End of the line

[silverfox]

Mickey

Please try and log on now and again. and thankyou for all you tales over the years.

One thing about retirement is that whilst you think you have more time to 'do those things' you will find you have less!! don't ask how it happens!

Stay healthy

Best swishes

Ron

[giner]

Blimey, Mickey, can't believe it's taken this long for me to get onto this thread (too busy telling jokes on the 'made me smile' thread, I suppose. (What was that old euphemism, LNE - Late and Never Early.)

Jokes aside now, let me add my sincere congratulations on your retirement - talk about a job well done. I wish you the proverbial long and happy retirement. I bet you'll be finding some time to be hanging around stations, railway locations, etc. In the blood, innit? And, as the others have said, keep chiming in on here, you're always an interesting read. All the best.

[Mickey]

Thanks Ron & giner and others and yeah I am still posting most days of the week from a I.T. cafe in central London in the heart of the west end. £3 for 1-hour a bit steep but it passes an hour.

[Hatfield Shed]

The first day of the rest of your life! Congratulations on managing a fifty year career through the various transitions that the industry has been through.

... I am still posting most days of the week from a I.T. cafe in central London in the heart of the west end. £3 for 1-hour a bit steep...

It is steep. Even at every other day of the week you will burn through over £500 in one year at the current price, and prices are only going one way. Buy a modest laptop or a tablet, and pay for an internet connection, and you should be saving money relative to the IT cafe by the end of your second year in retirement. We pensioners need to look out for each other...

[StevieG]

LAST DAY TODAY.

STARTED ON BRITISH RAIL ON MONDAY 17th JULY 1972 AND FINISHED ON NETWORK RAIL ON FRIDAY 1st APRIL 2022

A few recent photographs were taken of me in the box during mid-March which hopefully I shall be obtaining shortly and will try and post them.

Only just logged in and found this post of yours Mickey.
Didn't know when your last day was until now.
All the best for the next stage of life for you.

[Mickey]

The first day of the rest of your life! Congratulations on managing a fifty year career through the various transitions that the industry has been through.

... I am still posting most days of the week from a I.T. cafe in central London in the heart of the west end. £3 for 1-hour a bit steep...

It is steep. Even at every other day of the week you will burn through over £500 in one year at the current price, and prices are only going one way. Buy a modest laptop or a tablet, and pay for an internet connection, and you should be saving money relative to the IT cafe by the end of your second year in retirement. We pensioners need to look out for each other...

Thank you Hatfield Shed I appreciate your kind words. With regards to paying £3 for one hour in the I.T. cafe yeah it is a bit 'steep' money-wise obviously it is 'west end prices' being only four streets away from Oxford Circus but it's nice and quiet in here 99% of the time ha ha ha...

[Mickey]

LAST DAY TODAY.

STARTED ON BRITISH RAIL ON MONDAY 17th JULY 1972 AND FINISHED ON NETWORK RAIL ON FRIDAY 1st APRIL 2022

A few recent photographs were taken of me in the box during mid-March which hopefully I shall be obtaining shortly and will try and post them.

Only just logged in and found this post of yours, Mickey.
Didn't know when your last day was until now.
All the best for the next stage of life for you.

Thank you, Stevie. It did cross my mind a while ago of posting here when my last day would be and then invite on that last day anyone who wanted to visit the box just come up the box for a chat and a look around but then I thought better of doing that after thinking about that idea a bit more which in this 'safety conscious' times that we now live in Network Rail would probably have 'gone berserk' with me and I would have landed myself in a whole heap of trouble plus quite a few people may have shown up as well?. Anyway as it happened my last day in the box was an uneventful shift which was probably the best way it should have ended the same way as it had begun 50 years earlier...

[rockinjohn]

Hi Mickey, good man you've "done your time" Hatfield's suggestion makes sense after the initial outlay,maybe a 2nd hand tablet, most folks around would help you set up,well thanks for all the posts & long may they continue, you have given me along with others many hours of pleasure reading the posts thank you.jj

[Mickey]

Hi Mickey, good man you've "done your time" Hatfield's suggestion makes sense after the initial outlay,maybe a 2nd hand tablet, most folks around would help you set up,well thanks for all the posts & long may they continue, you have given me along with others many hours of pleasure reading the posts thank you.jj

I'll still be around jj hopefully for a few more years yet because I like posting stuff on here that I have either experienced in the past or of a railway topic that I known something about.

[Platypus]

Hello All, well Mickey, that is a good innings, 50 years a railwayman. I was a Signalman for 42 years on the Victorian Railways in Australia, and I started in 1974. From my perspective I got well paid to play trains, and other people had to repair them ! Like you Mickey, I always wanted to work on the railways, and generally speaking enjoyed working with most rail staff ( there were very few exceptions ) and as a State Government Department, if I had any query about something I found that I could ring up the particular office, and the person at the other end of the line was more than happy to give me chapter and verse, which I greatly appreciated.We are now in a privatised and a sliced and diced up industry, and everything is now "commercial in confidence".
( We are even stuck with some managers are openly proud of their complete ignorance of railways, they are professional managers who manage things, details are someone else's problem. Not even Joseph Heller's "Catch 22" envisaged that.)
Re the man with the white bit of paper, I was required to go up to Head Office for an exam, and my work friend, Henry, said, well, you will see people up there ( HO ) walking around with a bit of paper inter hand, pretending to be busy, and actually meeting friends in the corridor to talk about the footy or cricket ( in those days, 1970s,1980s, that was the only two sports of interest ).I replied to Henry that he was probably exaggerating, to which he replied, you'll see ! And Henry was right, even allowing for the fact of a very long, and very wide corridor, there seemed to be a lot of people in that corridor tightly holding a sheet of paper, and enjoying a long conversation ! Regards to all, and a belated enjoy your retirement Mickey, may it be long, happy and healthy.

[52A]

Notwork Rail in this country also run by grocers and Human Remains people. Signalman in the north east of England retired after 43 years service, "Manager" came to see him and he was presented with a card, a framed certificate and a lapel badge. Very kind of them.

[StevieG]

Better than what happened for a 45-ish-year time-served, practical, experienced and committed railwayman I know who retired recently 52A.

Although he'd risen over the years to be a very senior duty Controller for Network Rail, at the end of his last actual shift (aside from good wishes from his colleagues present, and still with due Leave days to take), he was left to walk out of the Control office as if it was just another day, and he'd back as usual for his next rostered shift. And that was it !
Fortunately, his shift colleagues and others somewhat made up for it with a great self-collection-financed 'do' a few weeks later, which was most enjoyable for him and all.

But where was NR management representation ?
However, from other contacts, I get the impression that the good, bad, indifferent or absence of 'official' marking of retirements can now be very much down to the calibre, attitude and respectfulness of retirees' local managers.

[Mickey]

With regards to retirements. One time when I was a resident signalman at a box during the 1990s one of the resident signallers at the box was retiring which he kept secret about although it was known by a handful of people that he was retiring anyway it came to his last day and last shift and when he had finished his last shift he basically signed off duty and picked up his things and walked out of the box never to be seen or heard of again.