Well, since I didn’t have a camera you’ll have to wait for others to post them, sorry. However I’ve grab the only two available for now (adding credits as possible).
The day started off at 7am, were I woke up (after 4 hours sleep) and found my way to Taunton to catch the 8:19 to Paddington station, apart getting confused with where my reserved seat was and ending up at the back of the carriage taking a non-reserved seat (which was quite nice, next to a window and everything) and almost falling asleep during the 1 hour 50 minute journey, which was smooth no delays or anything, was interesting going full speed through smaller stations.
At Paddinton things got slightly more confusing, apart from the fee on the toilets (30p) which was minorly annoying, the map at the main tube (subway) entrance was rather confusing, I couldn’t find the route I wanted and planned to go on the ‘yellow’ line and swap to the ‘blue’, however it became apparent upon reaching the ‘yellow’ line that the map wasn’t quite correct and Paddington does indeed have a platform on the ‘brown’ line, so I ran (literally) to the platform and managed to get on the train just before it departed (took me like 20 minutes to workout the map and get to the right tube line).
Upon reaching Piccadilly Circus, I was confronted with the horror of trying to work out which exit to use (there are 4 – 5 which was really confusing), so after a call to Owen and lots of asking people I finally emerged from the tube through exit 4 and walked in a straight line towards Lester Square where I found (it was quite obvious) members of the TT-Forums Meet, of which Andel and Owen were late!
Once everyone had turned up, talked and gotten their name tags “<Real Name> (<Username>)” style with a very small TT-Forums logo above them, team leaders got more advanced versions which were larger, clearer and had country flags! With rain starting we headed into Yates’, a pub near by and proceed to colonised quite a number of tables, some of us ordering food and drink whilst Dominic (Andel) rewrote his list of Teams for “The Game”, and Ben (Sacro) went out in search of Mark (welsdragon) and others who may have been lost, finding Gavin.
At about 1pm, “The Game” started after Dominic gave the team leaders some rather bulky looking paperwork and a list of train classes to take pictures of at certain stations as well as a bonus bus to photograph. So we set out under the lead of Brian who knew how to get round the tube quite well, had a little talk about how he got so good at navigating it, after some of the team got tickets for the tube we headed towards Waterloo station (the tube was quite empty we could all sit down quite conformably and everything even if not all of us did), our target station.
Upon reaching our target, we had to sign in, which proved to be minor pain, paperwork and such but we got nice badges saying “Visitor / Contractor”, I think “Manager” or something would have been more awesome though. We then found and took several pictures (well Brain took all the pictures…) of some Class 450’s which were parked, I believe the winning picture had two side by side (from when we went to the end of the platform to find the 459 and 455), the left one was on the verge of leaving in the below picture.
After finding all the trains we had been asked to find (even taking a picture of a drivers cab in the 450 and the model and build specs of a 455), we returned our badges (which would have made a nice souvenir) and decided to look for a bus (a RV or a bendy bus), which we found (RV1) and Brian photographed as we were boarding, and we decided to have a picture of us riding it as we headed for Covenant Gardens to walk back to Yates’ to end “The Game” and submit our work.
We found Owen’s team waiting for us (and we thought we did it nice and fast too), and waited for the final team to catch up before Andel looked over the submissions and pronounced our team the winner which netted me a T-shirt (same as the default but with “The Game Winner” on the back), and giving a toy subway train to Brian for the best photograph (see above), whilst I got a drink and some food to eat (well, having nothing since 7am leaves one kind of hungry at 3pm)! After another 40 minutes of talking we decided (mainly because of my 17:06 train home), to take the group photograph (we asked some girl to do it for us, she was kind of embarrassed but took two pictures and then left looking even more embarrassed when we offered to buy her a drink for helping us), picture below.
Final Group Photograph
After staying with the gang a little longer, I left for the tube worried about missing my train by getting lost in the tube, which I managed to navigate quite easily, and it was quite quiet which was nice), upon reading Paddington and walking out of the wrong exit (I had hoped to come up in the middle of the station), and consequently walking round the the front, back into Paddington Station, I looked for information about my train. Which was early, I boarded it on platform 2 (it has some stupid little ticket scanners like the tube) at 4:50pm, and found my seat on the train after realising my mistake this morning and went home. The only minor thing this time was a broken signal which was constantly red and held us for 5 minutes before going through it! Which lead to being 10 minutes late, but overall it was a very pleasant experience and I hope to attend the next meet depending on location, date and funds accordingly.
[Edit] Look forward to seeing Owen’s little meet film and a ’subbed’ (usernames marked against the people) version of the Group photograph. There will be plenty from others about the meet so don’t worry about me not going into enough depth for you!
~ Lakie
