Page 1 of London Tubes...why? why? why?

Today you are lucky if you don`t live in London!
Its almost hometime! hooray.
But no....The tubes are bu**ered. A little bit of snow and half the tube stations shut down with no service. Northern, Picadilly, district and Jubilee and Metropolitan. Everyone is fooked.
And to add to our misery the central line isnt going ot be open again until mid Feb...the losers.
What are we meant to do?
I know you country folk will say move but it aint realistic! doh.

Why is this country prone to things such as...

No (overground) rail services -- Reason "wet leaves on tracks"
No underground sevices -- Reason "snow on tracks"

Do we have a different variety of leaves and snow to the rest of the world...or is it really because most train drivers didn`t bother getting up this morning like the rest of us, that is causing this chaos.

The Tube and Rail systems were built at a time when the attitude of planners and those that paid for it was that adverse weather conditions were short and temporary, and that those annoying members of the public wouldn`t mind if the systems were out of action for an hour or two...
Unfortunately, when we got extreme weather, we were buggered, but the planners couldn`t do anything about it as they`d burnt their bridges Plus, they`d got paid, and as such, didn`t give a monkeys.

In the US and other countries that have extreme weather conditions on a regular basis (which, let`s face it, we don`t) they build things with weather in mind. That`s why when wet leaves fall on the rail tracks in this country, our trains slip and slide all over the place (but in a straight line, of course) And when snow lays on the line, the metal contracts, making it dangerous for the trains to run on them.

ah yes..have just taken over 2 hours to travel 12 miles back home from Hammersmith....but funnily enough, it was all to do with a `track fire` in Earl`s Court.....ah well, grin and bear it.

I left work at 5 and got home about 15 mins ago.

I work halfway between liverpool street and old street and live in Canterbury in kent (yes a long way away).

This means I have to walk for 20 mins to get the 17:30 train at cannon street. As it takes me 20 mins to walk and not 15 mins on the tube (the central line being out of action and the circle taking too long and being unreliable) the train is pretty much full when I arrive at cannon street.

So I have the choice of standing for an hour or waiting 25 mins till the next train (assuming it arrives/leave on time). Wonderful.

"Great" Britain eh?

Even when the train is running on time it takes over 2 hours door to door on a 60 mile journey. Pitiful.

This item was edited on Thursday, 30th January 2003, 19:51

so..time for someone to burst in to the thread and blame it on some easy target / scapegoats etc and we can all hate them!!! :-)

I used to live on the costa Blanca, after a snow fall we could see the mountains were covered. We decided to remove ourselves from our Sunny warm patio & travel the 15 minutes to the mountains. When we got there, there was already a snowplough that had cleared one side of the road & was comming down the other side clearing that. We drove to the top & there were loads of Spanish snowballing. Although Snow is not unusual in Spain, it is not as often as here. Yet they coped with it instantly.

Thats not the spain i know...

try getting anything done over there and its unbelievable.... work ethic is a dirty word... especially in public service...

HaGGis!...I have used builders, plumbers, electricians, etc here & in Spain. In reality there is good & bad in both places. `Manana will do` is a well known saying over there, & I can understand why. What I don`t understand is when worst happens here we don`t seem to have a similar saying for it. Did you live there, if so where?

I reckon its all the asylum seekers getting doss jobs sleeping as underground maintenance and construction people.

LOL

Yeah, I`m on the Jubilee line and I have every other f*cker who used to use the central line stopping me from getting on in the morning because its tighter packed than a Tokyo train.