Another London Blog

Wartime London on Google Earth

2011-02-21T10:15:00.004Z

I spend far too much time in Google Earth. I look at where I've been and where I'd like to go. I look at where I grew up and where I live now. I follow roads, rivers, canals and railway lines. I even collate libraries of placemarks of great places I visited abroad, and send them to friends who ask me for recommendations of where to stay/eat/drink/party/relax in those far flung places.

My name is Another London Blogger, and I'm a Googleearthaholic.

One thing Google introduced in one of the last updates was the ability to go back in time, imagery wise you'll understand. This was moderately cool, for example I could go back from 2008 to 2003 for the imagery of where I grew up, and see how much of the local wood has been chopped down, how many acres of hop gardens we've lost recently. Yes, it was quite depressing, but interesting nonetheless.

Now though, there is a far better option available to us for historical viewing. In London, you can rewind the clock to 1945. Not satellite imagery of course but pictures from an end-of-the-war aerial photographic survey. This is fascinating. It is brilliant, and it's already cost me several hours. For all those buildings you suspected were built in the place of bomb sites, you can now see the actual bomb crater.

Less morbidly, you can see the dying days of our city's industrial past - the docklands that were such a German bomb-magnet are, in these pictures, actual docklands, not a glass-and-steel agglomeration of shagpads and highrise office blocks called "Docklands". And what's that in White City, where the BBC is now? It's the Olympic Stadium! The actual Olympic Stadium, from the 1908 Summer Games. We see parks still "under the plough" as giant Dig For Victory allotments along with now-vanished infrastructure such as Holborn Viaduct station and myriad gasometers.

The pictures take a little getting used to, but perseverence here really pays off. Generally, white space is a bomb site, though there also clouds across some of the areas! Have a go!

Phony Figures?

2011-02-21T09:45:00.003Z

An interesting piece from BBC London news has appeared in the Video and Audio section of the BBC News website today.

If you don't have time to watch the video, it basically makes the point that TfL's official performance figures do not include the time lost to upgrade work. This means that while in reality the Jubilee line has only run something like 78% of the trains it should have run were it not closed most weekends, the TfL performance figure says that he Jubilee line ran 95% of services.

There is a short piece in the film by Tony Travers of LSE who is an impressive academic on the subject of local government - I used his publications with frightening regularity for my own MA. He makes the point that London Underground sees things from its own point of view, which is that the railway is an engineering concern, and neglects to think of how the passengers are affected by all this work.

If Tony can find any organisation in the world that doesn't see things from its own particular point of view, I'll give him a hat. In some ways he is right of course, engineering concerns hold a great deal of sway in LU, but there are a couple reasons why I think this criticism of those performance figures is unfair.

The main reason is that TfL is not trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes here. The performance figures are actually called the Scheduled Train Kilometers. Clearly, this only covers the scheduled services. So, if something unplanned happens to close down the railway and wrecks a normal day, like one of the failed trains we're hearing so much of on the Jubilee, this negatively affects that measure. But the engineering works, which are planned in advance, do not affect the figures because the number of km run is scheduled to be lower or sometimes of course, zero.

As a sub-element to this, TfL also publishes the figures covering the amount of disruption the upgrades closures cause and supply these raw data to organisations like London First, who then monetise it and tell everyone how much in pounds sterling the closures cost, so it's not as if TfL say "look everyone, the Jubilee line is so fantastic that 95% of all trains run, we're amazing and the line is never closed".

Finally though, this is an internal performance measure. One of many, believe you me. If you thought the NHS and education were excessively target driven, you should try working at London Underground. It makes sense to measure the number of scheduled kms you run because it shows how effective you are at running the day-to-day services. If the figure is low, it shows that at the first sign of trouble the trains management teams start to cancel and turn trains short rather than try to fix the problem, and that kind of inept incident management is something that needs to be flagged up and fixed. It also makes sense to measure how much disruption you cause due to engineering works, and we do that too. All of this data is then collated and our performance is measured on that as a whole. The statistics for how badly the upgrades have been managed are out there and certainly should be discussed, but the Scheduled Train km measure is for something entirely different.

Picking one statistic out of the bunch and using it for something that it is explicitly not designed to be used for is one of the oldest tricks in the journalistic book. It's what I'd expect from local media, but it's a shame someone like Tony Travers was foolish enough or that eager for facetime on TV to appear on the piece.

Finally though, the upgrades need to happen. Sorry to harp on about it, but it's true. Even the slash and burn Coalition Government have looked at the business cases for the upgrades and at the audit reports of TfL and London Underground and guaranteed that every penny for the upgrades will be protected. How many public bodies can say that?

Guerrilla Marketing

2011-02-17T20:16:00.006Z

There is barely a single surface on the Underground that is not smothered in advertising. From the giant posters looking at you from across the track in the deep Tube stations to the little cardboard rectangles above your seat via the ripped off promotional front cover of this evening's Standard, nowhere on the system is safe from people trying to sell us stuff. And why not? After all, over half the world's population travels on the Tube every year. (Of course, that's nonsense. First of all, it's not individuals, it's journeys. Secondly, it's not just the Tube, it's all TfL modes of transport. But hey, it made a good headline)

It's not just advertising for products that makes it to these hallowed advertising spots though you know. Sometimes people are trying to change our opinions rather than change our spending habits. Nor is it just paid for ads that end up in your eye line. Oh no.

It started with the odd sticker, aping London Underground's style of notice with messages such as "No talking during rush hour". Now though, someone has gone to a new level. Two drivers told me on Tuesday that they had seen some above-seat advertising that, at first, they had just walked past. Then they noticed swear words, and realised that something was not as it seemed!

It turns out that some trains on our line have had the above-seat advertising changed to a leftie rant about the Coalition government. This was no half-arsed effort either, entire cars have had all their advertising slots changed to this message! I love the fact that someone has gone to the effort of measuring the adverts and making their own version, then changing them when no-one's looking.

When do they do it? At the dead of night? Or, is it one of our drivers? They don't have much time in sidings all alone, but occasionally they have just enough to change a whole car. I haven't seen this yet, though I haven't been looking that hard yet. If anyone sees one of these ranty adverts, take a picture and let me know!

Damned If We Do...

2011-01-25T01:41:00.003Z

Diamond Geezer has just completed a three-part adventure around London using all of the Rail Replacement Bus services which were forced upon (largely unsuspecting) Londoners over the weekend just gone. As usual for DG they were well written, interesting posts. As is occasionally the case with DG, it struck me as a masochistic thing to do, and definitely more in the interests of London in general than for him in particular I’m sure.

I don’t want to get in to the issue of RRBs because DG has just done it eloquently enough and I don’t disagree with anything that he’s written – they should be far better. What does interest me is the attitudes of people in general towards those dreaded words – the “TfL Investment Programme” or, as it is now referred to in the station PA scripts, “closures as part of our programme to upgrade the Tube”.

There are three scenarios for engineering works. No-one seems to like any of them.

Don’t Do It
In a return to the policies of the 1980s and 1990s, the Tube is not upgraded at all. Assets deteriorate and fail, because they were not designed to be patched up forever, they were designed to have a useful life of about forty years. Every day is like those awful four weeks in October/November 2010, when everything seemed to be buggered all the time. Unlike autumn 2010 though, it doesn’t make headline news, because it is the norm.

Londoners, the papers, business owners and politicians all bitch that the Tube is shit, and will never get better. They’re probably right.

2) Weekend Closures
Money is found from somewhere (PPP, sigh), and the upgrades begin. Three to four hours a night is not enough for major engineering works, so the line has to be shut for a proper period of time.

Every weekend for months, and in some cases years, part of the line is closed.

With the line closed for 50 hours, the engineers and labourers move in. Two hours are wasted setting everything up at the beginning. Two hours are wasted dismantling everything at the end. For working overnight, some of them are paid extra. For working at the weekend, some of them are paid extra. For working overnight at the weekend, some of them are paid extra. Although some ordering in bulk is possible, it’s not possible to buy everything the work will require over the whole year because warehouse space for that much stuff for that length of time is just too expensive. Economies of scale are lost.

