Whole Jubilee line suspended

"Costs" are always the reason for things not being done. Politicians and management alike must have this as their favourite word and always gives them sufficient reason for just planning for this afternoon when they should be planning for tomorrow. And in the end, because the work often has to be done eventually, immediate penny pinching turns out to be the most expensive option in the long term.

All bodes well for the Olympics

As yes you can blame the safety elf for that, in my days as a lineman a 2lb hammer and one or two quick swipes would free the can, usually with a nice trail of fireworks, clearing the earth but these days the traction has to be discharged first!

That isn't what causes the wide effect.

95 and 96 stock is sensitive to power supply issues, there is a piece of equipment called the interference current monitoring unit (ICMU). Earths on the traction current system will cause the ICMU to trip out, which will cause the train to effectively shut down. If lucky, it will be able to coast to the next station. The train operator is able to trip/reset the train, which MAY bring it back, but if the earth fault is persistent then the train will most likely shut down again.

Remembering the infamous witches hat incident on the Northern Line, the reason this had such a wide effect was that all of the affected trains were northbound (it was near the close of traffic) and the Northern Line generally rises towards Golders Green / East Finchley. Potentially every train in the affected sectionalisation section can be involved, this will normally be both directions. These sections are quite large and hence a lot of trains will be affected.

TBTC does not help as you start to run in to issues involving track access (in the open sections), protection, every train throughout the line has to have its trip manually edited. Then when you do get going again, look forward to VOBCs having to be reset, non-communicating trains etc.

So look forward to more whole-line suspensions on the Jubilee and Northern Lines!

There should be more sections with a juice rail gap, maybe?
Also: when did the witches hat incident happen? Was it caused by the object?

There are more than enough juice gaps, however, there are few sectionalisation gaps, many juice sections are within a sectionalisation section.

For instance take the Picc line which has just 5 sectionalisation sections, 8,9,10,11 & 34 IIRC and two of those (10 & 11) are shared with the District line between South Kensington, Ealing Broadway and Rayners Lane!

Back in the 1980s section 1 covered Baker Street to Amersham, Chesham, Watford, Uxbridge and Stanmore on the Met & Jub so an earth fault affected dozens of trains on both lines. Circa 1987ish we (I did the line controllers and HQ controller indication rewiring at Baker Street, HOH and 55, Broadway) split that single section into Jubilee section 1 Baker Street-Stanmore, Met Section 1 Baker Street to Harrow-on-the-Hill and from HOH split again into sections 38 to Uxbridge and section 37 to Amersham, Chesham & Watford AFAIR. This was as a result of trains with an earth fault being almost impossible to locate sometimes as they travelled around.
At that time the Jubilee had just two sectionalisation sections, the other being section 35 Baker Street to Charing Cross. I have no idea how many sections were added with JLE.

Due to planned Engineering works quite obviously...

I like the way you placed that cleverly with the delay bit, ever thought about studying to become a politician?

Just a guess at what exactly?

I think you're correct, the baby was thrown out with the bathwater about 25 years ago when the idea of outsourcing all engineering began in earnest!