Thanks Moocher
I do have a few photos of my time in the Rescue Service and I will upload some when I eventually retrieve them from their hiding place, wherever that is!
The main difference in the training gallery from the time I was there was how clinical the walls looked - they were not painted in the ten years I spent there. Pointless really, as in those days we were allowed to set and use real fires during our fire-fighting practices in the gallery and you can imagine what that did to the walls! Later in my career, some department with nothing better to do, banned us from lighting fires in the gallery as it was deemed too dangerous! (We in the Service thought that was the whole point of the exercise) Following the ban we had to make use of smoke machines (generating vegetable smoke!) to create the appearance of smoke, but firing off extinguishers and fire hoses onto targets rather than into a real fire wasn't quite the same. Another change I spotted from the photos was the installation of handrails - they simply didn't exist during my time there. I loved every minute of my Rescue career and worked with some exceptional people in some pretty extraordinary circumstances at times - the extraordinary camaraderie and black sense of humour kept us going through some pretty grim episodes, but the sense of satisfaction following a successful rescue operation cannot be adequately expressed in mere words.