please empty your brain below

Forth Bridge job, surely? By the time all those upgrades are done, it'll be time to start again right?

Question - when was the last date that TFL ran a full service on the tube at the weekend ... ?

At least it helps to rationalise the anger by knowing to be angry with.

...and it might even help staff to deflect anger by saying "not my fault, guv, it's [insert name of inane TFL exec] who made the decision, look at this poster"

Another thought: Seeing as the Circle line is now no longer a circle anyway, why not do away with the pink H&C, colour it yellow, make the map less congested and just have some Circle line trains also running to Barking?

Shame that the DLR isn't included in the Planned Works Calendar or other docs :(

LU just can't win, can they? They have a decent attempt at explaining why the closures need to happen and get criticised for it. Perhaps they shouldn't bother in future and just do the closures without saying why.

Here... i had half an hour to "spare" (!!)

What the tube map would look like if they just merged the H&C and Circle line together and made it just the Circle line.

http://twitpic.com/45b4q3/full

Bonus Thought:

Trains could run from Hammersmith, clockwise around the loop and end at Barking, and vice versa. anyone?

There was a full weekend service on LU just before Christmas. There was also just one day on LU in 2010 when they had a "good service" for the entire traffic day (and it wasn't Dec 25!).

The Piccadilly, Bakerloo and Central upgrades haven't yet started and no start date has been given. The suggestion that there will be 'monstrous' closures because the completion date is so far in the future is pretty premature. Now Metronet and Tube Lines are no more, the closures will be managed in-house by LU and should be less excessive. The LU cancellation of the mulitple Tube Lines planned weekend Northern line closures last year suggests that a different approach is being taken now.

"You can just imagine their sunken hearts when this idea first came up in a meeting, and how much they must be looking forward to recording a new video every week that their line is closed."

Maybe just maybe this might lead the managers to question if a full closure is *really* needed, which can only be good. On the railway and the tube the amount of clousures for engineering work seems to have snowballed. It's worth remembering that over a hundred years ago the Great Western Railway converted hundreds of miles of broad-guage tracks to standard guage in a single weekend. No weekly closures for months on end back then - so why now?

At least TfL are trying to explain what's going on. You try getting sense out of Network Rail on the seemingly-random closures of great chunks of the mainlines.

@ Jon Combe: perhaps the Great Western Railway managed to convert hundreds of miles of track in a single weekend because:

- they had thousands of navvies at their disposal, for whom health and safety wasn't a consideration and terms and conditions were non existant.

- the track was laid to an infinitely lower standard than today's railway.

- and don't even get me started about how much simpler signalling systems were back then to those required by the Underground.

You're comparing apples with pears...

Nice try Geofftech and it does make a lot of sense. Oslo does something very similar with its Line 4/6 - the trains blind change between stops during a pass of the "circle" and the train line number changes.

However the killer weakness of your idea was that one of the main purposes of reorganising the circle was to double the frequency between Paddington and Hammersmith. Your scheme goes and halves it again (assuming the number of trips around the "circle" is roughly constant).

And on the subject of broad gauge conversion - it is actually relatively easy to convert the track from broad gauge to standard gauge when most of the track is already actually dual gauge.

i think my idea falls down because a circle train would pass along the top section of the 'Circle' (Edgware Road to Aldgate) *twice*, thus increasing the number of trains on the top section by too many that it could handle.




Actually no that is not a problem because today the Circle line goes around once and the Hammersmith and City goes along the top section so it would be roughly the same as your proposal (assuming Circle and Hammersmith & City run at the same frequency).

Kevin from the Jubbly Line might have recorded his video in vain. The TFL site is currently reporting Good Service this weekend for the Jubilee Line.

Kevin's been busy. This morning the TfL website definitely said there were closures on the Jubilee line this weekend. This evening it definitely doesn't.

20 min interval west of Bromley-by-Bow early-AM on Sunday. That is NOT the usual service at that time, yet this area will be regarded as "good".

more overnight thinking:

make Aldgate the Circle line capital. alter the curve so that trains from Aldgate East heading west, go into Aldgate too! then run an Edgware Road to Aldgate service, and a Barking to Hammersmith service. Aldgate becomes the change point.

honestly, why doesn't anyone ever consult me about all this first?:-)

Having watched all the videos...

- None of them have astons/captions in the bottom third which would have added a nice professional touch.

- Angela Back in the one for the Metropolitan Line has got the words 'Jubilee Line' in the background, shame no one thought to stand in a place which didn't say this.

- The David Millard has screwed up with the aspect ratio, that's just a bit embarrassing isn't it?

overall they're not great. what TFL could do with is a succinct 5 minute video featuring snippets of all these people, and some shots of working actually being done.

TFL - hello if you're reading this, i'll come and make it for you for free if you like. Do get in touch :)

having said that, the Mike Brown is quite good, apart from the one shot where he's far too low down on the screen and makes it look like he's sitting down...

I need to travel from Whitechapel to St Pancras and back every Sunday. Which now means catching the 205 bus for up to an hour and half each way and anything up to an hour waiting to get on said overcrowded tin heap of Hell. I definitely preferred life before the leaflet, innocent of knowing that it's going to go on for at least another seven years.

I used to get a lovely email from Transport for London called the London Loop weekend, which featured some suggestions on what was going on that weekend, and listed the closures as a bonus. They stopped sending them (I must assume due to budget cuts) and have replaced them with an incredibly boring list of what's closed on each line.
If they're going to spend money on promotion about what's going on, albeit not much, can I suggest that the London Loop was a good investment of tourism funds?











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