With the line closed for 50 hours, people who have been working all week now can’t leave the house to go and play. Gigs are missed. Pub gatherings are postponed to a weekend when the Tube’s working. Those who do venture out end up spending ages trying to work out which bus to get, and even longer on the damned thing. Businesses along the line are hard hit on every weekend of the year.

It’s annoying, definitely, but gradually things get better. Journeys take less time. Fewer failures occur. The line steadily becomes more reliable, and travelling on it is less hit-and-miss, less stressful.

Unfortunately, sometimes multiple lines in the same area have to be closed. This is done as a last resort, not as a decision taken at 4.55pm by that week’s work experience kid, but people in the afflicted area naturally decide it is malice, incompetence, or malicious incompetence.

Londoners, the papers, business owners and politicians all bitch that the Tube is shit, and will never get better. They’re wrong, though it requires about 20 years of weekend closures until this can be proved to them.

3) Blockades
Money is found from somewhere (PPP, sigh), and the upgrades begin. Three to four hours a night is not enough for major engineering works, so the line has to be shut for a proper period of time.

For four solid weeks, part of the line, or even the whole thing, is closed.

With the line closed for four weeks, the engineers and labourers move in. Two hours are wasted setting everything up at the beginning. Two hours are wasted dismantling everything at the end. For working overnight, some of them are paid extra. For working at the weekend, some of them are paid extra. For working overnight at the weekend, some of them are paid extra.

Actually though, most of them are paid the normal amount. Most of them work 8-6, Monday to Friday. Everything for the closure is bought at the same time, saving considerable outlay. Instead of being planned as 50 50-hour chunks, the work can be properly project managed as a four week intervention, saving considerable outlay.

With the line closed for four weeks, people who live along it need to make other arrangements, not only for play, but for work. The first few days are awful, but after that everyone has worked out the quickest ways of getting around and travelling to work by bus becomes routine. A few people take to their bikes for the first time. Businesses along the line are hard hit for four weeks.

It’s annoying, definitely, but things quickly get better. Journeys take less time. Fewer failures occur. The line quite rapidly becomes more reliable, and travelling on it is less hit-and-miss, less stressful.

Unfortunately, the line being closed for so long obviously has annoying effects. It is short term pain for long term gain, but people in the afflicted area are pretty sure that those morons at LU don’t understand how important the Tube is to everyone living there.

Londoners, the papers, business owners and politicians all bitch that the Tube is shit, and will never get better. They’re wrong, and actually it doesn’t take that long to prove it to them.

Since Scenario Four doesn’t exist (it’s the year 2000, and Mayor Livingston clicks his fingers. Magically, all the Tube lines are upgraded overnight. Hooray!), one of the three listed above will happen instead. Where I live, all three have happened actually. Ten years ago, the local paper and the local MP liked to get readers/votes by decrying the awful performance of LU. They were right, and they were adamant that Something Must Be Done. Two years ago, the local paper and the local MP liked to get readers/votes by decrying the awful weekend closures. The closures weren’t even that frequent, and they were only necessary because of the past awful performance of LU which the paper and MP rightly attacked. But they were something to bitch about, and were happily seized upon. Last year, the local paper and the local MP liked to get readers/votes by decrying the awful three-week blockade.

You get the picture by now, surely?

One Under

2011-01-14T11:16:00.002Z

It was only a matter of time I suppose. Some people manage to go a career in London Underground without dealing with a person under a train, which we rather callously term a “one under”, but in my job it was a matter of when, not if, I would have to deal with my first one.

I was on the phone to the controller talking about run of the mill stuff when, in the background, I heard a train mayday call come in on the controller’s radio system. All LU trains have a unique radio in the cab, and one press on the radio’s mayday button will send a priority call to the controller which sets off a very distinctive alarm in the control room. As soon as we heard it, the controller hung up on me and went to answer the call. Of course every call is treated as though it will be real, which is why the controller hung up on me to take it, but I wasn’t too fussed as most maydays are in fact false alarms related to the “deadman” switch which is intended to detect if a driver keels over while at the controls but which normally ends up alerting us that they have left the cab without shutting the train down.

Two minutes later the telephone started to ring and, on seeing that it was the controller, I knew what was going to be said when I picked up. I felt the bitter taste of adrenaline in my mouth as soon as I heard those words – “mate, we have a one under down at xx”. Once the phone was back on the hook and I had the details noted down, I had to take 30 seconds to think through my next actions. I tried to think of this as just another incident, but it was difficult to get over the fact that this was going to be my first one under. What was I about to see? What would be going on when I got there?

I gathered my stuff together and asked the manager in charge of train crew to get me a spare driver. The spare and I jumped in the car and raced down to the scene of the incident, about a 15 minute drive away. Everything was much calmer than I had expected. The station and train had already been evacuated by the staff there and all three emergency services were already on site. Traction current was off and the poor driver already had a drink in his hand and was being looked after and questioned by a very understanding police officer.

Checking on the driver was my first priority. Seeing that he was in good hands, I moved down to where the train had come to a halt, just one car in to the station. Paramedics were with the girl, while the police and fire brigade stood around chatting in low tones, waiting for their bit to begin. I updated my service manager and called the Network Operations Centre to find out where the Emergency Response Unit were. The ERU are our emergency service and they are the experts in dealing with many things, including people under trains. They can get people out from underneath trains, they can split trains down and even jack them up as if they were simply changing the tire on a family car. It turned out that my job was simply to co-ordinate the efforts of everyone on site, along with the usual pressure of trying to get things up and running again as soon as possible.

The paramedics pronounced the girl dead and left very quickly once that was done. Now things swung in to action. We couldn’t yet move the train as ERU were still about five minutes away, but the police began to check the CCTV and make enquiries in the area to try to rule out the involvement of anyone else. This became my focus too – I needed to do anything I could to convince the police asap that this was suicide and not a crime. If the police declare a crime scene then we can kiss goodbye to the service for the rest of the day, the station and the train will be locked down, preventing us from running anything in that area. I got the police access to the CCTV playback suite as quickly as I could, and took them through the footage over and over again. It was not nice to watch once, let alone that number of times.

ERU turned up and, with the fire brigade, managed to get the body out and the train moved. Meanwhile the police gave the all clear and we started to get things back up and running. The spare driver took the train to the depot to get it cleaned up. Meanwhile, the police had found the girl’s handbag and were going through her things. She had a decent amount of money – not a suspiciously high amount, just enough to know that she wasn’t in any need of cash. She had two books, bought just an hour before at WH Smith. This is what troubled me. Why did she do it? She clearly intended to read those books. What clicked in her mind that made her want to end it all, forever?

On leaving the scene my shift was over. In fact, it had ended about an hour before, but I can’t just walk out once an incident has started. I was left to think about what had happened. I got to bed eventually and after a while was able to sleep. I very much doubt that the same could be said of the poor driver that night.

All Night Long

2011-01-10T22:09:00.001Z

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.

On The Obvious Lure of Unions

2010-09-06T22:37:00.004+01:00

I don't belong to a union, I never have and probably never will. I think this strike is pointless because the unions will not win. LU, rightly, will not back down, meaning that RMT/TSSA members will lose a day's pay for no reason and most Londoners and commuters will be severely inconvenienced.

A couple of things, however, have always annoyed me about comments to Annie Mole's blog. First of all, you get someone like centralboy on there who, while his opinions are a pole apart from mine, is clearly reasonable and not one of the RMT's unthinking, moronic stooges. Rather than debate with him in an adult way, people resort almost immediately to ad hominem arguments or simply a condescending tone. Staff like centralboy are clearly the type of people that managers in my grade and above should be trying to win around; treating him like a moron is ridiculous and doesn't make our jobs any easier.

Secondly, though I dislike the unions, you'd be a fool not to realise that the very reason LU staff enjoy a secure job with good pay and benefits is because of union action. People in other industries used to have unions, but gave them up. Now they wonder why they have lower pay than they deserve and have jobs which are at the whim of their senior managers.

