Why has Victoria tube station started to smell like roast meat? | Hacker News Reader

Why has Victoria tube station started to smell like roast meat?

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In Austria we have a whole metro line which smells like vomit in the hot summer months - it's also the metro line which connects the most important tourist sites. So tourist get a very special smell of Vienna.

The reason is organic glue used in the 70ies during construction to harden the ground. So the smell is "baked in" the structure of the whole metrotunnel.

http://homepage.univie.ac.at/horst.prillinger/ubahn/deutsch/... (German)

Your paragraph on this similar issue conveys almost the same level of info as the whole article and is equally interesting.

I don't see myself as a TLDR extremist, but I feel there's a cultural shift that needs to happen, or I am just personally ruined and doomed to get irked at verbose articles the rest of my days.

I'm the same. I have noticed that more and more, if a web-posted article doesn't get to the point in a couple of sentences, I move on.

I don't find this to be the case when I'm reading printed matter such as books or newspapers though.

And yet it was print newspapers that had the rule that important stuff must come in he first column inch.

Yes, but I am also disappointed when the odd article I find interesting and want to read more of is only a few paragraphs long.

Didn’t read the article - lul - but sometimes you gotta just enjoy verbose articles for the verbosity

This reminds me of the trains CrossCountry use in the U.K. (as well as a few other names, East Coast Mainline too maybe?).

They have the air con intake next to the toilet ventilation, so the whole train just smells like a toilet. They are kept clean enough, but it’s got that combination of strong cleaning products and a slight background hint of something else that is very reminiscent of public toilets. Throughout the whole train.

The ECML uses Intercity 225 sets, which is a much more prestigious kind of train. Cross Country appear to use the older IC 125 (among others, due to lack of ubiquitous electrification), which is diesel-powered. So it doesn't sound plausible that the ECML trains would suffer the same problem as more regional, modest services.

I don't know about the specific rolling stock, but Cross Country are not regional – they do long distance journeys and have things like catering onboard for first class, so I wouldn't call them modest either.

I could be wrong about the design flaw being on the ECML though - it might be the long distance Virgin services that I'm thinking of.

The Cross Country trains are InterCity trains, just not as prestigious, or as high speed (and not electrically powered).

Correcting what I said before, according to Wiki, the Cross Country services are now operated by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_170 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_220

The story in question seems to be this one: https://metro.co.uk/2013/10/06/virgin-trains-to-spend-3-5m-r...

So it's Class 220s (the Cross Country trains) and Pendolinos that had the problem. All were being operated by Virgin, the Pendolinos on the West Coast main line.

> Some people are apparently able to discern difference between high-street chains

Yes, I'm one of those people. Or at least I can tell McDonald's/non-McDonald's. I also can smell them from quite a long way away.

Once I spotted one while driving in a city in Spain, it was almost 1 km away but we found it by circling around it by smell. This was before smartphones, GPS and such, and before generalized air-conditioning in cars (which happened in Europe fairly recently) and pollen filters.

Indeed today when driving in a car I don't smell anything, and it's disturbing. One of the pleasures (not often discussed) of riding a motorcycle through the country is experience all the different smells of the outside world. (Of course you can always drive a car with open windows but it feels weird and if you're not alone in the car inevitably other passengers will complain).

> Indeed today when driving in a car I don't smell anything, and it's disturbing.

What about people smoking tobacco in other cars? That disgusts me. But maybe it's because I'm a former smoker.

>and it is impossible to entirely verify this solution without having terrorist-levels of access to the underground system

Isn't it already "terrorist-level access" for a privately owned restaurang to "inject" their "air" into the tube station ventilation?

That's the issue. The restaurant ventilation is compilant with the regulations in place.

So is the restaurant injecting their air into the tube station or is it the tube station pulling their air from the restaurant?

It's likely that exhaust from the kitchen of a burger seller (Bleecker) is getting sucked into Victoria station. It's a classic ventilation fail. One of them needs to move their ducting.

Edit: At least it's not CO from a parking garage.

For more than year station air has been contaminated and nobody has done anything.

Tldr: restaurants/kitchens push smelly air out. Subway station sucks smelly air in.

Thanks!

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