800 london underground jobs to go

lostinrates

ninky wrote: »

137? i know someone that used to drive that route.

Hang on I can't remember. shall I look it up....um...coming over the bridge...into battersea...

he was a great guy, ''my'' driver, an older guy, with a smile that reminded me of home.:o

yes, the 137, pretty sure....

edit: I agree with you about bendy's which was a shame: I had very limited mobility for a long time, geting upstiars on a dd could be really tough.

Getting rid of hop/on hop off was also a shame. I see why...but ....you know life's a risk....I also fiund hopping on has sometimes got me OUT of a lessthan great situation. Saved by a well timed bus.

fc123

lostinrates wrote: »

wow. Tough. I shall give DH a throrough questioning about his routes.

Weekends are a total nightmare at the mo. Whole Jubilee line down again this weekend.
Chunks of the Central Line keep being shut..and lots of other colours too.

I understand they have to do upgrades, repairs, improvements and so on and weekends used to be quiet but they are just as busy as weekdays now.

I will confess, without giving fodder to The White Horse that a tube train track maintenace guy used to be a parent at DD SELondon primary, worked nights, really good money and used to do voluntary teaxching assistant most days.
I recall chatting to him and he did confess to not being awake the entire shift so had enough energy to be very proactive with his kids and the school. I am going back about 8 years though.

Spartacus_Mills

chucky wrote: »

i thought that you would have been very happy

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showpost.html?p=27726017&postcount=103


http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showpost.html?p=27703479&postcount=41

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showpost.html?p=27724063&postcount=91

Having spent 18 months working on the tube for a train maintainer I have some sympathy for his sentiment, if not the visceral nature, of his viewpoint.

stonethrower

The Underground at the weekend has been a joke for the last few years. There seems to be work on at least 3 lines every weekend.
On a slightly different note my friend works on the underground at night goes in at 1 leaves at 4.30 works 6 nights a week and on roughly 2 nights he is told to go home because materials haven't arrived or that some other type of work is going on where he was supposed to be working. On occasion he is often rang up and told not to come in. All these nights he is given full pay. The amount of money that is wasted on the maintenance is massive.

ninky_2

what annoys me is that if you pay for a monthly or weekly travelcard it costs the same whether it is full service or half the lines are suspended. i think there is probably some way of claiming back fares if you wait more than a certain amount of time but does anyone actually know how that works in practice?

and i never trust the oyster system to take the correct amount from payg, it's far too easy for it not to register your touch out and then overcharge you.

oh dear....am i becoming a middle englander?

MissMoneypenny

ninky wrote: »

who says it didn't exist. ken managed to get more cooperation from the unions and management. that is what improved things.

Red Ken will nevet get my vote. That man, as always, has an agenda that benefits Ken. He does not care about London. No real Londoner will ever vote for Ken.

princeofpounds

The shutdowns, the fair rises and the general disrepair on the tube are not the fault of Boris. And they also have very little to do with Ken either, to be fair. These sorts of problems and the solutions to address them develop and are planned on much longer timescales than that.

The system for maintaining the tube was set up many years ago, mostly under the Labour national government (though I suspect there are policy roots as far back as the last conservative government). This culminated in the failure of Metronet and the effective failure of Tube Lines. Whilst London mayors nominally had control of pricing they didn't have much say over the bills that pricing would have to pay as that structure was agreed before the modern mayoralty was even established.

drc

What really annoys me is when you pay your tube fare etc but you have to use a bus replacement service instead. So they are charging you for using the tube even though you are actually using their bus service, so should be charging you bus prices. Nice little earner there.

London Transport is smelly, dirty, dangerous, expensive and unreliable.

lostinrates

Ah, we wouldn't know about weekends.

I agree about the oyster disruption.

I have no end of issues with oyster, they suggested I didn't keep it in my handbag (something to do with being in proximity to my home...surely an issue for men with pockets?)

Incidentally, its expensive here. Our milan equivalant to travel cards and indeed single tickets, ar dramatically cheaper.
I forgot to ask dh about his routes last night.

ninky_2

MissMoneypenny wrote: »

Red Ken will nevet get my vote. That man, as always, has an agenda that benefits Ken. He does not care about London. No real Londoner will ever vote for Ken.

i think the evidence showed differently. we had some great events with ken. there always seemed to be something buzzy going on down along the southbank of trafalgar square. boris came along and took away all the funding for that. wanted us to get back to proper 'english' events like morris dancing and classical music. personally i think if london was just full of english culture it would be quite a dull place.

what makes a real londoner btw?