South Kensington station's escalator replacement project
ianvisits.co.uk
ianvisits.co.uk
Longest ones apparently are to be found at the Park Pobedy metro station in Moscow at 126 m, and in St Petersburg.
Longest escalator system, and my favourite, is the Hong Kong Central–Mid-Levels escalator, at 790 m (2,600 ft). Many people's commute to work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central–Mid-Levels_escalator
Escalator accidents:
1982 Moscow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviamotornaya_(Kalininsko–Soln...
2018 Rome https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/23/hurt-in-rome-m...
Smoking on the escalators, wooden steps, and build-up of trash in the inaccessible area underneath them all contributed.
It might look long but is still really interesting to read, the simple questions that needed to be answered, the interviews and the conclusion.
My normal commute would have taken me right into the center of the fire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFqQOlYE4EE
"the longest escalators on the Underground network, and the fourth-longest escalators in Western Europe"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_tube_station
Angel is much deeper than Kensington, so the Kensington ones won't be that long.
I used to commute via Goodge Street every day. A few years ago they replaced the four lifts (in twos so that two were still in service) which ultimately took two years. I could never really fathom what it was that specifically slowed that down so much but hey the lift congestion every morning was fun
Particularly when it is something of public use, be it a highway or a railway, the amount of precautions, limitations and safety risks (in some cases for both the public and the workers) grows incredibly, slowing down considerably any intervention.
Over the last 4 years our team has achieved a lot: huge numbers of valuable changes and improvements to our platform. But it's been much harder than it might otherwise have been because we've had to make those changes with the systems in use. Had we started from scratch, or been able to take downtime, there are a lot of projects we could have done much more quickly, but we had to keep the business running - it is, after all, what was and is paying all of our salaries.
One of my banks decided it was going to do a "major upgrade" one weekend. Advertised I think maybe 8 hours outage like hey, who needs a bank for eight hours right? And of course their team can't actually hit that schedule, but nobody wants to choose "Roll back, fall on my sword at breakfast time" so an hour after the end of that supposed 8 hour outage their telephone support were telling me it ought to be fixed "soon" and any problems are only "temporary" and I can try again in a few minutes.
They got it back later that day, no noticeable improvements and you can bet that even if there was some enquiry about what went wrong nobody learned anything from it. Like NASA after Challenger. And they will still send representatives to the IETF who will say well, we can't afford these random outages like you Internet people, we're a bank, we need high availability. And those representatives will look around wondering why everybody is laughing.
Unlike most metro systems, many London Underground (tube) lines are bored, and at a much greater depth. The Northern, Victoria, Bakerloo and Jubilee lines go under the river; while most systems route trains over bridges.
The history of the tube is fascinating. The most recent lines (Victoria, Jubilee, CrossRail/Elizabeth) were built by a centralised authority. The older lines were built by various railway companies wanting to extend their lines into London. Over the years, railway companies dissolved and merged, leaving the fairly awkward map (the two branches of the Northern line share a platform at Camden, a stations at Euston and Kennington, and usually nothing else).
Because of the depth and lack of foresight when building anything, changing the network is nigh on impossible without major disruption.
For example, a new terminal is being built at Bank, meaning the Northern Line platform is no longer a ’bridge’ between Bank and Monument. Most of the work is done, but a substantial amount of the line will close for 3 months to finish it off. (Unfortunately, this is my commute. It’s annoying but I’m ok with it.)
[0]: Specifically inner London, ref Page 67 of https://content.tfl.gov.uk/travel-in-london-report-13.pdf
[1]: By spaces-times-distance, ref Page 101 ibid.
Add to this the fact that average road speed in Central London is about a third of average Underground speed, hence you're quite possibly looking at making journeys three times as long, even ignoring the extra congestion that all those buses would cause.
It's sometimes quicker, or at least nicer, to walk above ground than it is to take the gigantic tunnel (spanning maybe 3 blocks) between the two.
You have issues around the lack of space in central london for work vehicles, the need for removal of rubbish which can't block up emergency staircases, exits.