Before I joined LU I was a manager in the construction industry. It frequently irritates me that I cannot simply fire some of the wasters that I meet in LU like I was able to in my old job - the exact kind of people who, as Stevem so rightly points out make all other LU staff look bad. That is a definite downside of the unions. Calling a strike over a plan which doesn't involve compulsory redundancies and which would simply be implemented with mere office griping in any other industry is another. I could name at least 20 more without thinking about it.

Remember these things though: not all union or even RMT members are like Bob Crowe; lots of staff are actually worried about safety, no matter how much of a smokescreen it may appear; many more staff think that this is probably the tip of the iceberg, and you don't get to keep your job and lifestyle the way it is by rolling over. Everyone else saying "that's not fair, we can't protect ourselves so why should you?" will not make these union members suddenly think "oh yes, how right you are". Having witnessed what has happened in other industries which no longer have union representation, it will probably just make them redouble their efforts.

One final thing: the staff working on the stations and trains tomorrow are clearly not strikers, yet from personal experience we always get some form of abuse from at least one cretinous individual. Please don't let it be you.

Sorry State of Affairs for Cricket

2010-08-31T16:49:00.001+01:00

When I first read about the details of the match-fixing scandal that has now engulfed cricket, I have to say that I wondered what all the fuss was about. I thought it a pretty minor things, blown out of proportion by news outlets anxious to fill column inches and rolling news minutes at the fag-end of silly season.

Through my own actions, though, I have realised that I was wrong about all this. Five minutes ago, I started to do something that I have planned to do for about three months now: buy a ticket to the One Day International between Pakistan and England at Lord’s. But I didn’t. Despite planning for that long, and despite already knowing that the tickets are an extorsionate £80, I decided that I wouldn’t pay a tenner to watch a match in which certain things, perhaps even the end result, were already decided.

This, as the pundits have been saying, is how the scandal will affect cricket. People who are unsure of whether what they are watching is ‘real’ will not pay.
Events and the result being pre-ordained may be accepted and paid for by WWE fans, but it’s just not cricket.

Safe System of Work, or Mindless Bureaucracy?

2010-08-28T18:07:00.001+01:00

Even without reading the RAIB report, which is not yet finished, we can say with certainty that the runaway train incident on the Northern line a couple of weeks ago was a major safety issue which will require the review and modification of working practices as regards defective trains. The RAIB report should tell us exactly what those modifications are.

In the mean time however, London Underground has gone utterly mad with new regulations. First of all, engineering trains of the same type as that which ran away were totally banned from the network pending the investigation by RAIB and LU. At first this seemed fine to me, but now I think about it, I wonder whether setting out a stricter method of working with these locos in the interim would not be a better and more efficient way of doing things. First of all, the standard LU response to a defective train is usually a push-out, not a pull-out as was attempted on the Northern line. Push-outs put less strain on the coupling, which in any case is supposed to be proven before it is used. Why not set out strict processes for dealing with defective engineering locos of this type instead of banning them altogether?

My real problem though is with an incredibly ill-thought-out, kneejerk reaction called “Operational Standards Notice 96” (OSN96). OSNs have the same force as the hallowed LU Rule Books, when all is said and done they are essentially additions to the Rule Books. OSN 96 states that all engineering trains which have their brakes isolated, or any passenger stock which has two or more cars of brakes cut-out, must not be moved until a ridiculous bureaucratic process has been carried out.

Firstly, the OSN states that the person in charge of the site must contact the LU Rostered Duty Officer (RDO) to request permission to move the train. The RDO is an LU general manager with special incident training. It is a very senior grade, rostered weekly. To find out who the RDO is this week and what their mobile number is, the person in charge must call the Network Operations Centre. The RDO will then call the LU duty engineer to discuss the move request. The move will then be given or denied permission.

So far, so arse-covering. Even more ridiculous though is that although the OSN stipulates that it covers “defective trains”, depots have been told it also applies to them. I was at our local depot the other day, and a three-car unit came in to go over the wheel-lathe – a piece of equipment which keeps the train wheels in the correct profile. This is done by cutting out all the brakes on the train and attaching it to a “tug” loco. The attachment is no botch-job, the shunter is the same height as the passenger train, and they connect using a secure double D attachment. The lathe road is perfectly level, not by accident, by design – specifically because the unit to be lathed must have all its brakes cut out. Despite all this, OSN 96 had to be followed to the letter. Authorisation took 45 minutes in the middle of the day, and was only given for that specific train – not for the lathe road or the depot in general. This depot usually lathes at night, with their peak time being between 0200 and 0400. How long will authorisation take at that time in the morning?

This is an absurd over-reaction to a totally different scenario. I advised the depot manager to give the RDO a call at 0200 on Sunday or Bank Holiday Monday with his next request. It will be interesting to see how long OSN 96 applies to depots after that.

Strike Action

2010-08-25T22:41:00.003+01:00

The RMT and TSSA today announced the dates of their strike, a strike that they are warning will be the first of many unless they get their way. LU won't back down over the re-organisation, so RMT and TSSA need to be careful here. If the strikes go on, become less supported and eventually fail to achieve their objective, they'll look very weak.

Support for the strike at my depot is anything but steadfast. Even the RMT Industrial Rep is not very happy about it. Two of the drivers I spoke to today said they were considering leaving the RMT. Most of the others wouldn't dream of doing that, but the consensus seems to be that they'll probably walk out for the first strike and then work during the rest of them. In straightened economic times, the union needs to make train operators feel personally threatened to get them to support the strike, but the LU re-org only affects station staff, duty managers and 'centurions' - the management level above duty manager. The RMT has been attempting to do this, mainly by way of posters warning drivers that "station staff won't be there to help you if something goes wrong", but I don't think it's getting through.

RMT and TSSA are also enforcing "work to rule" from now on, which means no overtime. As passengers, this will affect your day-to-day travels on the Tube far more than the exceptional strike day. Train Operator duties are calculated to the minute, and have very little "padding" to allow for delays. Even a very short period of "minor delays" can push many drivers into overtime - we're only talking a matter of minutes here, but this is still classed as overtime. Under work to rule, if it is well supported then passengers could start to notice problems almost every day. Late-running drivers will refuse to take trains any further, leading to trains terminating wherever there are sidings, no matter how far that is from their destination. As an average example, a westbound West Ruislip train on the Central line, due for driver changeover at White City but running late, could be terminated at Marble Arch or White City.

The 6 September strike, as I have said in previous posts, will be an interesting one. Will it be well-supported or not? Have the unions overplayed their hand? Whatever happens London, never fear - I'll be at work that day.

Runaway Train

2010-08-13T19:31:00.003+01:00

The last few weeks have been pretty good for London Underground. Delays and disruption have largely been avoided on all lines, save for the planned works on the Circle and H&C. This good service coincides with the fact that London is noticably emptier than usual during the month of August. Is this a shame, meaning that the one time the Tube works almost perfectly for weeks on end, no-one is around to see it? Or is it confirmation of the old railwaymans quip, that the service would run so much better if it weren't for the pesky passengers doing things to mess it up?

That run of good service was shattered today, and not even the most passenger-hating old Steam Age relic could pin this one on rail users. In the wee hours of this morning, an engineers train was heading southbound and home after a night's work when something on the locomotive failed. Since the loco was at the north end of the Northern line, the decision was made to couple it up to an out of service '95 Tube Stock (Northern line train) and tow it to one of the northern depots. For "reasons now under investigation", the engineers train broke free and the train rolled away. It rolled for 13 minutes and almost four miles, from Archway to Warren Street where a steep upward gradient into the station brought it to a halt.

This is incredibly serious, and is under investigation both by LU and by the big boys, the Rail Accident Investigation Branch. The Northern line had opened and was operating passenger services at the time - only the quick thinking of the Northern line controllers in moving trains out of the path of the runaway prevented a collision. All trains on LU have coupling mechanisms, and "emergency couplers" of the type fitted to the engineering train simply couple the two trains by a mechanical lock, which is normally pushed hard in place by compressed air. It would appear that in this case, the engineers train's emergency coupler broke in some way.

