Last night, it took me as long to get home from Kensington to Surrey as it would have taken me to get from Gatwick to southern Spain. In total, a journey with a grand total of three hours and five minutes to cover a route which is roughly twenty miles as the crow flies.
Apparently the difficulty was a broken down train somewhere outside of Clapham Junction, which meant a large proportion of the track round there (supposedly the busiest station interchange in the UK) was unusable (presumably because the points were blocked up by it) and everything was queueing up to be diverted to the slow line. Then once we got past that, we queued all the way down to East Croydon.
This was even more frustrating because if the tubes had been running properly, I would have caught the train before and avoided it all. As it was, I waited so long for a Circle line tube that I missed my train at Victoria by one minute and was forced to catch the affected service half an hour later. And it's no use trying to get any other train and catch a connection at East Croydon, because the Victoria train pulls into Croydon at almost exactly the same time as the London Bridge one so by the time you have hared through the underpass with the rest of southern England it has departed and you've missed it.
Needless to say communication was appalling throughout this delay, and it was only when we were well past Clapham that the guard ventured to tell us what the problem had been. Prior to that, we sat there and fumed in very British silence, looking at our watches and tapping our fingers against the glass in frustration. Even as it crawled through the suburban sprawl we all just sat there (and really there isn't much option to do anything else) and spoke to our loved ones in resigned tones telling them that we were going to be late "again" as the trains were up the creek.
This morning again, the tube was out of sorts and I resorted to getting the bus from Victoria to Kensington. It was a lovely sunny day, so it made a nice change, but it takes twice as long.
I dread to think what will happen when the network is put under real strain this summer. We have all been told that we cannot take any further leave during either Olympic period in case the transport system fails and we have to get local authority staff out onto the streets to help all the lost foreigners who cannot get to their event of choice. And it's looking more and more likely that the creaking infrastructure will not cope - if it can cause such chaos outside of the holiday season when there is no special event in London (even without the consideration that this is one that is predicted to attract about three million extra visitors) what on earth is going to happen then?
Yeah, I must admit, I do not miss the wonderful experience that is commuting into London. I do also wonder if the Olympics will be forever tarnished by the possibility of transport Armageddon. I do hope not, but the rail system especially seems very vulnerable to even the slightest of problems. Canada does not have a commuter train system, 98% of all rail transport is freight only, but they do have light rail and tram systems in the larger cities which nearly always run on time and hardly ever break down. You have to consider that in the light of passenger volume though. Edmonton only has a population of 900,000 and Calgary only 1.1M and even counting those commuting in from St. Albert and the surrounding counties, there isn't anything like the numbers of people going through. London's problem is that it needs a large transport infrastructure in a relatively confined space. The system is very old and lacks serious investment in the last 30 years. Look how long a cross-rail link has taken to get to the construction stage. I remember reading about such a project when I was a junior engineer over 30 years ago! Projects that really matter, like station rebuilds, rail links, tram systems etc, take forever to get through planning, public consultation and approval. Such systems, identified in say France or Japan would be approved and built in a fraction of the time. It is the British disease I'm afraid and I cannot see it changing. Meanwhile, people like you have to suffer the consequences.
ReplyDelete