Then add in the challenges of unknown unknowns and needing to be able to revert any change quickly that can't be done to plan so you don't end up with a closed station and you start to get there.
I assume they had to do them 1 at a time to completion as well?
If you like epic spiral staircases you can't go wrong in London.
As one of the millions who at some historical point in their lives has had to suffer the District line commute, the above is a thought I used to have regularly whilst stuck sniffing someone's armpit on the District line ... why can't they have non-stop services intermingled with normal traffic (just like in any other number of countries around the world).
They could have used the same rails, no need for a separate line (just like other countries around the world)... its a shame London Underground seemingly only considered the most expensive option (building separate tracks and tunnels for the non-stop).
To be fair, "close-running" is not a word that tends to be associated with the District line ... "signal failure" is, however ! ;-)
The rest has roughly 2-10 minute intervals.
I think it might be worth increasing the line speed through signaling upgrades and more automation.
If you are already costing the taxpayer X million per year and then you want another 400M for an upgrade, are you likely to get it?
The benefit for the cost involved really just isn't there; while drivers aren't cheap they aren't impossibly expensive in comparison with the average number of passengers per train.
My favourite example of how unionised workers whose union invariably presents their preferences as "safety" care little about actual safety was signallers. Historically some mainline rail signallers (same unions) in the UK worked 12 hour shifts at outlying boxes. So you maybe do 3 x 12 hour shifts = 36 hours that's a week's work or take an extra as overtime for 48 hours. Roster maybe a dozen people to work a box and it remains open 24/7. Annoying scientists said, wait a minute, humans don't remain useful and attentive workers for 12 straight hours, especially at night which explains these incidents where a signaller makes a grave error at like 0400 after 10 hours at work. So the safety regulator wants to limit shifts to 8 hours like for air traffic. The unions are apoplectic because if you're a member working a mixture of 3x12 and 4x12 and now they want you to work 5x8 that's up to two days per week extra. Suddenly railway safety vanishes as a concern...
It is possible to make gradual progress. When I was born there were still guards on tube trains. Why? Well there had always been guards on tube trains. Today of course London Underground does not have guards. It just took a long time to make it happen, with I believe the Northern Line being last to stop having guards.
This is one of the big missunderstandings about the HS2 line. Politicians focus on the shorter journey times, but the big win is actually increased capacity. HS2 will take the express trains off the normal line. With just HS trains on that line you can run more of them than you can if you have stopping trains sharing the track. In addition you should actually be able to run more stopping trains faster since they don't need to be fitted in around the expresses with no extended stops waiting for a delayed express to pass at a station or passing place.
Scheduling/timetabling is a wickedly hard problem, especially in a system like a railway, it's the sort of thing people get Maths and CS PhDs in. The contstraints that you have to solve are complex and interconnected and are part of a bigger network, and you are also trying to please a lot of people with very different (often contradictory) needs.
* stop more or less everywhere
* stop only at larger stations
* even/odd stopping at small stations
However on something like the underground that would complicate the "turn up and go" approach that most people take to the tube if you start skipping different sets of stations on different trains.
It's something that's done, but I'm not sure how well it would scale on the tube if you did it a lot. Each train would need to miss roughly the same number of stops to prevent blockages or you need more passing places. With the small gaps between many tube trains the margin of error for scheduling can be very small.
I think it's one of those things that works, but the advantage for the vast majority of people would be pretty small compared to the complexity and added fragility it would introduce if you tried to do it a lot.
For example, in the simple case where the stations are evenly spaced, if train B arrives at station 1 at the same time that train A arrives at station 2, then they will leave at the same time and arrive at stations 3 and 4 respectively at the same time, and never catch up with each other.
In NY, the expresses are easier to understand because the rules are very simple.
The signalling barely works at the best of times. It's literally a museum of technologies, from the pneumatic to the electronic, and it's one of the most common points of failure on the network.
But when it's working it's been improved to the point where there's almost no spare line capacity at peak times.
And if you're making new tunnels it's so difficult and expensive to get a Tunnel Boring Machine into place that it makes no sense to bore short sections.
