Archived 2 December 2003

15 November 2003, archived 2 December 2003

Archived 25 August 2003

Updated 9 May 2003,   archived 20 June 2003

Reduced to simple terms, the report says that the engineer in charge of LU rolling stock decided to shut down the Central Line because he could not guarantee that the inspection procedures were enough to ensure a safe railway.  It goes on to say that the paperwork showed that the inspection work had been done and there was "no evidence" to show that it hadn't.  However, it stated that the supervisor had also signed the paperwork but didn't see what was going on.  The work was done by two agency staff who were doing 15 trains a day.  (15 x 8 cars x 4 motors x 4 bolts in a day - Mmmm).

Put another way, the inspections, instituted because they knew there was a problem, probably weren't being done properly because there was no supervision.  Modifications weren't carried out because they couldn't make up their minds.

22 April 2003, archived 20 June 2003

Central Line - Ealing to Loughton service

Today, 3rd April 2003, LU reopened the Central Line between Marble Arch and Bethnal Green to join up the two shuttle services operating at the ends of the line.  The service now operates between Loughton and Ealing Broadway.

Of course, the service was shut down again shortly after it opened because of a fire alert at Tottenham Court Road.  The service was suspended between Holborn and Marble Arch for two hours.

What a mess.  They had two months to get the line ready and they did nothing.  When trains started running, huge amounts of dust were disturbed, making passengers think trains were on fire.   Why weren't some test trains run through the unused section of line before opening to the public?

The number of trains modified is now 50 out of a total of 85.   There are 30 cars scattered around the system damaged due to accidents.

Central Line - Ealing to Marble Arch service

On Monday 24 March, the Central Line offered a 10 minute service between Ealing Broadway and Marble Arch from 15:30hrs.  LU say that they expect to get the whole line opened by Easter (20 April).  If they do the line will not have had a full service for three months.  Hitler didn't stop it for that long during the second world war.

Central Line - Eastern end reopens

Central Line - More Trouble

Central Line - Accident Reports

It will download as a .rtf (rich text format) file which can be read by most word processors.  It is well worth a read.

Posted 12 March 2003

Central Line - Accident Updates

The section of wood inserted into the negative current rail at Victoria NB Victoria Line was done deliberately to solve a unique problem with the ATO system at that location.  The story dates back to the early days of operation on the Victoria Line in 1969 when some trains suffered spurious emergency stops when starting away from Victoria NB.  After some experiments, it was found that a short section of insulation material (said piece of wood) cured the problem by eliminating the excessive spikes in the traction supply believed to be causing the tripping.

The full story is contained in a letter to Underground News February 2003.  It makes very interesting reading.

Underground News can be obtained from the The London Underground Railway Society .

Posted 30 January 2003.  Archived 28 February 2003.

The HMRI issued a preliminary report on the Chancery Lane incident and it is available at:

Posted 28 January 2003. Archived 28 February 2003.

Kicking LU when it's down

Posted 29 January 2003. Archived 28 February 2003.

Alan D. Perkin writes:

Tubeprune thinks he has a point.

Posted 29 January 2003. Archived 2 February 2003

Passengers will have noticed that there has been a nasty increase in graffiti recently.  The District and Circle Lines have been the worst hit, with a lot of stupid black scribble on the car ends and inside on the lower door panels.  There are also a number of car sides in a bad condition.  Tubeprune imagines that LU will be wondering why it spent £14 million on some very ugly fencing around its depots and sidings, only to find the criminals can still get in and deface their property. 

One might ask, who is in control of London's metro system, London Underground or a few moronic criminals?   It must be the hope of every LU passenger that the vandals will be caught and sentenced to spend the rest of their natural lives cleaning the same railway cars and walls that they have so supidly defaced.

Posted 14 December 2002.  Archived 2 February 2003

London Underground is showing signs that it has conquered the traditional British reluctance to speak in public.   Despite the reluctance of most British to use any form of public address equipment and the failure of many organisation to overcome this reticence, many LU staff now seem to be able to make an announcement in clear, accentless English.  Even foreigners can understand it.  Congratulations to the Piccadilly Line, which has a recorded announcement on many stations with different announcers who give a clear and intelligent announcement advising of the next station and when the doors are about to close.   Even when they use a staff member to use the PA, the results are often very good.

Train crew also use the PA regularly - the Piccadilly Line comes out well on this too.  Other lines are not as good but are still a lot better then they used to be.  The Metropolitan has a long way to go.

Posted 6 November 2002.

