A New Lease of Life

When I moved to California in 1999 I never would have dreamed that London would get to host an Olympic Games and especially not in an area I used to drive trains through. Train Driving was a good job, with fun and interesting people to work with and it paid well. The last depot I worked at before I moved was Clacton-on-Sea. Clacton's route map was to London Liverpool St, with the mainline to Ipswich and Harwich all via Colchester. Being mostly a commuter line into London we had to have somewhere to park the extra trains we used for the morning rush hour during the day, so that they were ready for the evening rush hour out of London in the evening. Well one of those places was Thornton Fields between Bow and Stratford about 4 miles from Liverpool St. station. Thornton Fields can really only be described as a "dump". It was in an area of East London that had been pretty much derelict since the Second World War. Stratford used to be a large locomotive and engineering works for the Eastern Region of British Rail but had fallen into decline and eventually closed in the 1990's. So back when the proposal was made for the 2012 Olympics Stratford with all of it's unused urban wasteland must have been the ideal spot to choose. When I took the train to London on my last trip to England I could not believe the transformation that was taking place and that the place I used to park trains at was now becoming an Olympic Stadium. The video is of that journey through Stratford, sorry for the bad quality it was taken a little bit hastily.

The New Olympic Stadium from Martin Fincham on Vimeo.