Croydon.

I went to Croydon today to learn about their light rail scheme. Now, if London were New York City, Croydon would either be New Jersey or Queens, it's a bit hard to know which. It is a burrough of London, whatever that means, and the people there tend to look a bit, interesting. For example, the ladies hair-styles are a bit plastered with hair spray. And there are a lot of people walking around with their hoods on. Oh, and there is an Ikea there. But we went for the 'tram'.

After a nearly 3-hour coach ('bus') ride, we arrived at the operational headquarters of the scheme, where we first waited in the lobby for ten minutes until we were shown into their kitchen and shown the coffee machine, which was free. So everyone got to pick their coffee. Then we learned a bit about the scheme (3-lines, consortium, expanding, 22 cars in operation at a time, etc), and then we got to see the control room (second control room in 2 days, impressive, I know), and then go to the maintenance place. The maintenance area was quite exciting because aside from learning about tire wear (a LOT of metal comes off those things, like, seriously a lot) we got to go into an empty tram and sit in the drivers seat and take pictures of each other (see above). After this they even gave us a free pass to ride the tram, so we went over to East Croydon and got a pub lunch before heading back to Southampton, which luckily only took 2 hours with the lighter traffic. Sadly, most everyone fell asleep on the way back as only a few of us had gotten Diet Coke. Luckily I then used my camera to create mischief and take pictures of people sleeping. And that was my trip to Croydon. We did not go to Ikea.