[PRCo] Re: NOT PRCo---London Transport Video Series on the BBC

Thu May 10 22:46:43 EDT 2012

Herb Brannon on Derrick Brashear's Pittsburgh Railways web-address list posted one link to a BBC series on London Transport's problems / operations ... a great series of a half dozen hour-long programs done as only the Brits can do.   Thanks Herb for alerting me.   It's a great series about a favorite city.   Some of us have a fondness for London ... I've only been there 18 times between 1959 and 2004.   It's sort of another home.   I truly appreciate Herb drawing my attention to this great programing of British Broadcasting Corporation.   But he only highlighted one of the six hours in the series!   :<)
For those of you seeing this coming around a second time, my apologies.   I am also forwarding what Herb sent to a variety of other places by blind carbon and including as well comments back to the original list.  If it is redundant to some of you, sorry.  

There are links here to more than eight hours worth of videos but some of them are pretty darn good ... certainly better than watching parking lot wars or "how much food can I stuff in me" on our television.

Episode 1 - The Weekend ... a fantastic presentation of what it's like to run a subway network on Friday and Saturday nights when people sleep on trains and in the stations, fall over drunk on the escalators, argue with station staff because they are blind drunk.  
My reaction to the person caught urinating in the station?  I recall taking a tour bus into downtown Delhi, India and counting a half dozen people relieving themselves on the street.   When you have eleven million people in a city and no place to do it, you simply do it on the street.   When you move them to another city, they probably behave as they did where they came from because that behavior is normal.   Over 30% of the people in London today came born somewhere other than the United Kingdom ... 172,000 came from India ... 40,000 came from the USA (might even include the guy I once saw in the rush hour relieving himself in the Broad St. Subway in Philadelphia in front of a 1,000 other people).  :<)

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrhslXjN5xE

Episode 2 - Revenue and how you spend it...mostly about fare collection and all the tricks people use to avoid paying a fare and the ways LT goes about capturing those people.  Only on British television would someone use the hand sign for wacking off to show that you just got screwed by the cop for not paying for your ride!   Equipment renewal programs, track replacement, upgrades are also peripheral to taking money in.  Lost property office.  Even the brand new trains sets from Bombardier on the Metropolitan Division.  

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ylEBmOeOR4

Episode 3 - this is all the grisly stuff including picking up the subway suicide victim in a body bag.  Herb and anyone else in the business could tell stories about either being the engineer or motorman who was the victim of a suicide or who knew friends.   The closest I ever came was being a fireman on an engine when an Amish farmer drove his horse in front of the engine ... the animal had to be put down.   I also had a friend who was an engineer who was the victim of a suicide.   

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=FNB8VbFmlOY

Episode 4 - Upgrading the Tube.   This is a network that has been upgraded over and over and over.   The earliest elements of the underground date to the mid 19th century ... we had elevated lines in New York and Chicago in the second half of the 19th century with steam traction.   London's Circle line goes back to our Civil War with steam.   The can still see the closed up vents in the stations where smoke used to escape.   

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oztjRCgs45U

Episode 5 - The Rush Hour.   Wait until you hear the tube geek 21 minutes into this one telling you which door to enter to get off in the proper pole position for the next train.   I thought rivet counters existed only in New York.   I am amazed looking at traffic diverted by a failure on the Jubilee line, a route that didn't even exist 40 years ago.  

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JowTyzuosFw

Episode 6 - Overnight ... shows all the maintenance functions that go on in five hours when the system is shut down.

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfxDlQnWAmM

The more I listen to these episodes on London, the more fascinated I become.   While London is not the largest or second largest English speaking city in globe today, it compares most favorably with New York in many aspects.   New York has about 20 million people and London has about 13 million.   But they are both very compact cities with very high transit utilization.   Actually, London tends to be a lot friendlier.   I tend to favor going there over New York and New York is only three hours away by Amtrak.   

