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.




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


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.


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




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


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.

Changing Fuses on the Tube

You might have seen the display of London Underground roundels on Westbound platform of St James's Park Tube station (home of London Underground's headquarters). On Saturday, I was waiting at the station for a train home after spending some time at Tokyo Day (some pics of iDogs, mecharobots, emo teenagers & other stuff here). In the display there's some "roundel style" fuse wire holders, which were given out as freebies.


This is pretty generous of an electricity company, as I can't see fuse wire being handed out today. But even if it was, I wouldn't have a clue what to do with it. I'm always slightly worried about the fuses in my house going, as I don't think I'd know how to change them.

Thinking of fuses, reminded me that I'd seen a brilliant cartoon, taken by Andy Davison, which illustrates how Toprate Percy was used to teach drivers how to deal with defects (such as changing fuses) on the Tube.


Andy kindly let me use the picture for the blog and said "I've been told that these were drawn by a manager called Alec Gorton a long while ago so would have been when 1938 stock was the conventional stock. Also Percy changes fuses without a fuse puller."

The cartoon above, is only half of the story, so I'm not sure how Toprate Percy resolved the problem. There's another couple of cartoon from the series here.

Do drivers, sorry train operators, have to change fuses on the trains now, or are there engineers and other people to deal with that? I never hear of trains being pulled out of action because of fuses going!