Questions obviously need to be asked about this, and with the RAIB on the scene, they will be. The one I most want an answer to is this: why was there no member of staff on the engineers train to operate the brakes? Most engineers trains have an operator at each end. Was this the case in this incident? If so, were both operators in the assisting train and if so, why? Unless the brakes were the faulty component on the train which necessitated the pull-out in the first place, it seems very odd to me that the brakes on the loco were not operated.

RMT Strike Action

2010-08-11T13:23:00.003+01:00

Back in March I blogged about the proposals contained within LU's "Operations Strategic Plan", or OSP. Back then I said that strikes on this issue were 100% likely, and today the RMT has unfortunately proven me to be correct, which normally the RMT reps at my depot would try to steer clear of doing.

In what the RMT describe as a "huge vote for action" against the proposed cuts in the number of station staff and ticket office opening hours, 3727 of their members cast votes of whom 2810 voted in favour of strike action. This is indeed a large majority, although it rather ignores the fact that only a third of their 10,000+ members in LU could be bothered to mark an X on a freepost form and take it to their local postbox - hardly a ringing endorsement of worker solidarity and job security fears.

The problem for the RMT is the same as it has been for all unions lately. They understandably want to protect their members from pay and job cuts, and to do this they need to resort to open conflict with management. But with the general population also scared for their livelihoods but not in unionised professions, public opinion quickly goes against the strikers. Now I've said before that public opinion isn't even close to being the most important thing for unions, but if the Mayor or central government get to a stage where they feel the people will put up with long strikes if the end result is a broken union, they might just take that risk at some point.

It will be interesting to see how these strikes pan out. They certainly can't be painted in the usual "greedy London Underground staff who don't know they're born walk out again to move pay from £700,000 per day to £900,000" way, so beloved of the press. LU passengers consistently tell us that the best thing about the company, and where it is better than other world metros, is that the staff are (mostly) visible and approachable. The RMT are striking over plans to reduce the number of staff that you see in stations, on the gatelines, on the platforms and behind ticket office glass. The union already has letters of support from disability pressure groups and the like, fearful of the effect that fewer staff will have on mobility.

So strikes are coming back to London Underground after a mere year hiatus. How the travelling public will react to these, though, is rather less clear than it could be.

Long Time No Post

2010-08-07T21:10:00.004+01:00

So it's been almost exactly three months since I last posted here. That it seems more like three days is perhaps a good way of explaining how incredibly busy things have been for me in that intervening period, and unfortunately writing this blog inevitably fell by the wayside when my free time began to disappear.

When I first joined this company, something that really surprised me is the large number of people at LU and in TfL more generally who undertake academic courses outside of work. I know at least five people currently undertaking OU degrees, three who have finished them, about eight who are reading part-time Master's at places like King's College, Imperial and UCL, and one train operator who does one or two A Levels at his local FE college and, consequently, has about 12 to his name. 12 A Levels!

Despite being the bookish type, and having thoroughly enjoyed my time at university, I swore to myself on leaving that I wouldn't be back for a while. I went back on that promise to myself pretty quickly and am now coming to the end of a Master's degree myself, something that has lasted two years and has all but destroyed any social life I once had. I am currently writing my dissertation, which is one reason that this blog has not been touched for some time.

Another is the reorganisation that I first blogged about some time ago. The necessity of writing my dissertation and reapplying for my job is why I've been rather quiet lately, and I apologise. Hopefully, I shall be back to writing fairly regularly very soon!

The Transport Manifesto

2010-05-05T18:04:00.000+01:00

Elections are won and lost on bigger and sexier things than transport, despite the fact that most people will feel the effects of transport policy, good or ill, far more than they will notice a penny on National Insurance or a windfall tax on inept yet well remunerated bankers. The following potted history will not help you to make up your mind on which lot to vote in tomorrow, but perhaps something about the billions of pounds of your money which has been and is being squandered in transport will make you demand better from whoever turns out to be your MP in a couple of days’ time.

Despite being widely and more or less justifiably ridiculed for the rudeness of its customer service and the limpness of its sandwiches, British Rail in the 1980s and 1990s was the most efficient railway network in Europe, costing the taxpayer an average of £1bn per year in direct subsidy. The Tory privatisation of 1994, which was considered a step too far even by the rabid Thatcher, has left us with a network which today costs between £4bn and £12bn per year in direct subsidy, though the figure is hazier than it used to be because “commercial sensitivity” in dealing with contracts between government and the private sector is more important than taxpayers finding out how exactly how much of our money lines private pockets.

In opposition, Labour made it clear to the purchasers of BR’s rolling stock that a Labour government would renationalise the railways, driving down the price of the stock. When Labour won power and did not renationalise the network, the new owners of all Britain’s rolling stock realised they had got themselves a bargain. The fragmented structure of maintenance and poor communication between competing railway companies led, in varying degrees of directness, to fatal accidents at Ladbroke Grove, Potters Bar and Hatfield. For all this, rail passengers are paying up to 240% more for their tickets than BR charged them, and British railway pricing today is directly modelled on the airline industry, pricing people out of the peak travel times instead of coaxing car drivers on to public transport with a pricing structure which rewards peak time travel as is standard practice in Europe.

On London Underground, Gordon Brown’s beloved PPP saddled LU with a cumbersome contractual arrangement with two profit-hungry firms, one of which collapsed costing LU (i.e., the taxpayer) between £140m and £200m, and one of which is still shutting the Jubilee line for whole weekends at a time when it should have been finished in December 2009. LU cannot refuse these closures but it can fine Tube Lines for every month that it is late – except that it can’t, because the risk of Tube Lines going under is so great that the fines could in the end land LU with another cleanup bill in the hundreds of millions of pounds. Thanks to Gordon’s cock-up, Boris had to make the ever-popular decision to put up fares despite shedding over 1000 staff after LU and Metronet merged, though since his party started rail privatisation it is hard to feel any sympathy for the blonde loon.

The Liberal Democrats had no hand in any of this, though their manifesto pledges regarding rail cannot stand up under the weight of their own absurdity. A 1% per annum cut in regulated fares sounds nice, until you realise that any loss of revenue in regulated fares will be more than made up for by the Train Operating Companies (TOCs) in massive unregulated price hikes. Reopening closed rail lines and building new tracks for existing lines by drastically reducing the road budget, while paying for all of this using road and fuel duty, is so far from a vote-winning formula that it would be dropped as soon as any LD government or coalition took power. Forcing Network Rail to refund one third of a passenger’s ticket price if they have to take a rail replacement bus will make maintenance so prohibitively expensive that corners will be cut, or Network Rail (funded by you) will be forced to pay, meaning that we all pick up the cost in the end anyway.

The Lib Dems just do not understand transport, at all. Could there be any clearer sign that they are ready for power than that?

For the Love of Maps

2010-05-03T21:47:00.002+01:00

Long before I turned into a professional train geek, I was a map fetishist. While it was not in my top three reasons for joining the Underground, I would be lying if I were to say that the fact LU is world famous for a particularly cool map was not something I considered when weighing up whether to take the job.

A fantastic series has just finished on BBC Four exploring the history of maps in such an impressive way that for the first time in years, I can honestly say that I am pleased I paid my TV License. Timed to coincide with a new exhibition at the British Library entitled “Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art”, the series spanned centuries of mapmaking from ancient cartographers to satirical artists seeking to spoof and lampoon political figures and the decisions they made.

To my eternal shame, I did not actually realise that the British Library has such an extensive map archive – their collection runs to over four and a half million items of mappiness which for me seems like the closest Earthly thing to Heaven. Included in that vast collection is the first ever “Atlas”, the name coined for his book of maps by Gerard Mercator, creator of the Mercator Projection; a later atlas gifted to Charles II which when stood on end is taller than most men; and some fantastic specimens of maps charting the history of London including the famous Morgan map of 1682, which you would know to look at even if the name means nothing to you.

The exhibition is at the British Library until September, so plenty of time to get down there and see it yourself, which is what I shall be doing in the not too distant future. In the mean time, the final two episodes of BBC Four’s great series are still on iPlayer for another six days, and can be found here. Take my advice and treat yourself to an hour or so of televisual, maptastic bliss.

