East-West

by Unknown

  I don’t love tunnels at the best of times: there have been stretches of my life when that was a proper phobia, a powerful, irrational fear, and other stretches when it was no more than a mild aversion, which is what it is at the moment. Many, many people share this feeling, about which they are usually reluctant to speak, for reasons of embarrassment which I fully share. It is an uncool thing to admit to, being scared of the Tube. For myself, I can actually date the moment the dislike began: 9 p.m. on 18 November 1987. I was in the bath, getting ready to go out later that evening, when the phone rang. It took me a moment to summon up the strength to get out of the water and answer, but I was glad I did, because I was greeted by my mother’s voice saying, as soon as I picked up the receiver, ‘Thank God!’ She had been watching the Nine O’Clock News, whose lead item was a fire at King’s Cross Station. I lived a couple of hundred yards away, and used the station every day, a fact my mother well knew. After I got off the phone I opened the window, and could immediately smell the damp smoke in the aftermath of the fire. Thirty-one people died that day: in response, the Underground began its journey back from decades of underinvestment and neglect; and, a fact which has no consequence for anyone but me, I’ve never since felt quite the same about being on a stationary train deep underground.

  The issue with the Northern Line, for the tunnel-averse, is not so much its length, because hardly anyone except the driver travels the full length of the line, but its narrowness. The various technological and engineering constraints around the construction of the Tube – basically, the fact that it was an extraordinarily difficult and daring thing to do – put severe constraints on the size of the tunnels. At the start, they were a mere 10 foot, 6 inches in diameter; they were then widened, but they’re still no more than 11 foot, 8½ inches, which is, I find when I start to think about it, unsettlingly narrow. My discomfort with that fact kicks in not so much when the train is in motion as when it stops in the middle of tunnels. If that happens on the deep Tube lines, I’m not a happy bunny.

  When the train comes to a halt, there’s a sensation of airlessness which is particularly uncomfortable because the deep Tube trains don’t have air conditioning (and because of technical constraints, on most lines, never will – again, it’s those narrow tunnels which are to blame). In summer, that means that the heat builds up fast, with no air movement to give a faint sense of relief. Even when the trains are running, temperatures on a hot day can get over 35°C. I mention that figure because it is the legal limit for the transportation of livestock. You can’t legally truck cattle in it, but you can move people around on the Underground – except, of course, when the train comes to a halt. Then, the temperatures can rise so quickly that there is soon no other course of action possible except to evacuate the train. A driver told me that in his experience of the deep Tube on a hot summer day that can happen within twelve minutes. And then what happens? You are led out through the front of the train, as follows: the power in the line is turned off, the lights in the tunnel come on, a section of the driver’s cab opens out forwards, he puts down a ladder, and he escorts the passengers out the front of the train down the track towards the next station. One driver I spoke to had had to do this twice in his career, and he was very matter-of-fact about it, but it did leave me thinking that I wished I didn’t know one single detail in particular: the fact that the deep Tube tunnels are so narrow you can’t get out of the side of a stuck train, but have to exit through the front.

  On the sub-surface lines, none of this feels as if it matters nearly as much. This is an irrational belief, of course, since being stuck in a tunnel is being stuck in a tunnel, but there’s a component of the shallower depth which makes it easier to take. The cut-and-cover tunnels are more spacious than the Tube tunnels, and they have frequent junctions and intersections where the tunnels open out into each other. Early illustrations of the Metropolitan Line, drawn to entice wary customers into the smelly, smoky, steamy tunnels, are hilariously spacious and airy, and barely hint at the trains being underground. OK, the sub-surface lines are not really like that – but they’re more like that than the deep Tube.