Crossrail is supposed to be London's east/west express line. Obviously it's not ideal for District Line users, but it should free up some peak hour capacity for Circle and Hammersmith & City journeys which may translate to fewer District/Circle passengers.
There's also talk of a north/south Crossrail 2.0, but that's unlikely to happen for decades.
There are overground express sections on the Piccadilly (District) and Metropolitan (Jubilee) lines but they all keep the lines separate.
There may well not be room for a tunnelled express in the central area. If it were up to me, I'd consider installing a good urban tram link from (say) Earls Court to Embankment.
Yep. Not sure if I miss-worded something but that definitely wasn't what I was implying, just the opposite. That the whole point of HS2 is to separate the fast and slow trains so you don't need passing places (either at stations or otherwise) and so can actually run more trains on both the new HS [line and the existing line.
[0] I don't live in the UK, so I didn't know that yet despite being a railway nerd.
I think you can read section 2 of [1], and the start of section 3. With enough trains, you can still fill up a four-track railway.
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
> just like in any other number of countries around the world
Other cities had extra benefit of hindsight, being able to design around the problems identified in older systems (particularly London's).
> They could have used the same rails, no need for a separate line
You at least need passing places around stations in practise. In theory* you could have many extra points and pass trains between the existing two lines to work around each other instead of keeping one line dedicated for each direction (as is the case for most of the track length) even at stopping points like stations but that gets complex to manage, has more moving parts (which are difficult to maintain in the confined space), would considerably slow down flow at busy periods as the trains can't move as fast over the points (particularly if they may need to switch line at them) and will spend time waiting for an opposing train ahead to switch out of the way, the tunnel around each change point needs to be wider (for the train partly, unless you redesign them too, for maintenance even more so), … It might work for a small number of non-stop trains worming their way through the system around the majority stop-start services, but that number of services would be so small to the point where the investment would not be nearly worth the small overall gain in reduced journey times.
[†] only about 45% of the line distance of the current tube is actually underground[‡] [‡] though that includes large overground sections in the outer zones if you are only considering central London I suspected that %age is considerably higher
There you can walk from your house (with a view of woodland and fields across the valley) to a London Underground station (you probably don't actually catch an Underground train, even the express takes too long, you catch a "normal" commuter train serving the same station but these days it's the same price because it's the same system) in the morning and the reverse even evening. And your children grow up away from the noisy polluted city, but not so far away that you can't take them to see a stage show or one of the museums on a whim.
Which is nice for them, but hardly screams "sustainable" as a society.
On regional railways, where the service might be every 30 minutes or longer, it is a different prospect since you can send the stopper out immediately after the express and it gets 30 miuntes to get out of the way.
Solution: Never arrive early, never depart late, and keep the stopping durations fixed, at the longest time possible (which is one quarter the time between the two closest neighbouring stations).
My dad used to work for the underground and hearing him talk about the challenges of the engineering down there was always fascinating. This is especially true for the deep tunnels and the older parts of the network. Trying to keep the whole network dry, when you are dealing with brickwork that might be 100 or more years old, in a water table that has risen a lot following the end of heavy industry in London sounded like a particularly tricky issue.
Add in the constrained space and often very limited access on the deep lines and you can understand why it can take so long to do some projects, and why things like longer operating hours might sound nice but have significant knock-on effects.
I guess they used a lot of water from wells, lowering the water table ?
In the past the water would be pumped up from boreholes (London sits on an artesian basin), and was then discharged into the Thames (directly or through the waste water system). This happens a lot less now, because of both a reduction in the amount of industry and improvements in efficiency, so the water table has risen, which means that TfL have to pump out a lot more water than they had to decades ago.
Similarly, all materials for that project enter and exit from the other end of the project tunnel in Queens. New York City at ground level has no indication that the work is ongoing 140 feet below their… well, feet. Very neat!
I think they move them to sidings in central London very late in the evening, so that after the last passenger train has departed (00:30-01:00) the equipment/materials can be where they're needed in just a few minutes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground_engineering...
[2] A web search for "London Underground engineering train".
