Memory Lane The Diversionary Route

As most of you might know Sunday is the favoured day on the railway for doing maintenance, just as on road Bank Holidays are the favourite time for spreading millions of cones along every patch of available road, dumping a few token items of heavy plant and the buggering off for a six week foreign holiday!

Last Sunday I was working and had two trips to Waterloo. The first being the very first train from Salisbury to Waterloo. I got into work and read my work schedule where I saw the word 'Piloted' alongside Woking where I was to pick up the said Pilotman. The reason for this being that we Salisbury drivers do not take services (also known as 'signing a route') to Clapham via Egham, Staines, Isleworth etc.

I got to Woking and picked up the driver who was to pilot me and we went along the ling to Byfleet and New Haw where we were route off and along the Byfleet Curve to Addlestone. This is where Memory Lane began, my first job after graduating was in Addlestone where I worked for Runnymede Borough Council, my first project was to oversee the building of new toilets in Victory Park, which the line runs along on one side. Then we went onto Chertsey, I designed a wall for a school and a surface water culvert under the railway line. Now we crossed the M25 bridge and to Virginia Water, where I had lived for a time and had even done some spotting at the station. Next to Egham, yet another public toilet I designed, a car parking survey and some survey works for a few drainage projects in the grounds of Royal Holloway College.

To think that all this was over 20yrs ago. We now left the borough and came to Staines (yes it is still a dump!) where I had taken my young nephew to see Jurassic Park, then Ashford where he and my aunt and uncle had lived. Next Feltham, still rough as a badgers arse and very glad that we were not stopping until Clapham - I had also done a survey in 1997 at Feltham of some offices owned by ICL. That was more or less the end of the reminiscences.

We got to Waterloo and on departure were sent by our normal route and didn't need a pilotman again. However we were crossed from the down fast line to the down slow line from Surbiton to Woking. Passing through Weybridge I was reminded of the very last architects office I worked in three years ago. To think that since 1991 I started in Addlestone (a few miles from Weybridge) worked in Swansea, London, Kingston on Thames, Guildford, Aldershot, Bristol and Cardiff - and even lived in Woking. I am now doing what I always wanted to do, what I did in the interim was just a diversion route until I got on the right line - Never thought of it like that really.