When you spend £40m on upgrade work by shutting down an entire Underground line for five months you'd expect, when you re-open, for things to work smoothly wouldn't you? Well not so with the Waterloo and City line which re-opened yesterday and managed to last 24hrs before it was closed due to signal failure, and a broken down train.
For anyone wondering what the £40m spent by Metronet went on it was...errr... new signalling system and trains. Not a bad investment really, about £250,000 per day spent, for a service that breaks within 24 hours. Another way of looking at it is that it cost approximately £20,000 for every minute it managed to stay open before it was knackered again.
Hat Tip: The Last Boy Scout
1 comment:
If the track had NOT been shut for five months, it would have taken several years to do the job in the two or three hours Metronet get each night to work on the Underground.
Remember also that the Underground has not been maintained since it was first built, and this is the first major work that has been done on it since. (And the delay in the opening was due to London Underground taking a week to train new drivers on the track.)
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