Sunday, February 1, 2009

London Transport hit by Snow

Good luck getting into work this morning, as an "extreme" weather warning has just been issued by the Met Office for London & the South East, due to heavy snowfall overnight. Last night all London buses were taken off the roads because of the conditions and they are still not back this morning.

No trains or buses

No buses due to snow - screengrab

At time of writing (7.20am) every London Underground line with the exception of the Victoria Line has disruptions to service & suspensions.

Tube Screengrab

Stansted and London City Airports are closed at the time of writing. Heathrow has only one runway open and even if you wanted to get there, you'd have problems as the Heathrow Express service has been suspended & the Tubes going there, err.... aren't.

Your best bet is to watch the news, listen to the radio and keep an eye on TfL's website, which was a mass of blue "suspensions" and "part suspensions" this morning.

The snow is expected to continue falling throughout the day, so there may not be much let up. 20cm of snow will be expected by the end of the day. Anyone from countries that get a lot of snow reading this blog or looking at #uksnow trending on Twitter, will think "What are they all moaning about, that's not heavy snow". But for a city that relies so much on public transport, whenever there's the wrong type of snow or too much of it, we're screwed.

View from my study

That's the current view from my study window above, as regular readers know, my house backs onto a railway line and normally, I can see trains. But for the past half hour, there have been no trains!

Update: Made it to the station to be told, that I should have believed the view outside my house and there's no trains. Here's a few pictures from the snowy station

Not a good sign - Kew Gardens Station Kew Gardens Station in Snow

Kew Gardens Station in Snow - Eastbound

Absolutely tons of pictures on Flickr of the snowy Tube, but my favourite has to be of the, for once appropriately named, White City by pgchamberlin

Snow White City by pgchamberlin

2003 was the last time I can remember really heavy snow like this (I actually broke my leg in two places the next day falling on ice), and there were talks of us being prepared for it next time. Guess what? We're not.

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