  And then there is the crucial, defining fact that the sub-surface lines have sections which aren’t underground at all. The Tube is a tube, but the Underground is by no means all underground. Only 45 per cent of the whole network runs through tunnels. The figure is even lower on the District Line. In total, only about a third of the line runs through tunnels, and if you take the train the full length of the line, from Upminster to Richmond or the other way around, you are made strongly aware of the fact that the tunnel section is no more than an interlude. Of the sixty stations on the line, thirty-five are on sections which are above ground (and this is leaving out places such as Earl’s Court and South Kensington, where the station is open to the sky, but there are tunnels at either end of the platform). The train starts in one set of suburbs, the posh West or the rougher East, both of them above ground, and only dives underneath the city when it comes into the super-built-up, expensive middle of town. Property prices force the train underground, into the dark and the tunnels, where a significant portion of the people on the train are spending a significant amount of emotional energy on trying not to think about what happens if the train comes to a halt.

  4

  The Underground lines are different in character. You’d expect that: they go to different places and they have different demographics, histories, physical characteristics, trains, everything. One thirty-year veteran of the Underground told me that the Piccadilly, where he began his career, ‘is a floozy. Whereas the District Line is like an old aunt who’s seen better days.’ That may change before long: 2015 will see the arrival of new, dramatically more modern S-stock trains and the shift to a new control centre at Earl’s Court: the second of those developments may pass unnoticed, but even the most oblivious District Line commuter will spot the new trains, and find them shinier and more modern than the D-stock trains that entered service in 1980. Will that make the line feel less aunt-like? Probably not – any network which runs between Putney and Dagenham is never going to feel too dangerous and cutting-edge. But she may come to feel like a younger, cooler, more tech-savvy aunt.

  The aunt-like qualities of the District Line have a strong basis in history. Another way of describing them is to say, as a manager at the Baker Street control centre did, that the line is ‘more of a patchwork quilt than the other lines’ – a metaphor he used a few times. That attribute comes from the history of the line. It’s the second oldest after the Metropolitan Line, and in its early years was known as the Metropolitan District, a designation which was eventually simplified to District on 1 July 1933 because a) it was confusing and b) the managements of the two organizations hated each other. It began operation on 24 December 1868,4 as a short section between Westminster Bridge (Westminster, as the station now is) and South Kensington, with intermediate stops at St James’s Park, Victoria Station (an important one, because it opened up access to the overground railway networks), Sloane Square and South Kensington. At South Ken the new line joined end-on with the Metropolitan Line’s recent extension, which had opened a few months before. This was an important first step in the attempt to build a circular line all round the capital, and an important step in the Underground system becoming a genuine network of lines – a process which would have been a lot easier if the lines hadn’t spent so much time and energy fighting each other, selling mutually incompatible tickets, and so on.

  There was always a bodged-together, improvised quality about the District Line. All the early Underground lines were built with a combination of private money and public legislation to let the building go through. The combination was a good one for getting railways built, but a less certain one for making them instantly profitable – though it has to be said that it was dramatically more effective than the modern equivalent, the public-private partnership, which, as Christian Wolmar points out, cost £ 500 million in consultancy and lawyers’ fees be
fore a single spadeful of earth was dug. The whole idea of the District was that it would run through some of the richest parts of the city. An immediate problem with that is that the richest parts of the city are also the most expensive parts, and complicated questions of where to run the line immediately ensued. The line was supposed to run along the newly constructed Thames Embankment, built by Joseph Bazalgette to incorporate an underground railway and the pipes needed to clean up the city’s sewage system. The idea was for the construction of the railway and the sewer to be simultaneous, but the reality proved more complicated, and the new line often had to have separate building works, adding to both the complexity and the expense of the project.

