All Night Long

Happy New Year! Once again it’s been a while since I last posted, this time because we’re having some internet problems at home. This has been rumbling on since October and we’re still not connected to the outside world, it’s awful!

Obviously since I last posted a great deal has been going on. We have had yet more RMT strikes; the new management structure has “gone live” which has changed my job substantially (and for the better); Christmas has been and gone along with a now relatively rare ASLEF strike and, finally, New Year’s Eve is out of the way.

I drew the short straw this year and was the incident officer all night for my line. To be perfectly honest, I was dreading it. I love getting stuck in to things when they go wrong, but the prospect of a night dealing with drunken morons vomiting, fighting one another and smashing up my trains was not enticing.

The night started with a bad omen. My role is that of a roaming manager (or “floater” as one of my more potty-mouthed drivers likes to call me) and so I spend a lot of time going up and down the line looking for trouble. Having booked on, the very first train I jumped on got “pulled down” after just two stations – pulled down meaning that a Passenger Emergency Alarm was pulled. When this happens the emergency brake is automatically applied, but the driver can override it if no part of the train is in a station. We were just coming in to the next stop, so the driver overrode the brake and brought the train to a controlled stop in the station. I was in the cab with the driver and told him to get on the radio to the controller while I went back to deal with the incident and reset the alarm. The adrenaline starts pumping as soon as the cab alarm goes off, and as I walked back to the third car I wondered what the problem would be. It was only 11 o’clock but already there had been people slumped comatose in the seats of the station we had just passed through. When I got to the third car fortunately I found that it had been accidental. The girl closest to the alarm was of the type you occasionally see, she was terrified that she was going to be hit with a big fine for activating it without good reason. Her group of half-cut friends were only too pleased to tell me it was her! I reset the alarm, reassured her that she’d be free to continue her night out and walked back to the front.

The rest of the night was not so bad as I was expecting. The police were out in force and were brilliant, they were on every station in the central area and very reassuring, even if most of them were very definitely in the bah, humbug mindset and sick of people wishing them a Happy New Year! I had to deal with a couple of fights, and we had a few minor stoppages of up to five minutes due to problems further down the line with vomiting or fighting. Obviously vomit is a disgusting problem to deal with, but it is a headache from a customer service point of view. Most of the things we do on the Underground are utilitarian – we always go for the greatest good for the greatest number, for example regulating a train delays the people on that particular train, but lowers waiting times for people across the length of the line. Vomit on a train only affects one car, or even just one part of one car, but normally we have to take the train out of service, in complete contrast to our usual approach. Sometimes a blind eye will be turned, someone just needs to make that call.

Unfortunately in the early hours of the new year, events took a nasty turn. At one end of the line, a father was savagely beaten in front of his family by a group of disgusting thugs on a train. He had asked them to stop smoking dope, they responded by bottling him in the face and raining down fists and feet on him as he lay on the floor. The train was taken out of service due to the sheer amount of blood in the affected car. The police had DNA and CCTV evidence, and I hope to God that they catch the thugs responsible. At the other end of the line, a crazy man first got naked and then tried to chuck himself underneath a train. After causing 40 minutes of mayhem, he was apprehended by the police and taken away, fortunately in one piece. Chalk up another driver traumatised by a selfish individual.

So a depressing end to a night which in the main was nothing like as bad as I was expecting. I never know what I will be faced with when I go to work and I love the variety. It’s just a shame that sometimes real people get hurt in this city which can turn so violent so quickly.