Jubilee!

One day when I can be arsed¹ I shall have to check through this journal to see how many times and with what frequency I bitched about the travails the Northern Line heaped upon me from time to time, particularly during my five years living in Whetstone. Certainly, I recall some corking cock ups over the years, but at this remove, the frequency of horrors on the so-called Misery Line doesn’t seem so bad compared with say, the Jubilee Line, the current purveyor of commuting misery in the life of Bryan.

Frankly, if we are being fair we should use some spurious statistical technique to factor in the vast age of the Northern Line compared with the complete youth of the Jubilee Line – particularly the section I use, the erstwhile Jubilee Line Extension between Stratford and Charing Cross. Some of the western parts of the line are very old (in rail terms), but certainly the bit I use has yet to reach puberty, having opened in 1999. So if we allow for the comparative ages of the two lines, the spry Northern Line outperforms its younger cousin by some theoretically-provable-but-rendered-in-hearsay considerable degree.

The signalling on the eastern stretch of the Jubilee Line is particularly poor; poor to the point that I believe it to have been designed by chimps with crayons and installed by baboons wearing boxing gloves. This is the stretch of London Underground that will bear the brunt of the additional passengers and tourists that the Olympics bring to the city in 2012.

Still, I shouldn’t worry too much about the negative impression the maintenance and operation of the line might give. I fully expect RMT to go on strike for most of the 19 days of the games in pursuit of a 300% pay rise and 150 days paid leave each year, all in the name of passenger safety.


¹Read: never

Jubilee!

One day when I can be arsed¹ I shall have to check through this journal to see how many times and with what frequency I bitched about the travails the Northern Line heaped upon me from time to time, particularly during my five years living in Whetstone. Certainly, I recall some corking cock ups over the years, but at this remove, the frequency of horrors on the so-called Misery Line doesn’t seem so bad compared with say, the Jubilee Line, the current purveyor of commuting misery in the life of Bryan.

Frankly, if we are being fair we should use some spurious statistical technique to factor in the vast age of the Northern Line compared with the complete youth of the Jubilee Line – particularly the section I use, the erstwhile Jubilee Line Extension between Stratford and Charing Cross. Some of the western parts of the line are very old (in rail terms), but certainly the bit I use has yet to reach puberty, having opened in 1999. So if we allow for the comparative ages of the two lines, the spry Northern Line outperforms its younger cousin by some theoretically-provable-but-rendered-in-hearsay considerable degree.

The signalling on the eastern stretch of the Jubilee Line is particularly poor; poor to the point that I believe it to have been designed by chimps with crayons and installed by baboons wearing boxing gloves. This is the stretch of London Underground that will bear the brunt of the additional passengers and tourists that the Olympics bring to the city in 2012.

Still, I shouldn’t worry too much about the negative impression the maintenance and operation of the line might give. I fully expect RMT to go on strike for most of the 19 days of the games in pursuit of a 300% pay rise and 150 days paid leave each year, all in the name of passenger safety.


¹Read: never