Well once again rail fans, your favorite form of transportation went haywire here in jolly ol' London. On Tuesday January 23, 2007, London and much of Britain had a dollop of snowfall. London received about 1 inch of snow along with some thin layers of ice which formed in the late night hours. In another blunder, I failed to grab my camera to take photos of Trafalgar Square with its famous Admiral Nelson statue and lions covered with the white stuff.
As it was, once again the horror stories continued with rail transportation. One of my VLICA colleagues lives just west of the town of Slough. She didn't make it in to work on Tuesday. On Wednesday she told us her story over lunch. In what could have been the title of a short story, she said her train had made it just past Slough, then stopped. The train backed up to the town and the passengers were dropped off at the station. There, they were told they would have a bus come by to pick up passengers, but the bus never showed up. Several other trains came and went, but the train conductors refused to stop for the beleagered passengers. Finally my colleague said "it had been three hours to nowhere!" and decided it was time to hang it up and go back home.
The Evening Standard on January 24 read "Beaten by an Inch of Snow". The article went on to detail some of the chaos:
1) At 8am, the East London and Metrpolitan lines from Amersham and Rickmansworth were suspended due to faulty trains or weather problems.
2) Severe delays hit the Central line due to signal failures at Hainault. The Jubilee line had a signal failure at NEasden. Those tracks are shared by the Metropolitan line.
3) Minor delays hit the Victoria and Piccadilly line.
4) Suspensions or delays not weather related hit the Circle Line due to signal failures at Westminster. The Bakerloo line between Elephant & Castle and Paddington had fire alerts.
5) On mainline rail, severe delays hit soutwest trains going into Waterloo, southern routes going into Victoria, southeastern routes going into Charing Cross, and Cannon Street.
Wow! All this from 1-2 inches of snow!
Ciao for now - TMW
Posted by The Mighty Wizard at January 25, 2007 04:37 AM