Be Excellent To Each Other

Tits Avenue? Tits Avenue station has to be open, hasn't it?

Upper Ladybumps? Surely I can get to Upper Ladybumps?

The tube strike did cause more traffic on the Pontypool bypass this morning.

Nightmare.

If only there was some sort of already existing vast underground tunnel network through which efficient, electrically powered trains could be happily trundled with only a miniscule energy and maintenance cost.

I agree with Grim... that's an metric fucktonne of money. How on earth are they spending it all?

I think the major problem with the tube is that it's always incredibly busy for about 3-4 hours a day and pretty quiet the rest of the time, but they staff it fully for 18 hours a day.
So staffing is very expensive as is maintenance. I've heard apocryphal evidence from engineers who work on the network that maintenance is really badly handled with no long term investment - it's a continuous round of short term money wasting. Simple things like escalators have to be custom engineered and built on a station by station basis and they never order duplicate spares so if one breaks down the parts have to be manufactured to order.

Morningwood Crescent.

Did I do that right?

I'm always surprised how run-down and dilapidated most of the tube looks, considering how much money runs through London. It looks like we're still recovering from the blitz at points.

I don't know if anyone else has been on the Leningrad Metro, but it's a world of difference and apparently more or less runs itself.
Fuck sake, Lundon.

I believe the problem is that every station is completely different. (That is what makes travelling on the Tube an enjoyable adventure each time I do it.) The lines are different, so different stock and so on and so on.

But you are right on the short term thinking - the system is very old and just muddles along in that classically British way. Having Governments and unions who have other priorities when it comes to the Tube (money, or workers) doesn't help.

Both the Leningrad Metro and the Moscow one are modern wonders. Beautiful stations, quick, cheap trains, and deep enough to serve as air raid bunkers. Of course, they were mostly built by slaves but, hey, nobody's perfect.

And Plissken's hit upon a big reason for this, I believe both of those were built in one go. The London one really wasn't. Nothing from the District line is of any use on the Central at all. The trains wouldn't even physically fit through the Central line's tunnels.

Yes. That's what comes of doing it first - you get to make the mistakes. They really need to be looking into automating the trains though. Really, it can't be that hard.

What would the poor working-class drivers do then? End of an Era must be spinning in his grave.

Tube drivers earn quite a bit of cash.
Also, old man afterthought used to be a tube driver.

Is he a (dead) tube driver?

Isn't the DLR automated?

Yup. Craster uses it every day - what's the service like, Cras?

Yes, and it's ever so fun sitting at the front pretending you're driving it when drunk.

Or was that the top of a London bus? I forget.

Both. Although the bus was funnier and there is photographic evidence of that.

Zombie drivers innit.


To be honest I'd doubt whether automating something like the tube would actually save money - the drivers' pay doesn't sound like it adds up to much in the grand scheme of things.

It doesn't, but it's always the first target for ideological reasons. You couldn't operate an automated system without a supervisor/equivalent, anyway.

I use it every day too. 3 years ago it was great, and generally it still is, but now has patches of 2 weeks every now and again where everything goes wrong. I'm blaming the upgrade works for it.

That's not true for the Pietari one at least, and it wasn't built by slaves either :

Line 1 (Kirovsko-Vyborgskaya) 1955 30,9 km 19
Line 2 (Moskovsko-Petrogradskaya) 1961 29,5 km 18
Line 3 (Nevsko-Vasileostrovskaya) 1967 24,3 km 10
Line 4 (Pravoberezhnaya) 1985 11.1 km 8
Line 5 (Frunzensko-Primorsaya) 2008 14.0 km 8

That table gives the date of opening, the length of the line and the number of stations.
And yet, all of the tunnels and cars are compatible.
There may be a valid argument that some of the LU's diversity is due to the original tunnels being very small and old due to their great age, and that bigger trains were needed, but I think it's a lot more to do with the different competing companies which originally developed the lines.
If it had been either a single company, or a state enterprise, then I am positive it would be a radically better and cheaper to run system today.

It wouldn't be but it would take ooh... let's say more than a month, during which the current drivers would paralyse the system.



A driver costs about £60k a year to employ. There's a LOT of drivers.

The DLR is very good, much better than my experiences of the tube have been. It still has signal failures, and suspect packages, and cocks on the line, but I've never known there be an issue with the actual automated driving. They need to hurry the fuck up with 3-carriage upgrades though, and stop only running trains as far as Crossharbour.

Does anyone know how many drivers they actually employ. I can't find a number.

118118 doesn't know either.

About 3500 apparently (according to the Telegraph). So that's 210 Million / year. That's peanuts compared to the 3 Billion a year income mentioned above.

I originally looked at this title and thought it was the latest in a long line of isometic helicopter shooters by EA.

Wasn't the original Underground built very quickly using/exploiting cheap Chinese labour - IIRC it was done in a couple of years and several thousand of the workforce perished because of the slave like working conditions.

I've sat in meetings a couple of years ago (taking pictures) with all the main parties transport secretaries and can remember saying that it would probably be cheaper to fill the entire undergorund network with quick setting concrete and start again. There was talk of an elevated monorail system for central London but the reason, according to the Lib Dem secretary I spoke with, that it was never greenlit is because it was too difficult to get passengers off it in case of emergency - it appears they hadn't thought about emergency inflatable sldes, like, y'know, they use on planes...

It also means that the £2MM/hour they are costing London with the strike is the money that could have gone on their payrises. Not going to happen now, is it boys?

Again though, that's £2m they're costing London. Not £2m they're costing TFL. It's about as accurate a maths as "Piracy costs £6billion willion kajillion a second".

Well true - I'm not one to let that get in the way of my hyperbole, though.

Aaand they're off again. Boxing day, apparently.

What a bizarre day to choose.

Gives them an extra days holiday at xmas, dunnit.

They will be robots soon. And about time.

Where's the newer one of these?

Dunno. Never mind.

MOAR STRIKES!

http://www.rmt.org.uk/news/rmt-declares ... ike-dates/

Monday to Wednesday next week then Monday to Thursday the week after is a bit old chunk of strikes. Guess this is them going 'we can still play hardball, even without Bob Crow'.

"21:00 hours on Monday 28th of April 2014 until 20:59 hours on Wednesday 30th April 2014; and

21:00 hours on Monday 5th of May 2014 until 20:59 hours on Thursday 8th of May 2014."

Nice extension to the bank holiday there. I expect they already have their holidays booked to the South of France....

I hope they're not planning to leave from St. Pancras

Special RMT only train, to move "essential personnel" around the network...

Yowzer.

Statement from LU seems like they've been reasonable, but gonna look for an RMT one to see what they're saying.

"RMT declares new tube strike dates as London Underground wreck talks and confirm even worse cuts to jobs, services and safety.

TUBE UNION RMT today confirmed five days of all-out strike action across London Underground as long-running talks hosted by ACAS, aimed at settling the dispute over cuts to jobs, ticket offices and safety, were wrecked by a combination of management intransigence and the introduction of additional measures that actually worsened the original toxic package. It has also been made crystal clear to the union that this is just a first tranche of cuts with even harder attacks being lined up for the near future."

From Grim...'s link.

I think that is a fair and unbiased assessment from the RMT

Amusing. LU says no mandatory redundancy at all, though they only promise to 'try' to not reduce pay and hours for staff, which is pretty much tantamount to admitting someone is gonna get screwed over.

Does this clash with a quiz at all?

Yeah, I think so.

FFS!

This thread will do.

Unison workers (which is local government, education, NHS, etc) is going on strike over pay, apparently.

Doors it stop me getting to the quiz?