Life at 143

I've posted blogs before about the Tube (the London Underground). However, it's hard not to share more silly facts about such an amazing transport system. We use the Tube for everything. I commute to work every day on it. We travel to Heathrow. We visit friends. We go to the pub. We go shopping. The tube is everywhere in London.

The Underground is the largest urban rail network in Europe. It has 235 miles of track, with 45% of it in tunnels. More than 500 trains are in motion at any given moment during rush hour. The busiest station is Kings Cross where 77.5 million passengers pass through every year. The deepest station on the network is just a few stops from our house. Hampstead station is more than 67 metres below the surface.

Sadly 21 people were killed on the Tube between April 2005 and April 2006. 19 of these deaths were suicides.

Two of my favourite trivia facts are:

• The most common cause for signal failure is commuter rubbish tripping a train detector beside the track. You see signal failures happen on the Tube every day. I now know that the signal system is fine, it's someone's Walker's Crisp packet that's causing the problem.

• On many of the smaller bore tunnels, there's only two inches of clearance space between the trains and the roof of the tunnel. This enclosed space explains why the Underground doesn't have air-conditioned carriages (aside from the simple fact that aircon hadn't been invented when the Tube first opened).
  
  Quite simply, hot expelled by an aircon unit would have nowhere to go. Each aircon unit would simply increase the temperature inside the tunnel to the point that units on later trains would fail, or waiting passengers would be roasted by scorching air from approaching trains as they stood on underground station platforms.

The Tube is amazing and doing well for a system that's 143 years old.