  That issue – about the expense of the real estate overhead – has always been a central factor in the history of the Underground. The cut-and-cover lines ran along roads, as much as they could, to reduce the risk of damaging the expensive houses overhead. When the people in the way were poor, it was of course far simpler to have them evicted and the buildings knocked down, but that was hardly ever true for the District Line, running as it did under expensive central London and then, later, out into the only-just-being-built suburbs. Even with the deep Tube lines, there was concern about possible damage via subsidence, and the lines often make small changes of route to avoid expensive real estate up above. Without those small changes, the lines could have run dead straight, since they were cut through the clay underneath the city and geological factors were largely irrelevant. That means that, when you’re riding the Tube and it makes small shifts in direction – shifts you can hear as much as feel, through the friction of the wheels on the tracks as its momentum moves – they are being caused by the cost of the city up above you. London’s history is full of themes, and one of those themes is the effect of rich people upon the city, and that’s something you experience most times a Tube train does anything other than run straight.

  The cost and complexity of building underground lines through a built-up metropolis will never be anything other than formidable, and in retrospect it’s not surprising that the Underground was difficult to build. Over the many years of its construction, however, the complexities continued to accumulate. The Circle Line was both an aspiration and a complication: everyone could see the virtue of an Underground line linking the capital’s main overground stations, but that didn’t make the administrative and engineering issues any easier in practice, especially given that the competing companies hated each other. The result, today, is that ‘patchwork quilt’, in which the District Line on some sections runs on its own track, on other sections runs on Circle or Metropolitan Line track, and on yet others – out in the West – runs on track which is nothing to do with Transport for London, but in fact belongs to Network Rail, the national overground company. That section has a different operating system from the Underground, one in which the signalman is in charge, instead of the controller. (‘I tell my drivers, the big difference is that in Network Rail, the signalman is God,’ a manager told me. That’s because they have far fewer trains to think about at any given moment; on the Underground, where there are trains zooming everywhere at two-minute intervals, control has to be passed to the control rooms, where they can see the overall picture of what’s happening on the line.) Most of the lines just run their own trains on their own tracks, but many non-District trains run on District track, and the line has responsibility for them while they do. The District has three branches in the West, out to Ealing and Richmond and Wimbledon; a separate service from Wimbledon to Edgware, and a branch line to Olympia, which only runs during big events. The District is the only Underground line which crosses the Thames over a bridge; in fact, over two bridges, one of them, at Kew, owned by Network Rail; the other, at Putney, owned by TfL. It also runs under a river, only that river isn’t the Thames, but the Westbourne, which runs through a pipe above the platform at Sloane Square. For all these reasons, the District Line, as well as being the Underground line with the biggest number of stations – sixty, is the most complicated of all the lines. ‘Its complexity is second to none,’ a manager told me, with audible pride.

  To experience that complexity first hand, I was lucky enough to wangle a trip with a driver in the cab of a District Line train, one day in May last year. This was the fulfilment of a long-held ambition. Since the first times I rode on the Underground I’ve been fascinated by those brief glimpses you get into the driver’s cab as the train pulls into the station. The cab looks so cosy, so self-contained, so snug and safe; a world unto itself. Everybody on the train is on their way to somewhere, often to or from work, but the driver is actually working, the only person on the train who is in the process of doing his job. On hot days, the drivers also sometimes have the door at the side of the cab open, and I’ve always thought there’s something agreeably raffish about that – it makes the driver look like a cowboy riding on top of a horse-drawn carriage in a Western.

  The experience of going out in a driver’s cab more than fulfilled my long-held expectations, and a big part of that was because of the view from the front of the train, which is so much better than the passenger’s normal view – rivetingly, fascinatingly, amazingly better. It’s so much more involving than the normal passenger view that now when I’m on an Underground train I often find myself wishing that the passenger coaches had screens showing the view out of the front of the train, in the way that some airplanes let the passengers tune into the view from the front of the plane. (By the way, any one of us can get a glimpse of the driver’s eye view, thanks to the driver’s view DVDs made by a company called Video 125. When you start researching the Underground, you soon realize there’s a reason why train-spotters are generally regarded as setting the gold standard for nerdy knowledgeability about a subject.5 There doesn’t seem to be a single aspect of the Underground network, or the UK train network in general, that hasn’t had at least one book written about it. The DVDs which focus on trains going through tunnels are a little, what’s the word, specialist in nature – I’ve watched the Northern Line one all the way through, and, well, let’s just say it’s no Hot Tub Time Machine. The District line DVDs – there are two, one on the central and western sections of the line, and one on the line out to the east – are more interesting, because there’s a lot more to see.)

