Hell is Underground. And vice versa

[bellinghman]

Actually, that may be a little unfair. But we travelled down to London for PicoCon last Saturday (happenstantially discovering jemck on the Tube a stop before South Kensington), to find that a remarkable number of lines were closed, either entirely or partially.

A look at the TfL website indicates that they're now carrying out a 10 year program of improvements, trying to update signalling to increase capacity, and refurbishing trains and stations. This is way overdue, of course, but it does mean that there are extensive weekend closures for the work required. Much of the initial stuff will be attempting to make improvements before the 2012 Olympics, so I'm expecting 2 years of weekend disruption until that work package is complete.

Comments

[pir.livejournal.com]

This is one of the reasons I live by a tube station, an Overground station and a mainline train station. It's rare for all three to get taken out at once.

Apparently you can mostly blame the tories for not giving enough funding for tube maintenance. Then everyone went "Oh, bollox" when they realised just how broken/ancient everything was getting... just when they needed to encourage more public transport usage because traffic was getting utterly insane in London.

For the next two years don't expect much tube or Overground to be running during the weekends... and nearly as bad for some time once the Olympics are done.

The results of the work are quite nice, though, we're finally getting the new Victoria line trains, I've even been on one. This is good in part because the old trains are older than I am (most built in 1967 according to the entrance steps).