slam home the breaker and put AC power on to the machine.  There always seemed to be a minute bump when power was connected .  I was told that if power was connected with a significant synchronisation-error, everybody in the building felt the bump.  And that would be when damage to the machine would happen.  A tenth of a second's error could cause tens of thousands of pounds worth of damage,

Have a look at some of the stories I was told by some of the old hands at London Transport