Wednesday 23 January 2013

A more mundane update

UPDATE: Tube from Edgware Road to Waterloo this afternoon was four minutes late, causing me to miss the connecting train to Surbiton at 16:25.  Had to take the 16:33 instead, itself a further six minutes delayed, so arrived at my final destination 24 minutes later than I should have.  That's another £60 to round off the day.  Incidentally, the latter delay was due to 'emergency engineering works' between Surbiton and Berrylands.  The former, I assume (since no information was offered), was due to rank incompetence.


I fear I'm never going to be able to top the 'swans on the line' story, but feel honour-bound to continue griping about the boring delays too.

No reason given for this morning's three-minute delay arriving in Waterloo.  The tube was on time, but I still arrived three minutes late, since it wasn't the tube I should have been able to get.  £7.50, please.

The BBC's got a story on how well transport operators coped with the snow in this corner of Blighty.  I tend to agree that it was a lot better than I'd feared it would be, but still an unacceptably poor show all-round.  Other countries don't have these problems, or at least not nearly to the same extent.

I also see from a separate source that TfL had 89,000 metric tonnes of salt stockpiled for this snow outbreak.  That's a typical PR tactic (and I know whereof I speak): to give the public big figures that sound impressive but not to give us any context.  How much salt would actually have been needed and how does that compare to what TfL had ready?  That is the information that we need in order to judge them.

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