So Just Who Uses the Underground?

2010-04-20T22:29:00.000+01:00

Being of the more liberal persuasion, I have to say that the vast number of surveys and other information gathering undertaken by the tentacle-like arms of the state make me very queasy indeed. I work for the Underground knowing full well that we can track the journeys made by any given Oyster card, but then I suppose I can’t get too hung up on this as a point of principle when I happily carry a location transceiver in my pocket wherever I go which can be tapped into by the security services (otherwise known as a “mobile phone”).

If the state is intent on undertaking these surveys though, and we can’t really stop it, then we may as well use that information for our own interest. Infrequently, London Underground interviews tens of thousands of its customers face-to-face during their journey and records lots of demographic details about them in an exercise imaginatively called the “Underground Users Survey”. The 2008/9 survey involved around 29,000 interviews and, LU staff are informed, will be the last such survey for the foreseeable future. Without wishing to get diverted by another bleeding-heart rant, I’d like to suggest that it be the last ever… please?

Anyway, in the main the survey offers up few surprises. Around 50% of respondents stated that their purpose for travelling that day was “regular work”, with the next largest figure being 11.9% visiting friends or relatives.

Given the price of travelling on the Tube versus bus travel, it is also unsurprising that most respondents were in the “B” or “C1” social group, these being managerial and other ‘white collar’ occupations with some measure of responsibility, though I have to say that I expected these groups to be only just ahead, which is not true according to the UUS – fully 68.2% of the survey’s respondents were in B or C1. Given that “E” is supposed to be “those living at the lowest level of subsistence”, it is amazing that any of them managed to fork out the four quid that a paper single in Zone 1 will cost you, but apparently 3.9% of LU users (extrapolated from the survey) fit this category.

But maybe that is because they weren’t using a paper ticket. Only 29.2% of Tube users do now, you see; the other 70.8% are Oyster converts. The only ticket type which even registers in double figures percentage is the one-day travelcard, beloved of those coming up from the Home Counties for the day, and even that only musters 13.6% of our customers. There was me thinking that the trusty one-dayer was far more popular than that, but then nowadays even infrequent visitors to London have an Oyster, my father being a case in point.

A plurality of these Oyster users pay as they go, the others travel mostly on weekly and monthly season tickets, with only 5.6% of our customers feeling flush enough to fork out for an annual travelcard. I imagine most of that 5.6% come from the north end of the Met, but I digress.

95% of LU users live in the UK, and of them 86.6% live within the M25. The average Tube user is a 25-34 year old white male who is in full time employment who walks to or from the station and who travels in the rush hours five or more times per week.

Could you have guessed that?

Another April, Some More Fools

2010-04-02T17:49:00.004+01:00

Just a quick one to flag up a couple of good All Fools Day articles about the Tube. The second one even has some videoed vox pops - love it!

Independent - "Hadron Collider II Planned for Circle Line"

Walkit.com - "London's Waterloo and City tube line to be pedestrianised"

Right, Everybody Out!

2010-03-31T01:11:00.001+01:00

The RMT today announced that it would be balloting its 10,000 members in LU on strike action to protest at the organisational change plans in operations that I described in a previous post (see “The Big Bang”). As I noted in that post, this was pretty predictable. Bob Crow is on record as saying that the plans will turn LU’s stations into a “mugger’s paradise” and that the changes will bring safety risks, which LU naturally disputes.

The safety angle, while not new, is being pushed more and more by the RMT in their disputes with all rail companies in a bid to get passengers on their side. This has proven me wrong – I said in pub chat regarding the LU network-wide strike last summer that the unions don’t care about public opinion, they only need to persuade management that strike action is costlier than accession to their demands. Clearly though, they do care about what the public has to say, just not enough to stop striking. While the RMT are always very concerned about the safety of their members, I doubt somehow that the safety and security of customers is at the forefront of their minds this time.

The union has long been against piecemeal measures proposed by LU designed either to make the workforce more flexible (e. g. deploy staff at more than one station rather than rostering to a single location, or train them to be multi-functional) or to reduce the workforce to the numbers that are actually needed. The organisational change in operations hits them with measures to do both at the same time, and I’d bet my annual salary that this is what has them riled up, not that a few more customers might fall victim to crime. That’s bad, and that’s sad, but what does Bob care more about?

So the ballot will go to RMT members across LU, and the result will probably be a strike. The timing of this announcement is curious, since the RMT set a deadline of 1700 on Thursday 25th March for LU to withdraw its plans, which at Company Council on that Thursday afternoon it refused to do. Whatever the reason behind the delay, you can probably now expect that an LU strike will be added to the other industrial action going on in this pathetically and lazily named “Spring of Discontent”.

Of course, if the strike does go ahead, I’ll be working. So watch this space for the Secret Diary of a London Blackleg…

A Stroll Down Surrey Street

2010-03-28T17:56:00.008+01:00

Well, I promised myself that I would get better at posting on here in March, and while five posts this month is the same as I posted in January and February together, I still think it is a case of "must try harder"!

I am on leave for the next couple of weeks and then go back to work into a bit of refresher training, so between now and then any posts are likely to be more general than Undergroundy, starting today.
***
Surrey Street is hardly one of London’s major thoroughfares. In fact, this 158m long one-way street which links Strand with Temple Place is pretty sleepy most of the time, and that is all to the good.

While it may not seem like much, the area has an aristocratic past, reminders of which are everywhere if you know what to look for. The only nobleman’s house which remains in these parts today is Somerset House, built by the Duke of that county, but at one time houses belonging to the Dukes of Norfolk, Suffolk and Richmond could be found along this stretch of the north riverbank, as well as those of several marquises and bishops.

The Duke of Norfolk, who is first in the order of the English peerage, had his home on a site which today is between Surrey Street and The Temple. Surrey Street takes its name from one of the Duke’s other titles (Earl of Surrey), as does Arundel Street (Earl of Arundel) which runs parallel with and to the east of Surrey Street, and Maltravers Street (Baron Maltravers) which runs east off Arundel Street.

Walking down Surrey Street from Strand, the only buildings of interest are on your right, the left side of the road taken up by an ugly concrete building with no public entrances. The first building you come to is the main entrance of the now closed Aldwych Station, once an outpost of the Piccadilly line. This station, which was at the end of a branch line running from Holborn, was closed in 1994 due to the projected cost of replacing the lifts. It is now used for emergency services training and as a film location – you may recognise it from Patriot Games or The Good Shepherd, but you probably wouldn’t recognise it from Atonement, Creep or V for Vendetta, since it is often dressed up as other stations, as was the case with those films. The income from filming is pretty good, and it is sometimes quipped within LU that Aldwych is more profitable now that it is closed than it ever was when it was open.

A bit further down, and on the right again, is another reminder of the previous owners. The Norfolk Building of King’s College London now houses academic staff, but stonework above the door gives away its previous identity: the Norfolk Hotel. Named for you-know-who, this unassuming building has a scandalous claim to fame – it was one of the hotels used by John Profumo and Christine Keeler for their affair in the summer of 1961.

Next to the Norfolk is a little roofed alley with a mysterious sign above the entrance –
THE NATIONAL TRUST
ROMAN BATH
DOWN STEPS TURN RIGHT
This bath, which is almost certainly not Roman, was acquired by the National Trust in 1948. Quite where it gets its name from is unclear, but it is at least several hundred years old, and you may have read about one David Copperfield taking a dip there in Dickens’ novel. The bath, which is now inside a building but visible to the street via a large window, can normally be viewed by entering a fenced area and pressing a light switch. Between April and September, you can get a closer look if you contact Westminster City Council at least 24 hours in advance. Unfortunately on the day of this particular visit, the gate was locked. The street this is on – Strand Lane – is eerily quiet owing to the expansion of King’s College London all around it, and it feels as though you are not really allowed to be there at all.