On the Hammersmith & City Line, the female recorded information announcer on the C Stock refers to "Playstow" as the destination of trains terminating at Plaistow.  She is, of course, wrong.  In spite of the spelling, the place is actually pronounced "Plarstow".  As custodian of the city's mass transit system, London Underground ought to learn how to pronounce the names of its own stations.  Posted 19 September 2002.

Lizzie writes, 'I quite agree.  The announcer says, on the Northern Line, "The next station is Hi-gut."   No, it's not, it's Hi-gayt, or at least, all the people who live there think it's Hi-gayt...'  

Posted 24 November 2002. Archived 2 February 2003

If you take a train round the Circle from Barbican to Gloucester Road (inner rail), you will get a good idea of the ranges of track condition to be found on the Underground these days.  The first bit, between Barbican and Kings Cross, is so rough that you sometimes get worried as to whether the train will actually stay on the track.  It rocks and rolls along, the bogies rattling and banging as the mechanical parts each reach the limit of their movement and hit a bump stop.  At the other end of the scale, further round the Circle, the new junction installation at Baker Street is superb.  It is so well laid that it is quite impossible for the passenger to notice that there is even a junction there.

Round to Bayswater and more rocking and rolling, where constant trouble with water penetration at the east end of the station and poor maintenance at the west end has produced some very bad track conditions.  Then on to Gloucester Road, where the new track laid under the repaired covered way provides a wonderfully smooth and quiet ride.

London Underground's line performance tables and graphs

The London Underground web site has started publishing train and line performance tables.  For some lines, these make sobering reading.  A good metro line should be able to turn in a 99.5% scheduled kilometerage performance.  Only one of the LU lines reach this level.   The best is the Northern, which reached 99.6% last month but this has to be because they only need 84 trains and they have 106 to play with.  This is 25% spare trains - most lines are lucky if they get 10%.

However, all is not doom and gloom.  The service performance is improving on most lines and this can been seen from the latest figures.  Tubeprune is sure that much of this is to do with the introduction of SATS and Bats over a larger number of stations......anyway, well done LU - but keep it up, there is still lots of work to do.

Archived 2 February 2003

If you want to see what a Train Operator's training is really like, go here.

Posted 31 July 2002.  Archived 2 February 2003

Archived 27 September 2002

Mr Robert Kiley

From Tubeprune, 29 March 2001 to utl

Perhaps a few facts will help.  Mr Kiley didn't "run" the New York Subway.  He was the man who brokered the politics which allowed the money to be found within the US political system, which is very different to ours.  When Mr Kiley joined the MTA, the rehabilitation programme has already been going for two years and the first new trains were already delivered.  This was 1983.    He just kept the money flowing from then on.

Mr Kiley has had a big problem understanding the UK political and procurement system.  It is quite different from that in the US.  The US still has a prescriptive technical procurement system, where the thickness of the glass and how to test the bolt torques are included in train tenders. This is not a performance spec as we know it in the UK, which would say "supply enough trains to run this service on this line at this frequency".

However, Mr Kiley is nobody's fool.  He is right to question the PPP as it is structured today.  It is foolish to try to separate operations from maintenance and capital works.  The best way to improve the London Underground is to offer the whole lot to private management.  Only the tenderer able to offer the best value for money, safety culture and operational expertise would be given the job.  Unfortunately, the present management has abrogated its responsibility in an attempt to show that the system won't work because they want money to buy new kit.    The system could actually run a lot better with decent operational management. 

It is time for a properly (commercially) motivated railway management to be put into place to restore the Underground to its proper place as a world class transportation system.  The PPP as presently structured, won't do this.

Archived from Forum 16 August 2002.

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On the Underground - Dwell Time Management

A trip on the Underground in the evening peak hour yesterday, 19th March, was interesting in that many busy stations have now introduced active dwell time management.  Apparently senior supervisors (or people who have voices with some authority for a change) are encouraging passengers with announcements to board and alight trains efficiently so that trains can get away promptly.  

Of course, this was a technique used for many years up to the 1970s, by which time passenger levels had dropped so much that trains were rarely full, even at peak times.  Platform attendance by staff was hardly necessary since there weren't enough passengers to delay station stops.   Active dwell time management stopped completely.  As a result, LU gradually lost the skills needed to cope with large numbers of people.  Now they are having to relearn these skills.  This is a long overdue improvement.

Archived 23 March 2002

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Today on the Underground - US SA?

The station announcer at Monument (Eastbound District Line) was heard on the morning of 14th March with an American accent.  His diction was clear and modulated and you could understand everything he said.  Americans always seem so much more confident at making announcements.  We should have more of them doing the announcements on the Tube.

