proposed re-signalling

Of course it will, but who in a position to have infulence on such things will admitt it? The opposition will denounce the flawed ways of their predecessors without going into too much detail, the party that put it in place will, when they get back in power in the ever swinging pendulum, have forgotten all about it, or it will be impossible to draw a comparison as political goal posts have no known fixed abode, and most of the original people will have moved on.

I havent met one engineer with over 25 years in any disciplin who hasn't said that Britain has gone seriously wrong somewhere along the line. But of course, now the wrong people are pushing many projects forward, as has been lamented elsewhere.

Perhaps after PPP fails Kens' Transport Bond scheme can be given a go. But whatever happens Northern line passengers seem to be next in line for the short straw.

Northern Line interlockings:
High Barnet
Totteridge (ground frame)
Finchley Central
East Finchley
Highgate Depot (relay room in depot, panel in DMT office EFY)
Archway
Edgware
Colindale
Golders Green North
Golders Green South
Hampstead
Camden Town Northbound
Camden Town Southbound
Mornington Crescent
Euston
Moorgate
Kennington
Stockwell
Tooting Broadway
Morden
Morden (ground frame in depot)
Charing Cross

Picc Line SCC I believe is confirmed to be located in Acton Works.

There is another point that is being overlooked ... the rail industry changed and especially signalling changed significantly after the (main line) Clapham accident and the Hidden report.

Those who are harping back to ''the LT way'' have to bear in mind all the health and safety stuff, changes to methods of work, and things like working hours directives, and so on. It took a few years for Hidden to come into effect - but it is noticeable that the projects that have been criticised upthread - Central and Jubilee - are both post-Hidden.

I would put money on ''the LT way'' would have done them no better post-Hidden, and the same applies to the Northern. In fact LT may even have been worse off ... would LT really have recruited all the additonal staff needed ? I doubt it. They'd hire more contractors .

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Nick

I think that we also need to remember the changes to signalling post Moorgate. These also led to a reduction in capacity due to the time taken to enter terminal platforms. Computer control allows some of this time to be clawed back.

You have all missed the point here!

The 'LT Way' was to install the new with the existing in situ, i.e. an overlay, the type of signalling equipment and systems are really quite irrelevant to the issue with which this thread began i.e. all the closures to do the work.

Most today just assume that it cannot be done, however, taking the point that the new requires less equipment and less cabling than the existing it should be even easier than in the days when equipment was effectively relocated on the changeover, why we would even recover a signal cabin on the night and put it on a train alongside the recovered relay cases, scrap cable tails etc. Subsequently the old cabling which had been dropped into temporary balata runs would have been removed with any remaining in situ equipment marked for removal.
The bottom line is that H&S has improved but compared to 30 years or so ago there is little graft in signalling installation these days with all the modern mechanical aids. People have forgotten how to do work and engineers have forgotten how to plan work effectively too.

Let's not beat around the bush, in the old days we cleared the existing runs first and then ran in the new cables, laid down new locations, changed the brackets and ironwork as required and upgraded the air main, installed the new equipment, wired up the new, prepared changeover notes, marked up what was coming out and what was remaining alive on the existing, pretested as we went, had over & back changeovers to prove the new all without disruption to traffic, following up with a final changeover, that was the 'LT way'.
On many of those jobs lots of other work took place simultaneously, P.Way, HT Mains, LV Cables, Telephones, Electricians and Building Contractors all working in the same space in some areas.

Obviuously there is something more to changing over an entire signalling system from one type to another type, even so I doubt that today's engineers would do it in a single shift, I suspect that it will be done in areas and that is little different to the changeover of an interlocking area.

We hear moans, groans and gripes about work not being able to be done without closures but in all honesty if the companies knew their business and were told from the beginning that closures were not allowed or allowed only for specific structural works that would make the lines unsafe for the passage of trains they would have had to do the job without so much disruption. Unfortunately those that negotiated the PPP on LU's behalf really didn't have a clue what they were about and it was patently obvious to those of us in the front line in the run up to shadow running!