Arriving at the southern end of Surrey Street, you are faced with an entrance to Temple Gardens and, more interestingly, an old cabman’s hut. These green wooden buildings used to be found all over London but there are now only a few of them left, serving cheap tea and bacon butties to the Hackney Carriage drivers of the city.

The one on Temple Place would probably also serve a fair number of students, too, were it not for the large Brutalist structure that is King’s College London Students’ Union. While I’m sure it must have good views from the top, to those of us at the bottom it is not such a pretty sight.

So that is Surrey Street. Just to the right in this last photo is The Howard Hotel – the Dukes of Norfolk all having Howard as their surname – which rounds off the connections between this street and the noble family. It can be easy to believe that London is a place where history is only to be found within the old Roman walls or in the vicinity of Trafalgar and Parliament Squares, but the truth is that there are thousands of places in this city where history has been made and where stories can be found and told. Even if you are a 158 metre long one-way street.

My other photos from this trip

Tunnel Time

2010-03-15T20:47:00.003Z

Going on the track and roaming around London Underground’s tunnels is something that I cannot get away from in my job, not that I would want to. Before I joined the Underground, I had always been fascinated, not so much by the railway itself, but by the subterranean world that is beneath our feet wherever we go in this city. I remember well the excitement of my first trackwalk as we set off in to the cut-and-cover tunnels between Liverpool Street and Moorgate, and the similar feeling I felt as I explored the old City and South London Railway tunnels which are still to be found mothballed behind innocuous locked doors at London Bridge station.

Although I still enjoy it, walking the tunnels and track is so much a part of my job that I would no longer jump at the chance to walk in any old tunnel as I used to when I began working for LU. On Thursday however, I saw a notice on the LU intranet asking for volunteers to take members of the public down into the Thames Tunnel between Wapping and Rotherhithe, and I couldn’t write my email to the organisers fast enough.

The Thames Tunnel was built between 1825 and 1843 by Marc Brunel, with his son Isambard acting as the Chief Engineer at just 21 years of age. When it was finished, it was the first tunnel ever to go underneath a navigable waterway and was a marvel of Victorian engineering, though of course it had been begun two monarchs earlier under William IV. You can find some fairly good histories of the tunnel on the internet, but suffice it to say that the tunnel was a commercial failure and was made into a railway tunnel in 1869, passing to the Metropolitan Railway in 1878. It was part of London Underground until 2007, when it closed to become a part of the extended London Overground network which will open in April this year.

Happily, some bright spark came up with the idea of letting the general public go down into the tunnel for Friday and Saturday of last week, which is where we rejoin the story of me volunteering to shepherd those people around. The work to upgrade the Overground was halted for two days to allow these visits, which sold out incredibly quickly despite what by all accounts was an incredibly bad online booking system. Volunteer guides came not just from London Overground but from all over TfL, including people from back office functions, London Buses and those of us from LU. We were on hand to give the obligatory Health and Safety briefing, answer questions about the railway or the tunnel and to generally ensure everyone was safe and sound. The real stars of the show were the fantastic Blue Badge guides, who entertained and informed us with facts and anecdotes about the construction and use of the Tunnel.

I must confess that I was expecting the people taking the tours to be a particular type of man, and so I was incredibly pleased that the demographic of all the groups I accompanied to be pretty much exactly the same as if we had simply kidnapped people from the street outside on a normal day and dragged them downstairs! Couples and groups of friends of both sexes tramped through the Tunnel, no doubt eager to take TfL and GLA up on an offer which will probably not recur in their lifetime: the chance to walk through a railway tunnel, and not just any railway tunnel, but the first one ever to have been built beneath a river. I enjoyed myself enormously, and if anyone reading this went down there then I hope that you did too.

I took some pictures, but they were not very good. Diamond Geezer and Urban 75 got some good shots (though I found some of Urban’s history to be a bit suspect), and Annie Mole has done something of a blogging roundup of the event.

The Big Bang

2010-03-12T00:08:00.002Z

So we now know what the changes are, and they are as fundamentally important to the way that we do things on London Underground as I suspected they would be. LU finds itself in something of a tight spot: the seven year business plan was written just as the good times were coming to an end, and the seven year budget that has been given to us from on high is not as big as they told us it would be. Something to do with some kind of economic downturn I think, I didn’t catch the details.

What is happening?
Operations, the bit of LU that actually runs the stations and trains, is being restructured. This will involve changes to line management and job losses. Senior managers are saying that they “plan to deliver these reductions with no compulsory redundancies”; the sharp-eyed among you may notice that that sentence does not include a promise of any kind.

LU stations are organised for management purposes in to “groups”. The number of groups across LU, currently 44, will be reduced by seven. This means that the number of Group Station Manager positions will fall by seven, and the number of Duty Station Manager positions (the grade beneath GSM) will fall too, I’m guessing by about 35, which is a big hit at middle management. GSM admin staff will also be reduced – since every group tends to have an average of two, that is probably a fall of 14. Every group will have no more than five DSMs, meaning more middle management reductions even in those groups which are not facing amalgamation into others. These changes should have been made by late 2010.

The reason that middle management can be cut is that staff are also being cut. 450 ticket office positions will be cut across LU, along with between 150 and 200 CSAs – the people on the gateline who you ask questions of/are polite to/are rude to/moan about etc. These changes should be made by Feb 2011 at the latest.

In my sphere, the way that trains staff are managed is also changing. The train-side GSM equivalent, known as a Train Operations Manager or TOM, is also facing cuts. The exact way this will work is unclear to me at the moment, but it seems that they may halve the number of TOMs there are on the network. They will certainly amalgamate small depots which are close to each other, which makes sense. What does not make so much sense is if they make the current two-TOM locations, the so-called “super-depots”, into one-TOM locations. The super-depots have about 240 drivers, and 240 direct reports is a lot of direct reports! My grade, Duty Manager Trains or DMT, will be rejigged. The DMT role is currently made up of two jobs which were originally separate grades, you cycle through each role during a shift pattern, and the restructuring makes them separate once again. The current “mobile” DMT, who is a kind of roving incident manager and who also investigates all delays of over two minutes, will become a “Duty Reliability Manager”. The desk DMT, who signs in drivers and ensures that drivers and trains go to the right places during service disruptions, will become a “Duty Train Staff Manager”. There will also be a deputy TOM role in the current DMT grade, which may be a way of getting round some of the impracticalities of reducing TOMs at super-depots, but still seems unsatisfactory.

Why is this happening?
There is an eyewateringly large gap between our aspirations and our reality, and that needs to be closed. Back office departments have already faced budget and job cuts, and now it is the turn of the operational side of LU to tighten its belt – despite the promises made by senior management at the time of the 2008 strike that operations would not be affected. In addition to this, the way that people are using the Tube is changing. LU has traditionally needed more staff than other metros because things go wrong a lot more – other metros are either newer or get more money than LU has traditionally been given. The recent investment, while nowhere near finished, has already brought up reliability, which must have made senior managers think they no longer need so many staff.

In another twist, in my opinion duty managers are often seen to be dead weight, sometimes with good reason. There are a lot of people here in my grade on both stations and trains side who are either lazy or incompetent, and the time has come to have a spring clean. The problem with this is that locations with good duty managers always perform very well, and I would think that performance managing duty managers and getting rid of people who are bad at their jobs is a better idea for productivity than cutting the posts themselves, but I digress.

How will it affect you, dear reader?
Well, if you are a commuter, in the long term you will notice that there are fewer staff members around during your commute. LU has noticed that commuters tend not to ask questions, what you do instead is switch on autopilot and go from A to B as quickly as possible. When there are service disruptions, you still don’t ask questions. You might complain, but generally you just switch to your back-up route, which you have done before and know just as well as your normal route.

So commuters don’t need so many staff as leisure users, and the staffing will be shifted to reflect this. Instead of beefing up in the peaks, we will beef up staffing at the weekend, when there are tonnes of closures and when, even if there weren’t, there are loads of first-time or infrequent Tube users about. These people, tourists or Home Counties dwellers, ask a lot of questions, and consequently need more staff.

