Tony,
What do you know about the tube system in London? Everytime I travel on it I wonder how the hell they made something so big and widereaching in days gone by.
It's THE most wondrous piece of (mostly) Victorian Civil Engineerring you could ever wish to see Phil. I could write pages & pages about it, & I cannot use it without being in awe of those who originally designed & built it. Nearly a billion people per year use it nowadays.
Passengers moan about it - everyone moans about everything these days - but it did suffer from lack of Investment during the period 1960 to 1990. Since then, almost the only blot on Mayor Livigstone's copybook has been his disastrous & now reversed decision to let the Upgrade Programme to the hapless & now defunct Metro-Net outfit, who were wholly overwhelmed by the sudden influx of work.
But it's very much better now than 30 or even 20 years ago. MUCH cleaner - Stations, Platforms & Rolling Stock, & they have got one very important thing Spot-On - communication. At every Station, every hour of every day, there is a "Service Update Board". Excellent.
Safety - there can barely be a safer mass-transportation system in the world. Exclude "Passenger Incidents" (folks falling under Trains) from that, & the death rate is barely recordable.
Regularity & Serrvice Frequency - SO much better than even 20 years ago. On the busier lines - Central, Victoria, Northern, Jubillee, etc, they run as closely as every 2 minutes most of the day. The Signalling system to cope with that alone is something special.
Maintenance & Design of infrastructure & rolling-stock is superb. The Seats need to be super-tough due to low-lifes abusing them, feet on seats etc, but you never even see chafed upholstery. The new Central Line stock has those high windows giving much better vision. The old Stations, particularly on the Piccadilly & Northern Lines are Listed Structures, being so beautiful, many of them recognized Art-Deco. The architecture on the new Jubilee Line is spectacular, & the materials - mainly glass & aluminium - has a maintenance-free design life of hundreds of years.
As tp the Trains, give how many operate daily, the mechanical reliability is almost 100%. Compare that to the modern-day Main Line Virgin & Midland Mainline plastic shite.
Tunneling "back in the day" was incomprehensibly complex, with Tube Lines passing over & under each other Underground, as well as having to dodge major utility Services (gas, leccy) & of course, the London Sewer System.
The Victoria Line - I recall it first opening - has revitalised huge areas of East London, & it's wonderfully reliable, & faster than ANY means of Transport in London.
I do wonder where all the money goes. The Services are packed to capacity, 12 of the 18 hours per day it's open, & it's quite expensive "per head" to travel on nowadays, so their income must be absolutely huge. I expect bureaucracy soaks up much of it.
It's an absolute engineering miracle of reliability & safety. Few Londoners realise it, but they are incedibly lucky to have it. To be fair, the Paris Metro is pretty impressive, as is the Moscow Underground. I've not yet experienced the New York Subway System, but it's on my "before I die" List.
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