Have you heard of West Ashfield Tube?

Yesterday, some London bloggers & Tube enthusiasts visited a fake London Underground station used for training. Both IanVisits and London Reconnections have two great blog posts on the visit organised by The Institution of Engineering and Technology.


London Reconnections kindly let me use the picture above and said:

"It would be easy to think that West Ashfield station was simply a visual gimic - something to enliven training sessions - but this is not the case. West Ashfield isn't just a decorated corridor, its a micro-station environment with a very clear purpose. It may contain a number of rooms and facilities that your average station doesn't (more on those later), but it also places trainees, when appropriate, in an atmosphere that is as similar as possible to that in which they may find themselves working."

Ianvisits told how they were "let loose on the system and told to basically run the the network, getting trains into platforms, slidings etc without causing traffic jams and the like.

The true purpose of the model train set though is to train staff on dealing with problems, and a simple flick of a switch can simulate any sort of network failure you care to imagine. It was here that we leant why it can sometimes take ages to get trains out of tunnels when things go wrong."

Thanks to both for providing fascinating posts & photos!