London is one of those places I've gone to see a play on Saturday night.  Why?  Our theater uses painted canvas backdrops to simulate rooms and other stage sets.   The Brits will actually build a room on the stage.   I recall seeing the Odd Couple in one of the theaters in London's west end.  The fastidious Tony Randall walked to the kitchen on stage to get drinks for the guys playing cards.   Now mind you, the kitchen was a separate room built onto the stage.   Randall opened the fridge, got the drinks out, got the ice from real ice cube trays ... not play acting with plastic cubes ... made the drinks ... walked back to the dining room ... and slammed the kitchen door.   You could tell that the they had built a real wall with studs and at the very least drywall on that stage.   A few years later we took our granddaughter to England and she had a chance to see Phantom of the Opera ... c'est magnifique ... especially when the chandelier crashed into the audience.   That was 15 years ago and that show is still being performed nightly with that same chandelier stunning audiences every day.

My first introduction to the London Underground was in 1959 when the Metropolitan division was still using electric locomotives to haul trains of trailers from Baker Street (on the Circle Line) to Rickmansworth, where steam tank engines with 1896 builders plates took over for the rest of the run to Chesham and Amersheim in the northwest suburbs.   Back then there were 1,072 tube cars built in 1938 and another 283 surface cars from that same period.  There were still pre-1938 cars running around and they were playing with a few cars of new designs from the mid 1950s.   Today nothing I saw then still runs.   But the London Transport Museum has one tank engine and two of those 1938 tube cars.    In a similar manner, nothing we remember from New York or Boston or Philadelphia or Pittsburgh from our youth is still running today.   I still have trouble running Pittsburgh Railways 1711 at the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum and considering it an antique because I remember when it was brand new.

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MAPS FOR REFERENCE:  For those unfamiliar with London, the Underground services mostly the area north of the Thames River and the the national railroad network (a variety of service providers providing commuter train service) provides the bulk of the service south of the Thames.   The first link leads to a map showing only LT underground routes; the second one shows both networks with the commuter lines shown as dashed lines.   All of those national network commuter lines to the south use DC third rail.  

     http://www.tfl.gov.uk/assets/downloads/standard-tube-map.pdf

     http://www.tfl.gov.uk/assets/downloads/london-rail-and-tube-services-map.pdf
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THE BASICS

LT moves about 3.4 million riders on a typical weekday versus 5.3 million in New York but it does it on about half the track miles that New York has.  Are the numbers correct?   Are they uniform conceptually?   Who knows!   Supposedly the United States concept is unlinked riders ... if a person used two trains, he is counted twice.  I don't know what method London is using.    If you add in all the passengers on the commuter trains coming into Victoria, Waterloo, Charing Cross, London Bridge and other stations on the south side, it might come close to New York.   My instincts tell me that London in the rush hour is just as busy if not more so as New York in the peak and I have experienced both.   London has something alien to New York, a 5 pound (about $8.50) daily congestion tax if you wish to drive your car into the inner city and that's in addition to the exorbitant parking charges (over $50 a day).  It helps to keep the riders on the bus or the underground.   The current New York subway fare is $2.25; the London fare is £5.30 for the first 2 zones or significantly less with an oyster card.   (£5.30 is $8.56 but those numbers are not necessarily comparable in terms of how many hours they might have to work to earn that same amount of money ... currency exchange rates are based on what bankers want to pay for dollars or pounds or euros.)  It's very obvious to me that English fares have gone up 100 fold since I was first there while ours have gone up about 10 times because our politicians are afraid to bite the bullet.

There is probably more on line on the history of the Tube than anything else because, after all, it was the first.   Paris, Budapest, New York, Chicago all came later. 
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HISTORIES OF THE UNDERGROUND

Here is a nice series on the history of the Tube -- A Hundred Years Underground in divided into four parts, done also by BBC.  It has a very nice "local" perspective.   If you only watch one, these first four links are probably the best done.   Because of the youtube prohibition on anything over ten minutes to prevent copyright infringement, this 30 minute show has been broken into four segments … it probably still violates the copyright.  

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8fLJgQ4wRw&feature=related

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy8VCl9hVeg

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=grEb3cUyeQA

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=hSW8SKKRJsU

There was also a series that was run on the History Channel as part of its Modern Marvels series  -- probably more showy and artsy than the BBC feature.  There is a great piece of information in the third tape .... 85% of the people working in downtown London arrive and leave by public transport.   The USA average is about 1 to 2 percent.  In New York the average is about 56%.    Have no idea when this was done; there is no copyright date on it.