[3] http://cartometro.com/cartes/metro-tram-london/ (detailed map, showing sidings etc)
https://untappedcities.com/2016/02/12/the-mtas-special-armor...
A lot of time, materials and tools are simply loaded through the station manually and since you are not allowed to store anything flammable below ground, some of it needs to be taken back out at the end of the shift.
They are not keen to lose station time but sometimes I think they could afford to lose an hour either end when they are doing engineering work in a station. At least in this instance, they needed to close the station which saves so much time.
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/mta-refuse-rigs-collect...
Not only is it expensive to install equipment, you then have to maintain it and replace it and in this example, not even "like for like" are going to fit in the same space.
When I used to go round various equipment rooms, there was electrical equipment that was the best part of 100 years old. Who would ever remove it in case it is wired into the signalling system or whatever? For that reason, they have to wait and then do a massive re-signalling etc. so they can safely remove everything and put nice expensive new stuff in!
(based on TfL's draft budget for 2018-19)
The government did not bail out the London Underground in particular last year but TfL, though I would be surprised if the underground was profitable last year.
Anyway, unsure what your comment was adding.
I worked in railway safety back in the early 2000s and moving block signalling was like nuclear fusion, the great hope for increasing capacity and always just around the corner. While it's in use on some underground lines, it still isn't in widespread use on surface lines, it's just proved really hard to get right. We are getting there, it will form part of future systems in Europe, but it's taken decades to get to the level of maturity where people will trust it to carry thousands of people at intercity speeds through complex rail networks.
I see this with for example the public transport in Zürich, Switzerland. Some of the light rail is very old but they are maintenance revisions done on them and things are continuously improved or replaced. Same goes for the tracks which have to be pulled out of the streets every few years and replaced. How this is done has improved tremendously over the years and materials of the track have also changed.
Another example are the electric busses that used to have a gasoline backup generator. These have now all been replaced with batteries as they became small and efficient enough to replace the generator.
Letting the bus run until it's dead will end up costing more than keeping it in good working condition.
I suspect that equipment is depreciated in TfL accounts but the people 50 years ago wouldn't know how much this replacement would have cost so who knows.
I'm fact the Zürich rail company (ZVV) in their purchase deal of the bombadier light rail included all plans for all parts. Bombadier was not happy but the ZVV has to make sure they can service the trains even if the manufacturer goes away.
This is also the reason LED lighting it a very delayed roll out in the city because the city can not use a light that is vendor locked which most commercial LED setups are. The old Natrium lighting can be purchased anywhere from. many different vendors. The fitting is standardized.
Yes, the income via transportation fees are usually similar to operating expenses, but like it's the case with roads, no one should expect for it to cover the full cost of building the infraestructure, much like roads.
The tube is not a part of a closed system and delivers thousands of other societal and economic benefits that are not reflected in the fees paid by their direct users.
Also, this infraestructure can last for more than one century, as I understand is the case of London's tube.
Another view is that it mostly benefits people in London so it should come out of London's Council tax (which I think part of it does).
The other view is that it is a general benefit to society and can and should be bankrolled by government. Then the problem is that the pressure to keep costs down is perhaps political and it is hard to know how much subsidy is fair.
https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/how-we-work/how-we-ar...
(Note TfL are also paying for buses, trams and many larger roads in London.)
The subsurface lines were profitable for at least their first 50 years. Oddly, their profitability started to tumble at about the same time as the rise of the automobile, reinforced by the foreign-based urban renewal blitz that occurred a couple of decades later in which many homes and places of employment were forced to relocate.
Infrastructure like roads is rarely directly profitable.
I wonder, if the engineering train couldn't fit a small loader, something like Avant (perhaps E6 for being electric for confined spaces), though I'm sure there exist some smaller ones too.
Or maybe engineering train could be fitted with a HIAB style thing..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n1ryH3igKc
Unfortunately, escalators can break catastrophically - See these comments in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28208925
Because it's interesting to a lot of folks.
(1) interesting
(2) new to nearly all
(3) something that people want more on HN
(4) on topic here