Telling Porkies ?

Admins - please move (or even delete!) if you think appropriate:

What you fail to understand is that these things are far too important to leave to the people who actually do the day-to-day job which is why it needs a committee of people who spend their lives sat in offices to sit down in a conference room and decide what the Tube really needs.

Without wishing to get political when Ken put Tim O'Toole in charge he kicked butt. When Boris took over, Tim left and Mike Brown slithered back, we were back to the same old same old.

Yep but I think there has been a difference since the late 1980s. Until then the only people who wanted to leave were those who were never really suited to the job in the first place. When I joined the railway in 1977 it was very much a family in so many ways with a great cameraderie born from many years of service to the travelling public and for many it was also so much more than just a job.
The sense of belonging that so many had enjoyed had begun to wane a little several years before I joined LT, when the combine began to be broken up by splitting off London Country in 1970 and then again when London Buses went in the 1980s but there was still a strong sense of family amongst Underground staff.
It all began to change for the worse when LT suddenly became LRT, at first I don't think anyone thought much about that additional R but by the end of the 1980s there had been a real seed change in upper echelon management activity. We'd seen forced redundancy, works & bricks (the Building Department) replaced with outside building contractors, power division sold to SPL, estates and advertising sold off, IT (data networks) sold off and on the operating side a couple of attempts at reorganising the departments generally known as 'Action Stations' had been seen off temporarily. The writing was on the wall so to speak and all that delayed it really was the King's Cross fire which kept most of engineering in house for another 10 years before the inevitable politically motivated privatisation which cost the taxpayer more money than continuing the subsidies would have but which was able to be conveniently 'majicked' off the government balance sheet.
The upshot of devolvement to lines and the great sell off of engineering was that many experienced staff saw a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and it wasn't just engineering veterans that walked but many operating staff saw the light too opting for an earlier retirement as the bottom had been knocked out of the job.
The great infux of inexperienced graduates and external candidates directly into station managament roles was also a catalyst expediting exodus from what had once been a good career with good prsopects. Many of those that remained have probably stayed on only long enough to secure better pension entitlement and/or pay off the mortgage. the railway just isn't the great organisation that it once was and it is perhaps less efficient now than it has ever been, it is perhaps just a job nowadays no better nor worse than many others but without the great sense of belonging that was almost universally felt across the now long gone combine!