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DLAHehn4Ag

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=W627ZNl7RLs

     Ignore the fact that there is no part 3 or 4.   The part 3 ends almost at the end of the show.  Part 4 starts at the same
     place where 3 does and goes to the end of the show.

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=DDVoV91t390  

Back when the Discovery Channel actually presented some credible programming (remember when?), they too had a show on the London Underground"   This appears to date to the construction of the Jubilee line about four decades ago but the copyright date is 1999.

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PIdUwfDPzU&feature=related

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=e61kCOvxJ8I 

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=ReprJiMWL68

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=eB5LFLaJvbs

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=PXcDoOvxQos

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=R1RKQaowZkE

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ROLLING STOCK ... TUBE STOCK AND SURFACE STOCK.

If you are confused about equipment design and why some cars look like round pipes and others are more like ours ... London always had two different clearance profiles.   BBC is confusing terminology but the mass media always did in any country.   The "Surface" stock had more generous profiles, runs on the Metropolitan, Circle and District lines.   These originated with underground steam trains.   The other lines (Bakerloo, Jubilee, Central, Northern, Piccadilly, Victoria, Dictrict, the eastern parts of the Metropolitan) use what is called "Tube" stock, all of which are about 9'-5-1/2" in height.    The double power rails are conceptually similar to double underground (positive and negative) conduit rails for trolleys in Washington, DC or double-overhead in Cincinnati and Havana.  In London the outside rail is positive and the inner rail is negative but I would not count on them not switching them if their is a ground fault.   

ROLLING STOCK DATA SHEETS

     http://www.tfl.gov.uk/assets/downloads/foi/Rolling_stock_Data_Sheet_2nd_Edition.pdf

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DOCKLANDS LIGHT RAILWAY ....  East of Bank Street into East London's Docklands there never was underground service. When the area was redeveloped from a derelict former steamship dock area to a financial / insurance industry hub in the late 1980s, the Docklands Light Railway was created.   It was been extended multiple times.    Would we call it light rail?   No ... it is an automated system like BART or PATCO using high level platforms and third rail power supply but simply lighter equipment than the existing underground.    If you are visiting London, the new Lewisham extension is a great way to get from Bank Street or Tower Gateway (near the Tower of London) to all the attractions around Greenwich (the Observatory, Queens Home, Cutty Sark, the Naval Academy).  Docklands expects to haul twice their normal weekday riding for the 2012 Olympics (July and August ... tickets on sale this month).

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S764Djwt3IY&feature=related

The only thing in the London area actually resembling a tram is the Croydon Tramlink, which knitted together several British Railways east-west branches in the southern suburbs that were too lightly used to remain part of the national railroad network.   The central portion actually runs on city streets through Croydon and stops in front of the East Croydon train station.   You can get to it from London either from District Line underground to Wimbledon or the National Network trains from Victoria or London Bridge stations to East Croydon.   Tramlink is in green on the second map link.   I found it an entertaining day a few years ago. 

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=mhnVG6O4OA8

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNmZI9rFDys&feature=related
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If you desire a real dose of electric commuter rail trains, go to Clapham Junction in the rush hour ... there probably never be a moment when nothing is moving and seldom will you see fewer than two trains running simultaneously.   Clapham is where two railroads, one coming from Waterloo Station and the other from Victoria Station jointed briefly and crossed each other.  I have no idea how many platform tracks there are but I heard the station announcer on this video announcing a train calling at platform 13. Caution … every city has its poorer areas.   I would not try to stand out in this area.  But I would not avoid going there … I've walked around Watts, West Philadelphia, East London, Clapham, South Chicago (63rd Street), St. Denis in north east Paris (only place I ever found a bouncer in a McDonalds to keep the Islamic population under control).  I'm just saying, keep your eyes open.   Then after seeing Clapham, get on a train for the Borough of Richmond and enjoy the palace that Henry VIII swiped from Cardinal Wholsey  (Hampton Court).  

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZuLNxRLoGk

Difference between today and my first visit?   Back then King's Cross, Euston, Paddington and a few other stations were almost entirely steam.   