  Trains show you a particular version of the urban landscape, the unpolished and undressed rear of buildings. I’ve always liked that about the view from the train, that you’re seeing a town or city as it looks in private, before it’s dolled itself up to go out, whereas the the view from a car is always of the public self, putting its formal self-presentation on display. The backs of houses are always more humanly revealing than the fronts. Add to this the variety of perspectives from the District Line, from the leafy West over the Thames and through the tunnels up to Edgware or out to the East, which is first gritty, then rough, then beaten-down, then, at the last gasp, in Upminster, goes back to being leafily suburban again; add all these things together, and the view from the front is something everyone should see once.

  The view is another one of the reasons why drivers prefer to work on the District, and why Upminster is, as I’ve already said, the senior depot.

  ‘The variation makes it much easier,’ my driver told me. ‘In the tunnels all you see is the dark and the signal lights. It’s more tiring because there’s nothing to stimulate your mind. The signals are easier to see in the dark, but that’s the only advantage. I used to work on the Bakerloo. On that line, in winter, you get up in the dark, spend your whole day in tunnels in the dark, and then go home in the dark. The District is more pleasant to work on, a lot more interesting.’

  I can believe that without difficulty: the constantly changing view from the front would be, if you were the driver, one of the high spots of your working day. The moment when you go into the tunnel is a particular point of drama and interest: as you take the train from Upminster into town you see the tunnel coming towards you at Upney. For most of the above-ground
section, the train tracks are, to one degree or another, raised, so the sensation of diving below the earth is even more dramatic. You can see where the expression ‘tunnel vision’ comes from: all you can see is the narrow black tunnel, where seconds before there was a 270-degree perspective around and in front of the cab.

  In the tunnel, the signal lights stand out very brightly. I thought of all the times I’d travelled in an Underground train, completely unaware of them, yet being ruled by their orders: red for ‘Stop’; amber meaning that the next light ahead is red. Some lights are always red until the train comes up to them, which explains something I’d often noticed and wondered about: those places where, even though there are no trains in the tunnel ahead, and even though there are no junctions or intersections marked on the map, the train always comes to a stop, or near-stop. I was surprised to feel, given that I don’t much like tunnels, that there is something cosy and safe-feeling about being in the tunnels when you’re in the driver’s cab. Maybe that’s because you are never out of radio contact: the thick cables which carry the Underground’s communication systems are visible all the way along the tunnel walls. The fact that you can see ahead also makes a big psychological difference, especially since you can see the brightly lit stations from some distance away – quite often, when the train is at a halt, you can actually see the station you’re heading for just in front of you. Since the driver knows the ropes, he knows the likely reason for having come to a halt.

  One particular point where this is likely to happen on the District Line is the junction around Aldgate East, where the Circle loops round and feeds into the same section of track being used by the District; that’s the second-busiest intersection on the Underground. The busiest is the ‘triangle’, the area in between South Kensington, Notting Hill Gate and Earl’s Court, where two sets of District Line trains, from Edgware to Wimbledon and Richmond to Upminster, feed into the loop where Circle Line trains are also running. This, in my experience, is the commonest point on the entire network to get held in a tunnel – usually, it has to be said, for a fairly brief period. A line controller told me that any stop adds two minutes to the journey, because that’s how long it takes the train to slow down and get back up to speed again. In the triangle, if you come to a halt to let a train go in front of you, that train will always seem to be from the other line: if you’re on a Circle Line train, the driver will tell you that you’re stuck behind a District, and if you’re on a District train, he’ll tell you that you’re stuck behind a Circle. (The fact is that you’re more likely to be stuck behind a District Line train, because there are twice as many of them.) This is a driver’s in-joke.