Ticket offices which are currently in existence will not close for good, but their hours will be truncated. LU management has trotted out a statistic which says that only 1 in 20 journeys begins with a trip to the ticket office. In future, you will be forced to use the machines, Ticket Stops or the TfL Oyster website to top-up or renew season tickets. You may as well start getting used to it.

How will it affect me?
A good question. Unless I lose my job, which I hope won’t happen, I think this will be good for me and others like me. I hate, hate, HATE the desk role of my job and wish that I could be mobile all the time – a wish that I will get if I manage to move from old-world DMT to new-world Duty Reliability Manager. It may be that I am moved from this depot to another on another line, or even over to station side. That would be unfortunate, since I like it here, but at least I would have a job, and an enforced sideways move like that would only give me more experience to carry on moving up the chain.

Will there be strikes?
Yes. I am 100% sure there will be strikes. Some people are talking about long ones, say a week or more, but I am not sure it will come to this. If depth of feeling was the only thing that counted, then those people would be right, but it isn’t. Most people could not afford to strike for a week – that’s one quarter of your earnings gone. So my tip is that there will be at least one network wide strike, but that they will follow the pattern of two days per pay period, as they have done recently, rather than a massive week or two week walkout. There may even be no network strike and only local strikes - call me a cynic, but since Train Operators aren't affected, would they really walk out for the sake of "solidarity"? Well, regardless, I'd still lay money on at least one network-wide strike.

PS: It's called the "Big Bang" because that is the LU term for this kind of confrontation with the unions. Normally LU deals with things through the normal collective bargaining machinery, but today's announcement was a bolt from the blue, and contained several controversial issues at one time. A big bang. We can only wait to see what the fall out is.

"Big Bang" Theory

2010-03-11T08:39:00.003Z

Something big is afoot in London Underground. Something very big. Everyone knows it will be announced today, but no-one knows what it is - unless you believe the rumours, which range from "massive job cuts at the senior management level", to "no job cuts at all", via "massive job cuts across the board".

We shall know more by this afternoon, and I'll be posting here this evening once I've had time to digest it, by which time I expect the Evening Standard or old Uncle Bob will have had something to say about it (or probably both).

"We are transforming your Tube"...

The Problem with London Politicians 1: Andy Slaughter MP

2010-03-09T18:05:00.001Z

The MP for where I live is Andy Slaughter – a Labour man who has lived in this constituency all his life and who was a councillor for LB Hammersmith and Fulham before he moved to Westminster. The problem with Andy is that he seems like a lovely bloke who has time for local residents, while at the same time conforming to the slimy stereotype of MPs who will say or do anything to get a vote. It would be rather nice if the MPs who appear to be lovely are just, well, lovely.

Until recently, Andy was a Parliamentary Private Secretary to a Minister of State in the Foreign Office. He resigned from this post in protest at his government’s backing of the third runway at Heathrow. Very decent of him. One could question why it took him so long when the government has always been in favour, but I never question why the latecomer to my birthday party is late, I am always just pleased that he showed up at all.

One of my main problems with Andy is that in his campaign literature which gets shoved through my door, as well as on his website, he seems immune to the irony of the fact that he criticises Boris and the Tory H&F council for exactly the same things that the Labour national government gets wrong all the time. It’s as if, having seen how awful his party’s government is, he has decided to give up any claims he may have had to speaking about national issues and has decided to become a local councillor again. He attacks LBHF on policing, despite the fact that this is the only area in Britain with 24/7 beat policing, thanks to funding from our council tax. He attacks LBHF on social housing, despite more social housing being sold by Labour councils or disposed of into arms length management organisations in the last 12 years than by every council in the previous 15. He even attacks London Underground (how dare he!) for the way in which the Shepherd’s Bush Central line station refurbishment was undertaken, even though it was Gordon Brown as Chancellor who pushed through the PPP which gave us Metronet, the blithering idiots who undertook that refurb. Finally, he attacks Boris for putting the fares up, when this was caused directly by two main factors: the cost of rescuing Metronet (thanks Mr. Brown) and the drop in ridership caused by the recession and Britain’s woeful ability to cope with it (thanks again).

What is most disgusting about Mr. Slaughter, however, is his impeccable Janus impersonation on the issue of post offices. You see, Andy helped to collect signatures on a petition against his government’s plan to close lots of post offices. I know this is the case, because a) I signed it while he was there and b) it says he did this in his glossy “Annual Report” that is front of me right now. Then, when he went to Parliament, he voted with his government on their bill. He voted in favour of closing post offices.

It seems very silly to lie blatantly to your constituents. Some of us do watch BBC Parliament Andy. Some of us do follow your voting record with interest.

Remote Controller

2010-02-09T22:43:00.000Z

I have subscribed to Private Eye for umpteen years, and have always found it to be amusing and useful in bringing to light injustices and hypocrisies of which the public would otherwise never hear. Sure, it may not be the cutting edge satire that it was when it began, and as much as I admire and respect Ian Hislop the magazine could do with some fresh thinking from the top, but despite these thoughts I always look forward to the day every fortnight when it drops on to my doormat.

The anonymous columnists are by-and-large very readable, and clearly know a great deal about their specialist topic. “MD” has been a favourite of mine since I first handled Lord Gnome’s organ, and obviously I always read “Dr B Ching” for his take on the absurdities of rail policy and privatisation. There is, however, one Eye columnist I cannot stand.

“Remote Controller” confirms in every way my steadfast belief that TV critics are moronic individuals who are simply not sufficiently educated to commentate on a more impressive art form. His rants, sometimes incomprehensible, occasionally contradictory of a previous issue’s tirade and always boring, show how it is possible to be driven to the edges of clinical insanity by a medium which has always been trashy and will never fulfil its potential.

When “Remote Controller” really comes unstuck however is when he tries to branch out and discuss something other than mere programming. We are treated to a prime example of this in the current issue of the Eye (1255), in which RC attacks the boardroom manoeuvres that have resulted in Adam Crozier taking over as Chief Exec of ITV. Crozier, previously boss of Royal Mail, is lambasted by RC for ‘leaving chaos…at the Royal Mail” and for lacking both television and business experience. The man who turned Royal Mail from losing £1m per day to profiting by the same amount is hardly lacking in business experience, and taking on self-interested unions that would rather cause the national economy millions of pounds of damage than work all of their contracted hours does not equate to leaving the company in chaos, but dragging it to where it should be. He didn’t entirely manage, as the recent Dispatches on Channel 4 may have shown, but achieving profitability in a business with a Universal Service Obligation is pretty impressive in itself. Even after the recent job cuts and changes, ITV is unimaginative, bloated and unprofitable. A man with experience of turning the balance sheets black in an organisation which had the same problems should definitely have been considered for a top job at the company, and while cutting staff who are not worth their salary is never popular, pandering to the sick, lame and lazy will never result in a successful company.

Maybe RC’s most recent column is a show of solidarity with those Royal Mail workers who have almost as much time to spend watching TV as he does, but somehow I don’t think he will be finding work after Private Eye as a business analyst.

The Letter of the Byelaw

2010-02-07T00:11:00.001Z

It is as clichéd a topic of British conversation as the weather or how to make the perfect cup of tea. It makes commuters’ blood boil. It leads to tutting, stern looks and occasionally even fisticuffs. And, in most forms, it is actually a criminal offence.

I am talking, of course, about rudeness on the Tube. For reasons that I am sure we are all familiar with, travelling by Tube can often be unpleasant enough without your fellow passengers making your experience worse with their unmitigated self-centredness. What you may not know is that many of the things you probably find most annoying are criminal offences under the Transport for London Rail Byelaws. Standing on the left? Proscribed. Entering a train before everyone has got off? Illegal. Holding a door open? Forbidden. Even the increasingly prevalent scourge of the mobile phone music playing imbecile is covered, as the use of ‘any instrument, article or equipment for production or reproduction of sound’ is against Byelaw 7.

