AFY              Some London Transport stories

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In the early 1950s I worked for London Transport as an electrical fitter.  As I was short of work at that time and frequented the West End of London, I went into the Baker Street offices of London Transport.  I provisionally applied for a job as a bus driver.  I knew that getting a PSV License was a wonderful opportunity for the future.  But it seemed that LT were not short of bus drivers, but they were short of electrical fitters.  My background in electrical contracting caused them to think that I was a suitable applicant.  But the two types of work are chalk and cheese.  The only bit of conduit work that I did while with LT was most unprofessional, as I saw it.

But the work was interesting and the money reasonable.  I certainly wasn't overworked.  I reported to a sub-station on Hammersmith Broadway and found that we always had half an hour or more for a cup of tea.  We then went by bus, trolley-bus or tube to the site where we would carry out some aspect of maintenance.  There were three other chaps, the foreman who was in his fifties, another fitter a little older than myself and a young chap who, it turned out, was a Catholic Priest in the training who had dropped out from the seminary.   He certainly wasn't priestly material, he was a bad time-keeper and rather a fickle sort of chap.

We had a pass that allowed us to travel on buses, trolley-buses and the Tube.  But we weren't allowed to use the North London line from Richmond around to north-east London station.  It used to be LMS owned and was strictly not part of the LT system despite the position of the rails being almost indistinguishable from the LT ones.  I tell a story below of when this sub-system was very useful to London Transport.

Victorian engineering
I spent quite a lot of time at Worple Road Wimbledon at the trolley-bus substation.  It was an easy journey for me as the 604 trolley-bus passed the door and I could get a 601 from Hampton to Kingston and change there.  Most of the time at Worple Road was stoning and undercutting the commutator of one of the three rotary converters.  These huge machines were installed for the trams, but needed little conversion when the trolley-buses took over in about 1936.

The machine I worked on was somewhere in the megawatt region.  I never asked what power it handled, but the commutator at the DC end of the machine was about four feet in diameter.  How many segments there were on the com, I have no idea.  I would guess a couple of hundred.

What had happened was that one of the substation staff had run the machine up using the pony motor, and then waited until the slowing rotor was in sync with the incoming AC, and then closed the breaker putting AC on to the input end of the machine.  An instrument with two needles indicated synchronisation when the two needles were fully crossed making an 'X'.  Apparently it was not too difficult to get the timing wrong, and when that happened everybody in the building felt the jolt, and a flat was burnt onto the commutator.  I would have thought that it was the AC slip-rings that would have suffered, but there is a lot that I didn't, and still don't, know about rotary converters.

We used specially made stoning tools that had a handle to allow the stone to be held against the commutator.  As the stones generated a lot of fine copper particles, we wore dust-masks.  They were of a professional design much different to those in use today by DIY merchants.  It was a tedious job that in total took several hours of effort.  But I have to take my hat off to the designers of those machines.  They were built and installed sometime around 1900 and in 1950 they were about a third of the way down their working life.  Imagine, they had a hundred years life left in them.

One of the substation staff showed me his party trick,  As I said above, the two poles were electrically isolated from earth.  Sonny boy, of course, used the insulation meters before performing his act.  After a good shower of rain and some drying wind, the whole of the outside overhead track gave a resistance to earth of over a megohm.  "Watch this" he said and grasped the positive busbar with one hand and the earthed ironwork with the other hand.  He then did the same with the negative bar.

Other London Transport Stories

ABX            The Big Bang at Wynchmore Hill

ACR            The night that Fulwell Depot went dark

ABV            London Transport and me

ABY             Collect your VC on the way out

ACT            The Clapham Junction fire

ACU            Thievery has always been with us