I have no doubt whatsoever that with modern technology at their disposal and knowing that LU runs a passenger service the LT signal new works organisation of old would have succeeded where today's signal contractors have repeatedly failed to deliver and with a minimum of disruption to services.

No.
Moorgate 1975, Picc Line King's X to Cockfosters 1979-82, Met and Jubilee Stanmore-Aldgate 1983-87, Bakerloo 1987-91.

I'm going to reply to this in a new thread as I'm veering too far from the specific topic of the Northern Line resignalling.

You'll find that most changeovers in the 1970s were one nighters regardless of the number of disciplines and amount of work involved. It was all about planning and the planning was done at all levels right down to the gangs doing the actual work. We usually had the Friday night to look around the job and know our roles and repsonsibilities and were expected to perform on the Saturday regardless of weather etc.
Many changeovers were multisite affairs done on a single night,
Earls Ct-West Brompton- Fulham Broadway, Holborn-Chancery Lane-St Pauls are examples I have mentioned before. Leyton was the changeover and recovery of the old cabin kit in a single shift, Wood Green stage 1 included recovering the lever frame and putting it on a train during the changeover as I recall, the whole of Whitechapel depot worked on that shift.
St. John's Wood-Baker Street changeover was worked on by Baker St., Earls Ct, Wembley park and Whitechapel signal new works,
Hyde Pk Cnr & Down street was an Earls Ct job with changeover volunteers from all new works depots and on the night there was a great deal of recovery involved.
I recall Cockfosters stage 1 as being a rotten night pouring with rain, I was a volunteer, as I lived in North london, on a 12 hour night shift for that job working mostly on a plate rack outside the cabin, the outside response teams got drenched but at least I was able to have some protection from the elements in the form of brattice sheeting.
Aldgate I recall as a long night and my own team of comms staff changed over kit all the way from Aldgate to King's Cross.
I think the last of the big changeovers that I worked on was Embankment-Elephant & castle.

Actually thinking about it Rayners Lane-Uxbridge was another big one, I recall having a hired in personal vehicle for the weekend on that job as I had responsibilities at both ends of the changeover!

Just what is so different today? Are the planners less expert? Are responsibilities taken out of the hands of those actually doing the work? Is it just a case of too much red tape?

Theoretically, a good deal of what has been described is still possible. With the greatest of respect to Colin, I've been involved in the planning for this sort of work and have a fair idea of what's achieveable.

The relevant legislation hasn't changed a great deal. The H&S@W Act of today is the same as it was when Embankment - Elephant and Eastcote - Hillingdon were resignalled. Yes, we have ROTS, Safety Cases and the rest but they have very little effect on the actual changeover - but they all form part of the planning process to get to that event. The reason what we've described is historic is for a much simpler reason: The big factor affecting what we can do is the staff available.

Take a (not particularly fictitious) example of removing an intermediate home signal on the approach to a station.

All of the relevant circuits are in locations. You place a supervisor (with changeover notes), two circuit installers and assistants at each location to do the circuit changeover. 4 x 4 locations= 16.
Another four are charged with removing the old trainstop. Another one is up the signal disconnecting with a partner at the bottom doing likewise. Staff in the local signal cabin to modify the diagram, say four.
Through principles testing: 1 tester + 20 assistants, some walking with the tester, others spread out along the track or in equipment rooms.
Tester in Charge (1)
Wire count team: Ideally eight, (2 per location), none of whom can have made physical wiring changes. Protection Staff: Three, one walking through and two others at each end of the worksite. Plus contractors to remove the signal post etc, Design Office staff measuring up etc...

We've got a running total of around sixty staff.
Have we got sixty staff that we can put on the job? Not usually. We don't tend to concentrate on one big job any more - we're pushed and pulled in all directions.

