Pickering

A pickering is a manoeuvre that should not be undertaken without realisation of the consequences of play along the diagonal. Since most pickerings attempt to swap line attributes between two lines along their points of convergence, or at least induce a series of point-equivalences from one line to another, pickering on wild stations, unplaced Ould straddles, and non-aligned green stations should only be done by the very brave, the very foolish, the suicidal and the supremely confident.

According to legend, there are at least two groups who are working on non-subprebendary (i.e. divisional along the relevant axis) pickerings, most of which are colour-based. The Angstrom Institute, which had early success holding a blue-and-white gingham pickering stable for about two seconds, have most recently held a double-chocolate leopard-spotted pickering on the Circle and Northern lines for over forty seconds. Naturally, the whole thing tends to immediately annihilate the immediate zones, and thus may not be very useful.

A group working in Russia had, at last count, achieved a two-headed red-green Euston Road pickering with switching inversions at intersections for around sixteen seconds, which could prove very useful when performing colour-variant shunts across sector boundaries. (See chromatic shunt.) Its handedness was proved indeterminate, and diagonal straddles were dangerous to say the least, but there is real hope. Rumours of a completely working Reverse Pickering that was stable for around five minutes (!) have been hotly denied by IMCS and CAMREC sources.

[PW]

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