Archived 20 March 2002

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PPP Confusion

The PPP process was finally thrown into ridicule last week by the combined efforts of the City financial institutions of London, the management of London Underground and their owners, Transport for London, (TfL) all acting against each other.  It started on 6th March when the City institutions issued a letter to the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, stating that, because the government had forced Railtrack to go into receivership, money for Public-Private Partnerships would be very difficult to raise.  Any that was raised would be more expensive to borrow.  They said, in effect, "We lost a lot when you pulled the plug on Railtrack.  We have lost faith in you.  If you want us to do this again, it will cost more to insure and we want government guarantees that you will compensate us for the losses if you do another Railtrack."

On 7th March, the Evening Standard newspaper appeared with two full page advertisements, one from TfL, urging the public to contact them with messages speaking against the PPP proposals and one from London Underground and its PPP contractors telling us that huge sums of money are going to be spent on the refurbishment of the Underground and how wonderful that will be for everyone.  What is staggering about this is that TfL is supposed to control London Underground.  Here is a government body (TfL), completely at odds with its own company and completely unable to manage it.  Worse, the lists of projects and improvements offered by the two organisations are completely different.  We could be talking two different cities here.  No, folks, this is London.

In the background of this chaos, the PPP bidders are trying to finalise their contracts with their bankers, their sub suppliers (who will build new trains and enlarge the stations) and LUL.  These negotiations are nothing if not difficult, being conducted in an atmosphere of political chaos, financial uncertainty and the usual, "We're not accepting that risk" approach from each party round the table.  Anyone who has sat in on such meetings will tell you that they are alternatively boring and then terrifying as long arguments over the difference between the meaning of "performance outputs" and "performance requirements" exchange places with sudden realisations by individuals that their corporate private parts are on the commercial chopping block because they hadn't realised that London Underground's track voltage is 630, not the usual 750.  They are conducted in lawyers offices charging £500 an hour per lawyer (and there are always at least two), plus expenses and who have presently run up a bill of £100 million over the four years of the PPP process.

And what of the passengers in all this?   Well, the numbers of people using the system off-peak is now greater than the peak levels of the 1980s.  The system performs fairly well for an organisation which has forgotten how to manage large numbers of people properly and is now having to relearn such skills.  The job is made more difficult in the new social environment of aggressive lawlessness, graffiti and soft policing which we are expected to endure these days.   Worse, the public have higher expectations of service and comfort, which the Underground system was never designed to provide.

In the end, money is still the root of all this evil.  Unless government gets to grips with the idea that they will have to build new lines, as well as rebuilding the existing system, that they must start now and that this will cost double what they are planning on spending, there is little hope for Londoners that their journey to work will get much better anytime in the next 10 years.

Comment by Tubeprune 7 March 2002, archived 14 March 2002.

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Strike News (November 2001)

It seems the Underground staff unions have come out on top, despite various macho events where both sides have been out to prove who's got the bigger balls.  The remote booking on issue, which formed part of the dispute, dates back some years when LUL agreed to provide facilities at 'non-home depots'.  This was because train crews were expected to travel to collect a train some distance from where they normally started but with no additional allowance to do it.  The facilities, it was alleged by the unions, were not provided.  The unions are now saying that they have an agreement that remote starts to duties will be paid for by an overtime allowance.  This would be at least fifteen minutes per book on/off.   What difference this makes to the provisions for facilities (particularly for women) at remote points seems obscure but, since when has logic been applied in these matters.  There have actually been few complaints from individuals and how this equates to improving working conditions is unclear.

The pay issues in the dispute are a little clearer and seem a more reasonable complaint.  The argument was that, in return for pay restraint, the unions agreed a three year deal, whereby drivers would accept settlements at no higher than the rate of inflation, in return for a 35 hour working week .  Engineering train drivers (i.e. those based at West Ruislip and Lillie Bridge) have, in the meantime, moved ahead paywise and have now had their hours reduced to 35 hours without the restraint imposed on passenger drivers.  The unions were looking for this to be redressed.   ACAS apparently agreed with them and, whilst all other staff accepted a 4% rise, the unions still stuck out for restoration to the same salary for passenger drivers as for the engineer's train crews.

The end result is that the management seem to have backed down in view of the strike action intended for Friday 12th October and later.  There was much posturing in the media (the unions came over poorly, it seems to some) and the London papers have a report that the settlement has cost LUL nothing.  If one believes what the unions are saying this may be correct for this moment in time, but certainly will not be the case over a twelve month period.    The statement from the unions is that passenger drivers will be restored to the same rates as Engineer's train drivers by this time next year - if this is correct then Train Ops. will be on a basic in excess of £30,000 by this time next year.........

Archived 7 March 2002.