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Seriously, those benches look so comfortable.
Trevor.Dennis, that wins over a park bench any old day!
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I don't know about the benches, but it looks like they have an employee roller coaster on site. How cool is that?!
Actually we had some added value where I worked before retiring 12 years ago.
The image above shows the 'Special Surfaces' track (bottom of this satellite shot below). It features what we called the rail crossing which is a kind of hump back bridge, but with some added lumps and bumps to make it a properly rough ride. When still a youngster I was given the job to drive a light truck over the crossing to test the ruggedness of a data recorder we were thinking of buying, and was told to drive over it at 30. It turned out to a bit more exciting than I expected, and I only just managed to keep control. When I got back to the engineers they all had stunned looks on their faces, and said 'You did know that was 30kph and 30mph?' Whoops.
They eventually restricted access to both tracks after too many near misses from folk going out to hoon and scare the apprentices.
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Trevor.Dennis, that wins over a park bench any old day!
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I've got a better track story. This one involving Horiba MIRA near Nuneaton in the UK. We used to use the wind tunnel, which used four propellers from a Halifax bomber (WW2), each powered by a large electric motor. The power used was significant, so we always did the night shift which was cheaper.
I was an apprentice at the time of this story, and as such, I had the job of going out for the team's supper. On the way back I decided this was my chance to try the high speed banked circuit, so I found my way on, and did a sighting lap before putting my foot down. Our hack car was a MKIV Zodiac. A car so soft and unwieldy, that when driving quickly through a tight s-bend, it was necessary to start steering round the second bend, while still driving round the first. It was a dog to drive, and totally unsuitable to high speed maneuvers.
So I got to the first of the banked corners, and immediately had a fright. The transition from straightaway to curve was more abrupt than anticipated, and once on the banking you can't see very far ahead because you are effectively driving on the inside of a cylinder — the road is constantly curving up above you. After the second banked corner I felt happy to go for a fast lap, and hit the next corner at about 70mph, but what I didn't know is that are three banked corners on the MIRA track, and I was suddenly confronted by a tarmac machine and a large tipper truck. I was sure I was about to die, but the bank gets steeper towards the top, and the outside lane was clear. It was still touch and go forcing the marshmallow Zodiac through the necessary violent maneuver.
I was still shaking when I got back to the hanger which housed the wind tunnel, and didn't tell anyone what had just happened.
They were good times though. We'd often arrive for our shift just as Jaguar were packing up, and they used to get very antsy with us. It didn't help that we could see the ancient Honeywell chart recorders they used to record the results of their testing, while we had multi track reel-to-reel recorders, and later solid state data recorders. We used to rib them terribly, and they really didn't like it LOL
A wee footnote to this story is that our preferred supper was Indian curry, and I had to drive all the way to the other side of Coventry for the nearest Indian restaurant. I bet there are dozens of Indian restaurants inside the same radius now.