The Anonymous Widower

Think Quarts Into Pint Pots

London Underground’s Victoria line, may have been a technological triumph for 1968, when it opened as an automatic train line, where the driver doesn’t really drive the train. Although, he or she is the person in charge. Incidentally, when the line opened in 1968 a lot of the electronic control systems used valves rather than transistors. I can remember reading about the line in a copy of Simulation magazine when I worked at ICI around 1970. It was truly cutting-edge world-beating technology in its time.

But you can’t say much for some of the stations, which were built on the cheap and are very much sub-standard compared to the extensions to the Piccadilly Line built in the 1930s.

But now the trains are running at a maximum rate of 34 trains an hour for much of the day, as is reported in this article on Global Rail News. Here’s the first three paragraphs.

London Underground’s Victoria line is now operating 34 trains an hour – ‘the most frequent train service in the UK’.

Peak-time services have been incrementally increasing since the Victoria line upgrade was completed in 2012 from 28 trains an hour to 30, 33 and finally 34.

Passengers now only have to wait two minutes between trains and there are also more trains running the full length of the line from Brixton up to Walthamstow Central.

So in two years capacity has increased by over twenty per cent, mainly by good design and engineering.

I wonder what the engineers, who built the line in 1968, would think of their baby now!

You have to also wonder if by applying the principles used on the Victoria line. could be applied to other lines in the Underground. Upgrades on lines like the Piccadilly have been delayed, but I do think, we’ll see some more squeezed out of the current system.

There are of course things that are being done and as a regular Underground user you tend to feel that the system may be more crowded, but you seem to get fewer delays. Perhaps reliability of trains, power systems and escalators is getting better.

It will also be interesting to see what happens next Monday, when buses go cashless. It might be anywhere between a disaster and a triumph.

At the disaster end of the scale, it will load more passengers onto the Underground.

But if it is a triumph and speeds up the buses, as I think it could, will passengers who can, swap from the cramped and dark Underground to a lighter and more spaceous bus, if it only takes a couple of minutes longer. Living in Hackney with no Underground, I change my route according to which bus arives first. Since the 38 has been run by New Routemasters, it has been effectively cashless, with passengers using the closest and most convenient door and only the few who need to pay using the busier front door by the driver. Certainly, if I want to get to the Angel quickly, I’ll choose a 38, as against a 56, which goes the same way, but is often overtaken, by a succession of New Routemasters.

If cashless buses work well, this will surely hasten the removal of ticket offices on the Underground, with contactless bank cards, supplementing Oyster and Freedom Passes. What differences, will this make to the ridership on the Underground?

The only thing that is certain, is that more quarts will continue to be poured into pint pots all over London’s transport system.

July 2, 2014 Posted by AnonW | Transport/Travel | Contactless Ticketing, Engineering, London Underground | Leave a comment