A bad week for the jubilee line?

Fuses can blow at any time, as can light bulbs.

As far as I'm aware, fuses and light bulbs that never ever blow have yet to be invented

Colin, it is reasonable enough that the London Underground employees defend the service - however having put up with a 5 day a week service for much of the last 2 years is it unreasonable to expect that the line could possibly work most days? And where there are issues that they are minor ones (such as fuses/bulbs) that can be fixed within 1 hour or so rather than the massive closures / disruptions that have recently been experienced?

One of the things that one notices over time is the sheer number of "broken down ballast/engineers trains" given as an excuse for disruption. There can't be many of them, and they obviously do very little mileage in comparison to the passenger service. Is there something exceptionally unreliable about these? Or is it just a handy excuse for the Operations team to blame things on the Engineering team?

Well not that long ago Tube Lines didn't have any money for lamps for the signal diagrams and buttons on their blue line. There now aren't any spare buttons, so when one breaks, one from a button that isn't used (such as a floodgate acknowledgement) has to be used! This was reported to a senior signals person some time ago too!

The there's the random Train Descriptions that flash up on the new KGMs installed as part of the Train Following System, which isn't yet working, some two months late. Will it ever?

ah fair enough for that one, even on that section of the met they seems to have those problems aswell, must be thames waters problems.
Colin - I know that bulbs obviously need to be replaced from time to time but the problems experienced on the jubilee seem to be more serious than that and seem to suffer the worst on the network, frequently paralyzing large sections of the line for quite long periods.
And despite being older, the signalling on the Northern seems to be getting better year by year while the Jubilee's deteriorates.
Railtechnician - thanks for the explanation, I highly suspect thats why the Jubilee has such big signalling nightmares at the moment.

Just to add insult to injury, bbc London have just announced the Jubilee upgrade won't be ready by october

I see from the directors' report, linked above, that the Jubilee is stated to be operating at around 95% of scheduled kilometres operated.

This at a time when it was closed most weekends, Saturdays and Sundays, and, as it says in the report, there were also extended closures over the bank holiday weekends during this time.

Um, excuse me, please, but if I look at the timetable displayed on any Jubilee Line platform I see a full service for both Saturday and Sunday, and therefore if this was generally not provided, along with those bank holidays, I can't see how the figure can ever have got much above 75%, and that is before all the breakdowns of service on weekdays, which presumably is what knocks about another 5% off the figures.

So the true figure of what was operated compared to the schedule in the timetable is nearer 70% than 95%, bearing in mind that the upgrade works were meant to be all finished in 2009. Now if TfL would be honest with these figures, as presented to the Mayor and displayed to their customers on platforms, the true state of affairs would be apparent rather than this fiction shown here.

Presumably when the East London Line was closed for a couple of years they could report 100% compliance on these graphs.

Mmm! It's five years now since I retired but my final year or so was spent almost fully as night Control Room TO at Earls Court. I was there and involved when all the signal diagram fascias were replaced and it was me that tidied up much of the control room wiring particularly removing all the obsolete kit and cabling from the Line Controllers desks and the other end in Warwick Road relay rooms. Indeed there was talk of replacing defective buttons on signallers desk panels at the time as it was a headache even then and it may well have happened had I not taken early retirement although the wiring in the desks is something of a nightmare being old and brittle. The old KGMs were well past their sell by date too as many of the diagram lampholders were.
The trouble with Earl's Court is that it is 50 years old and went through a period of years when, in my humble opinion, it was allowed to fall into a poor state, new equipment and wiring overlaid over the old, old equipment left in situ in the main cluttering up the desks and the rear of the diagram. I was dumbfounded when planning for T5 included squeezing it onto the Earls Court diagram, there were better ways I believe. Back then talk of a new Picc line control room filled the air as it had done year in year out for many years and the figure being bandied about was £200-£300 million, a ridiculous amount of money. During the control room sprucing up works I met those who were going to be installing new systems such as the train following system and discussed the general plans for the future, I was then, and still remain, amazed that the control room is still being used. At the time the cost of shifting it was prohibitive and that cost is always going to get higher and higher.
I floated the idea of scrapping the control room and 'piping' all the controls and indications for signal, communication and other systems to another more suitable location and was told that it was feasible, indeed there was even software available off the shelf to handle such remote control. AIUI the massive predicted cost of shifting the control room is because it would involve lots of new equipment at remote locations whereas my thought was simply to leave everything in the Warwick Road complex as is but redirect it over fibre optic transmission systems to anywhere more suitable. Then over time the predicted new systems would be installed direct to the new location gradually cutting away the old scanning and other systems from the transmission 'pipe'. To an extent this was already done with the old desk 5 (metal mickey) moving it downstairs into its own room albeit using copper and I presume that there is some form of tie up between where the District Controllers moved to and Earls Court although I would not be surprised to learn that Picc Controllers are looking after District T/Ts, miscellaneous alarms etc as they used to anyway when the control desk was a shared enterprise.

As for the train following system, I know nothing about it, I suspect it relies upon existing cabling and other systems and will present what it is told so if the old lit is faulty the new kit will have the same problem!

The decision to leave Earls Court as is and to keep piling new systems into it is in my opinion a flawed one but unfortunately internal politics is, it seems, a key driver within LUL just as it has been without it, a complete lack of unified vision with various empire builders pulling in different directions and wasting £s in the process. The whole thing complicated by line devolution, the PPP etc etc.

It really is time that somebody took the reins, produced a future goal and laid in a long term strategy to achieve it, perhaps the last time such existed was under Charles T. Yerkes and in the new economic climate money will have to be spent much more wisely than it has been in recent years.