A job I've been involved with is due for commissioning soon and we've got changeover work in a Programme Machine Room, two IMRs, trackside on two lines, plus an Emergency Control Panel and Line Control Room. At the same time this project has to compete with two other jobs, both of which are resource-hungry.
Railtechnician makes reference to the whole of Whitechapel New Works depot on a single job - that's in the region of 250 staff.

The main reason we can't get as much done is because we don't have the numbers of staff we actally need to do bigger jobs in such a short space of time, not because the working conditions have changed that dramatically.

And I welcome the explanation.

But whether it's a lack of people available to do the job, or different methods used, the basic fact is things are done differently to the way they were done 10 years ago. We have CD's instead of Vinyl now (yes I know Vinyl still exists), and we have mobile phones instead of pay phones on every street corner (again, yes pay phones can still be found)....we can even do our food shopping on a computer at home now (yep, there are still supermarkets out there). Point is things change, progress, move on, evolve, etc, etc over time.

The reasons why don't really come into it - it's just done differently these days and that's that. That is the only point I've ever tried to get across in relation to the why can't it be done like it was 10, 20 or 30 years ago posts.

One of the biggest aspects is wages, five years ago as a signal maintenance lineman I was earning £40k for a 35 hour 5 night week, privateers mainly exLUL employees not transferred to Metronet and Tube Lines but self employed were doing much better than that as subcontractors and with a little overtime could expect anything from £60k upwards. Those on the JLE were earning an absolute mint and many of my former colleagues subbing to various outside companies, some set up by former LU signal engineers, were doing very well indeed. I suspect that they may not be doing quite so well these days but the clever ones have branched out into other disciplines and with rail projects around the world booming in recent years there is not necessarily enough expertise to go around or available when required.
As Tom suggests labour in numbers is a must and in the good old days there was plenty of it, signals was run like an army and when there was no work to do we used to paint the grass green and the coal black so to speak. I've known as many as 40 men sit in a depot for weeks on idle time before being streamed onto a project and these days nobody wants to pay people to be idle. Unfortunately planned work is often thwarted by other work, by lack of materials, by the need for staff to attend mandatory safety training, annual leave and sickness etc. Planning around such events whetehr known or unknown requires a certain amount of surplus overhead which is simply no longer available in an industry which has switched from being a public service to a profit making business! Of course what is really ironic is that it costs the taxpayer far more this way than it ever would have the old way.
The rules are not such a big issue as one might think, when I joined the railway we used the 1974 Rule Book which was about one eigth of an inch thick, there were various appendices to the rule book on a line by line basis, for L&E, traction etc all of which were supposedly incorporated into the working manual and yet appendices to that continued to appear and it became a minefield of complexity by rewriting the same phrases ad infinitum throughout for each and every role of each and every rule in some strange effort to simplify the rules.
Line Clear, Line Safe, Licensing, SABRE etc have all served to dilute the effectiveness of engineering by consuming valuable time at the beginning and end of engineering hours.
In the 1970s Northern Line resignalling we were on site before the last train ran through, the man blocking the road would've called the electrical control room answerphone before leaving the depot to give worksite and details and as soon as he blocked the road with a lamp three dets and shorting strip he'd be on the phone to the chargehand. We be on the track in double quick time, about 0245 the messman would bring the tea, we'd have a break and then carry on clearing with the P.Way walker as he came through the site giving an estimated completion time. It may not sound too clever to those brought up since the mid 1980s but it worked well relying on the trust of one's fellow railwaymen. That has long gone, there are not too many real railwaymen working on the system these days!
Of course it simply isn't LT and hasn't been for 20 years !

Well I think I've made my point vocally enough now - I shall refrain from further comment.

Official Tubelines proposed weeknight closures for 16 months from July:

every Sun-Thu night(inclusive); last train leaving Central London no later than 2230.

This is extra to the 65 weekend closures already proposed.