Another tale from my days at Woburn Wild Animal Kingdom
On Sundays I used to drive the train. This was a narrow gauge railway which ran through the deer park, from the amusement area, around the boating lake to Pets Corner, and back again. On the one side you had a lovely view of the boating lake, on the other side it was a picnic area and overspill car park. Not the most picturesque of rides.

The train itself was a red diesel engine with a smiley face painted on the front. There were 2 stations, the main one at the amusement park, and the second one at the Pets Corner end. At each end you would uncouple the train and drive it on a small loop of track back past the carriages, and re-couple it again, so that the train was always pulling the carriages. When driving round with the carriages full of passengers, you would travel at a fairly sedate speed, about a jogging pace. The whole ride, including the re-coupling at each end, would take about 20 minutes. Train rides were generally every half hour, leaving 10 minutes between rides for the carriages to fill up.

In this 10 minute period between rides, I used to sit in my little train drivers shed. The shed contained drums of oil, diesel, grease, tins of paint, oily rags and other bits and pieces pertinent to the running of the train. You could either sit on one of the oil drums, or on the small shelf which ran along one wall of the shed. In the old days, before I worked there, people would have to pay to go on the train ride. This shed had been the pay kiosk, and as such it had a flap in the side, hinged at the top and held shut by a couple of small brass latch bolts.

So this one particular Sunday, I’m sat on the shelf in my little shed eating a bag of crisps with an oily hand. It’s a beautiful sunny afternoon and the park is packed. Without warning, the flap in the side of the shed, against which I am leaning, suddenly comes open and I fall backwards through the hole in a cloud of dust and salt & vinegar crisps. I end up hanging upside down by my knees, the flap banging down again against my kneecaps, covered in bits of crisp, still holding the (now empty) packet in my hand, and looking at a hundred or more upside down people. There’s a moment where everything goes quiet, like in the aftermath of an explosion, and everyone just stares at me. Then they start laughing. Hundreds of them. Arse. (I’m just glad this was before the days of mobile phones with video cameras and youtube!)

Now there was no dignified way to get myself out of this situation. So I did the only thing I could do. I hauled the rest of myself out of the shed into a heap on the floor, picked myself up, dusted myself off, performed an overly theatrical bow to the laughing crowd, put my train drivers hat back on, and took the train out.

The people were laughing all the way round to Pets Corner. They were laughing while I re-coupled the train, and they were laughing all the way back to the main station. I never sat on that little shelf again.
(Lionel Tiger, Tue 14 Jun 2011, 12:15, 1 reply)

I like this!

( Colonel Boris "...a desperate Buzzfeed imitation...", Tue 14 Jun 2011, 12:54, closed)