Everyone using the London Underground, London Overground and Docklands Light Railway networks must abide by these laws, and breaching any one of them is punishable in a magistrates’ court of a fine up to £1000. That’s a lot of money for standing on the wrong side of the escalator. In fact, I would be surprised if any cases under these byelaws had made it to the courts in the last ten years. The byelaw most commonly used by LU staff is probably 7(2) which allows us to eject beggars, unlicensed buskers and unlicensed charity collectors from our railway, but of course these cases are run-of-the-mill and never get so far as the court system. Perhaps if LU, the BTP or even a passenger group made some effort to prosecute someone for what I would call the ‘rudeness’ offenses like playing music out loud on one’s mobile, the publicity resulting from the case (and hopefully large fine) would dissuade people from being rude next time they were travelling about the system. Then again, given how idiotic these people are in the first place, perhaps it wouldn’t.

The reason I came to looking all this up is that I was on a District line train going to work on Friday when I was confronted by a group of Imperial College Medical Students raising money for their annual “RAG” drive. Their spiel was announced at the top of their leader’s voice before the group of five thrust their buckets in the face of everyone in the carriage. I felt that I was probably supposed to throw them off, but I was not sufficiently sure of my footing to actually stand up in the middle of the young man’s speech and declare that, as an LU manager, I was kicking them off the train. In hindsight, I was foolish not to do it, but at least I’ll know for next time. If you were on that train with me, I apologise for my inaction!

"Severe"

2010-01-24T15:45:00.003Z

Yesterday, Her Majesty's Government upgraded the UK terror threat level to "Severe", from "Substantial", apparently meaning that terrorist attacks against British targets are now "highly likely".

The government was at pains to let everyone know that the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) - a department of the Security Service (MI5) - had upgraded the threat, and that it was not a decision taken by ministers. Heaven forbid that some cynical souls might think this upgrade was designed to scare people into voting Labour! After all, there is no precedent for that - this government has never raised the level before crucial war votes in Parliament, or before other elections. Never.

Whatever the motives, people using London Underground yesterday certainly seemed to be taking the threat posed by terrorism more seriously. We had an above average number of calls about lost property and suspicious packages, with people now being careful to report their lost property directly to LU or the police rather than to the TfL Lost Property office. Station staff took a little more time over their security checks than normal. Trains were stopped while packages were searched for. Nothing went "bang". Hopefully, it will stay that way.

Fare's fair?

2010-01-06T13:30:00.003Z

From the 2nd of January 2010, a new fare structure applied to all TfL and National Rail services. In general, “new fare structure” is a euphemism for “increased prices”, and it was no different this time around. The Train Operating Companies (TOCs) which run National Rail services, companies like Virgin, South Eastern Trains, London Midland etc, disguised the fact that some fares would rise by percentages in the double figures by stating that the average rise was about 1% - a nifty trick made possible by the fact that the government regulates the prices of the most popular tickets.

On TfL services, the price rises announced by the Mayor a couple of months ago took effect. These were unfortunate – London already compares unfavourably with other world cities for transport costs, and most people who still have a job which requires commuting to are facing pay freezes or even cuts. Unfortunately they are necessary to complete the upgrades, which I guarantee will be worth the pain when they are delivered, but which is not much consolation right now. At least our rises are for good reason, rather than to create larger profits with no discernible passenger improvement as on National Rail.

In the case of the TfL “new fare structure” though, there have been structural changes as well as the inevitable price hikes. In the finest tradition of the British rail industry, these structural changes have made the hideously complicated fare system even more difficult to understand. First off, the long-awaited integration of NR services within the TfL Zones to Oyster has spawned the “Oyster Extension Permit” or OEP. If you have a travelcard, say Zones 1-2, but live in Zone 5 and want to travel into town on your Oyster using NR services, it is not good enough to have enough money on your card. Oh no. You must also have an OEP loaded onto your card which permits you to do this.

Then, there is the abolition of 3 Day Travelcards. These have quietly been removed and all customers will be sold Oyster pay as you go (PAYG) instead, on the premise that three days of PAYG price capping is cheaper than a 3 Day Travelcard. While this is true, most Londoners do not understand price capping and get stung by it. In addition, Oyster cards seem to ignore the price cap with alarming regularity. It is difficult for staff to communicate exactly how much money a customer will need on their Oyster to cover the cap amount, and it is not written anywhere in leaflets that you can take away. So Londoners find capping difficult, and now we are forcing tourists to use it by taking away a simple ticket type aimed at visitors to London. The One Day Bus and Tram pass has died a death for the same reason in this fares revision.

Likely to be the most unpopular change, however, is the minimum top-up limit at ticket office windows. From now on, it will not be possible to top-up less than £5 at a ticket office window. This is a measure designed to cut queuing times at ticket offices and has merit at the major interchange stations, but even in these busy places it is unpopular both with staff, who don’t like telling people to go away, and passengers, who don’t like being told to go away. I can only imagine that it will be even less popular at far-flung stations where a ticket office queue would be a nice change from the norm.

So, happy new year from TfL! If you can afford to travel with us, and understand which ticket you need to buy, it will be a pleasure to see you on our services!

Lost Property

2010-01-04T20:15:00.003Z

Two weeks before Christmas, we had the inevitable Christmas do at work. The price was low and to say that the food was mediocre is to be very kind indeed, but the alcohol was free-flowing and I am lucky enough to have the kind of workmates who I actually enjoy spending time with, meaning that in the end the night was quite a lot of fun.

Unfortunately, in a drunken haze on my way home, I forgot to pick up my bag as I left the night bus that took me home. The next day I reported it to TfL Lost Property and, after being told that they would look for three weeks and email me whether they found anything or not, began my wait. Buoyed by recent experiences of my friends, a number of whom had stories from the last couple of months of how strangers had gone to great lengths to reunite them and their property, I was quietly confident that I would get my bag back. Adding to this was the knowledge, and relief, that I had left nothing of any value to anyone else in there; although there was the irritation of realising that my expensive pair of prescription glasses were in the top pocket.

In the middle of last week, I received a call from the Lost Property Office saying that they had my bag. I was overjoyed! The nice grey scarf I had lost with it would be returned to me just as the newspapers' beloved "cold snap" began to get colder, and my glasses would be adorning my face in no time.

My scarf was indeed returned to me, along with a notepad which had my name and email address in it. However, they were not found in my bag. Nor were they returned with anything else. Someone had found my bag, decided they liked it more than their one, and placed my scarf and notebook in their old bag, leaving it on the bus. My glasses! My lovely bag! Gone. Stolen, in fact.

While I am trying not to let this cloud my opinion of the human race in general and Londoners in particular, it has left me somewhat deflated. I just wish they had included my glasses in the bag of things they rejected as useless to them.

Genesis

2009-12-23T19:11:00.003Z

It turns out that the first post of a new blog is not an easy thing to write. Despite knowing that, in all likelihood, I will be the only person ever to read it, I still feel the need for it to be a highly polished piece of prose which will serve to trail the kinds of post that may come later.

I have admittedly chosen an odd time to start my first web log. The advent of sites such as Twitter have only served to highlight and advance a trend which was already in evidence: people are generally no longer willing to sit and read a long post by someone they have never met. It does not even have to be long actually: anything over 140 characters can be enough to put them off.

Yet start a blog I have. I have started this blog principally because I enjoy reading the blogs of others, and I would like to bring that kind of enjoyment to other people if at all possible. I also feel, perhaps mistakenly, that I have some things of interest to say. Thousands if not millions of people are interested in the things that I am interested in; mainstream things like history and politics; not-so-mainstream things such as local history, the exploration of underground spaces, how London Underground was formed, has changed and operates today, and the desire to find out more about London than is simply written in the guidebooks. The successes of sites such as Subterranea Britannica, Qype and District Dave; as well as of blogs such as Annie Mole and Diamond Geezer, have assured me of this, which is why I have decided to start a blog. I hope I shall not live to regret it.

So what will you be able to expect from this blog? Commentary and analysis of UK politics in general, and London politics in particular. An insider’s view of the workings of the London Underground. Details of walks or explorations to be had both in London and in the countryside, particularly west London and the area of Kent in which I grew up. Yes, all this and more will be written about here. Like many of the people who, I hope, will become my readers, I have eclectic tastes. I look forward to being able to indulge them here.