30jan2003:
Tubed out. The little engines-dropping-off issue with the Central
Line is the last straw. I'm convinced the London Underground is rapidly approaching
a point where it simply has to shut down.
On Saturday at Chancery Lane a Tube train's engines fell off. The whole
line - one of London's older, dirtier, and more vital ones, since it services
the City - is now closed. There's not exactly capacity elsewhere in the network,
as evidenced by a ride I took on the Jubilee on Wed (crammed to bursting two
hours after the rushhour.)
And hey - engines falling off? Yes. Not merely cutting out, or rattling
a bit, but actually falling off the train onto the track. Tube engineers had
known for years the train's movement tended to loosen screws, but (it seems)
hadn't connected this thought with a plan to tighten them.
Look, mountain bikes suffer from the same problem. When you've got
turning tendencies from a basic design need - such as needing to spin the
crankshafts - a screw thread has a chance of unwinding on you. Shimano, and
a thousand other manufacturers, solve this problem by reversing the
screw thread on one SPD pedal, so both turning tendencies are to
tighten the screw instead of loosening it, this avoiding the whole plunging-into-a-bottomless-ravine
thing that might otherwise happen. Maybe a few more Tube engineers need to
hit the singletrack.
But there's a wider malaise here. It's common knowledge that many Tube
stations only stay open thanks to the experience of a few Tube lifers. People
who've worked for the Tube for decades at the same station know which signal
boxes need a good kick on cold mornings, know that Carriage No. 16546 has
wonky doors on alternate Tuesdays.
And yet even with these people, the system is failing. (These people,
by the way, also tend to be militant unionists. and thus more likely to be
eased out sooner by the private finance initiative that's soon to take over
the Tube.) Not a single cog in the machine seems smoothly oiled. The Tube no longer seems to be connecting the dots.
I get no sense that it works together as a system; it's now just a glob of
discrete stations with tracks between them.
I waited 20 minutes for a ticket yesterday at Canada Water; only one
machine takes notes or cards and it wasn't working. (Only one service counter
open, of course.) Stationery escalators are a daily occurrence at many stations
and surprise nobody.
The fire escape routes are a joke, particulary at rushhour: 450 drivers
refuse to drive when the fire service is on strike (as it is this weekend)
and 24 stations shut down completely. Another local line of mine, the East
London, still uses an 1843
tunnel built by the Brunels, because we haven't done any better since.
There's a tipping point in these things, a point at which things can't
get any worse and everything just falls into a black hole. (American TV executives
see it in their Neilsens: there's a point- about 19 minutes in the hour -
where there are just too many ads to make any show worth watching, and audiences
switch off in the tens of millions.) I believe this is happening to the Tube
right now. Ticket prices are rising, service levels are plummeting, the cost
of providing a service is consequently outpacing both, and the edge of the
graph surely can't be far off now.
I'm not looking forward to it, but I'm now expecting it. The
day when London's tube network just shuts down.
