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Passenger uproar as Jubilee line misery ‘will last all year’
Pippa Crerar, City Hall Editor22 Jul 2010
Passengers on the Jubilee line face dozens more weekend closures after transport bosses admitted upgrade work is unlikely to finish by Christmas.
Transport for London insiders said they have had the chance to “look under the bonnet” of the system after acquiring private maintenance firm Tube Lines at the end of last month for £310 million, and the situation is “as bad as we had feared”.
A new report, being discussed at a meeting of the TfL board today, reveals engineering work has hit major problems. Instead of being completed by October as originally planned, it is now expected to stretch on, perhaps into the new year.
Commuters have already endured up to 146 closures on the line.
TfL hopes that from the autumn, any closures affecting central London and the east end of the line to Stratford will be kept to a minimum. But “significant” closures will be required on the north-west end to Stanmore. More than one in six trains have been cancelled because of the shutdowns.
TfL has taken over full control of the line, effectively bringing an end to the public-private partnership set up by Gordon Brown.
There are understood to be problems at a depot in Stratford and at the line's Neasden control centre, as well as with train and system reliability. A new signalling system is facing serious software problems.
Reader views (16)
"on the Central Line, all the "driver/operators" do is close the train doors." - Rod, Epping
Yet another person who has swallowed the GLA Tory Group's lie. ATO on the 92 stock breaks down all the time, without Train Ops you be stuck in Epping, mate!
- ASLEF shrugged, Leyton, UK, 23/07/2010 05:58
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I'm wondering how long TFL can get away with blaming Tube Lines. Whilst the PPP did not work as well as expected, I remember why it was set up in the first place. LUL could not deliver the improvements in a timely manner that was also cost effective so they tried another way. This also failed so TFL's answer is to go back to the old way. London will still not get the improvments it urgently needs, but after a few months, LUL will have to find another excuse for not delivering.
I don't live there anymore but just wondering, has anyone seen improvements in the service since Metronet went bust?
- Jeremy, Sydney, Australia, 23/07/2010 01:37
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It's probably not radical, but the tube provides the arteries that ferry the workforce across the face of the city every day, in order to create wealth for the nations companies.
It expects it's employees to pay the fare, which they do.
It is not unreasonable to delve a little into the private and public sector pockets to fund the mechanism to make it work.
How? Commuter discount cards. the individual buys the cards at say 10% discount, quotes their NI number on the form, then TFL charges the company 5% on top of the base fare on the basis of that for contributuions to their employee mobility. Call it an employee mobility tax. Any attempts at shortcutting can be picked up at the annual audits.
- trip hazard, cambridge, 22/07/2010 20:19
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Steve - the reason some new escalators are "replaced" early (actually just a routine major service) is to get them onto a rolling service schedule. Otherwise, every escalator at a new station would be due to be serviced at the same date some years later, and the station would be forced to close. The same for all the stations on a new line, all at once! Once the rolling schedule is established, only one escalator at any one station requires scheduled maintenance at any one time.
It looks like a replacenent because the treads are removed for access underneath. An escalator is a big machine. You travel in the top half of the sloping tunnel it's installed in, it fills most of the bottom half.
- Nigel, London, 22/07/2010 18:53
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Privatised public transport doesn't work. You should see what it's like in the southwest. It only works if private operators are managed by the public sector. Left to run things by themselves, they do exctly as they like. In Bath, for example, the bus fare is 1.80 for 2 stops, 1 km (0.6 mile) apart. Travel any further, it's about a fiver. No tubes, no trams, sparse rail. Firstgroup have a near monopoly.
- anil, glos, 22/07/2010 17:45
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the origional "state of the Art" signalling system for the JLE did not work ( after 2 years partial installation !) and a older system had to be retro fitted
looks like we've gone down the same route.
Also - why are the escalators being replaced already ?
- STEVE, East london, 22/07/2010 17:14
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Gordon Brown pushed through the failed PPP system and should be required to account for his incompetent action. He is still an MP although nothing is heard from him now.
- Jayne, London, 22/07/2010 16:37
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No real surprise to be honest!
But where the hell is the money going? I dread to think how much all this has cost - and the line's only 10 years old! (Well, the extention, that is). Just goes to show this was rushed through & was a complete cock-up from day one!
I just hope CrossRail is managed somewhat better!
And whilst we're at it; British people for British jobs - let's see if this occurs....
- Scott, Docklands, London, 22/07/2010 16:34
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Adam - Is that it? "You sound like Bob Crow"?? That's a powerful riposite you've posited there!
Ditch the straw man arguement - I'm fairly non-ideological. What works is what matters. Sometimes that means privatisation... but just sometimes, much as though you probably loathe this, it does just make sense to run certain things privately.
You should try being less ideological and more practical.
- Mike, London, 22/07/2010 15:36
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The odd thing about this is - on the Central Line, all the "driver/operators" do is close the train doors. All the rest is computerised. This was trialled over the Woodford - Hainalt section 20 years ago, and it works. This is how the Jubilee Line was meant to work.
Why couldn't the Jubilee Line be modelled on this from the start? PPP was obviously a cash-cow for investors and management (of the private companies) from the start, and safeguards are still not in place to stop this happening again.
- Rod, Epping, UK, 22/07/2010 15:23
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Mike
>>that privatised public transport doesn't work
You sound like Bob Crow.
I seem to remember that it was far worse when it was publicly owned.
- Adam, Harrow, UK, 22/07/2010 14:42
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The JLE cost £3billion, much of it paid out to fraudsters against whom the Serious Fraud Office was then too incompetent to gain convictions (trials thrown out by the judge). For a small fraction of that £3billion, even given the 1/40 value of today's currency in terms of that in 1900, the entire Bakerloo, Northern and Piccadilly lines were built from scratch (using junk bonds). The whole of London Underground's upgrading plan (based on G. Brown's infamous PPP) is a massive sinkhole on the public funds. I have not as yet seen any improvement to any of the Tube services or stations -- apart from a few cosmetic changes to stations on the Central line. If anything, the service has degraded (witness the Circle line).
- Phil Jones, London EU, 22/07/2010 14:23
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This demonstrates the blindingly obvious (something that dawned on the Swedes, Danes, Germans, French, Austrians and Spanish decades ago)... that privatised public transport doesn't work. We, the travelling public, suffer while shareholders and CEOs benefit.
Now LU is back in public hands, it should stay there.
- Mike, London, 22/07/2010 14:08
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This is why Boris took the contracts back from Tube Lines. This is totally unacceptable. What have Tube Lines been doing, sweet f a.
Time for David Cameron & Nick Clegg to shutdown the unions, as it is time for their members to wake up and do a decent day work instead of striking all the time.
- Michael, London, 22/07/2010 13:48
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tfl PAID Tube Lines to take over this mess !
I assume that they wont be paying for anything else until it works ?
The original signalling for the JLE was supoosed to be "state of the art" and I assume nobody has learnt any lessons when that did'nt work either !
- steve, east london, 22/07/2010 13:36
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"misery to last all year"? and what precisely is the justification for this overly optimistic assessment? give up on the tube londoners. get on your bikes.
- Peter, London, 22/07/2010 12:37
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