Walkways in tunnels

The extension tunnels to T5 on the Pic kind of have walkways. They are at track level on the right.

Are the walkways wide enough for people with wheelchairs?

Can't help you with detraining statistics, you need someone from service control or above for that info.

As far as staff working on or about the track it all depends upon the situation but generally for routine work the traction will be discharged under line safe (open sections) and line clear (tube tunnels and sub surface tunnels) procedures.
For night maintenance current in tube and sub surface areas is discharged at the end of traffic hours by service controllers tripping the tunnel telephone circuit for each current section and then confirming the discharge with the power control room. Discharging traction this way conveniently allows the service controller to test the integrity of tunnel telephone circuitry.
When current needs to be discharged in an emergency or other incident requiring track access the tunnel telephone circuit is most often used to do it (there are many ways of using the T/T) but the power control room can also discharge current upon request of the service controller if it has not already been discharged using the T/T.

There are occasions when staff may work with traction on to deal with certain types of failure or to clip and scotch points when working within an engineer's current area.

LUL has a very comprehensive and complex set of rules, regs & procedures to handle all situations, you ask how simple and my answer is that they are simple for those who are trained to work under them. As I used to install and maintain tunnel telephones as part of my duties and was a permanent night worker for most of my career, working in tunnels with or without traction 'on' was second nature to me.

When detraining passengers the traction would be discharged first, the last thing anyone would want in a detraining situation is for a passenger to be electrocuted when walking to safety! There are one or two emergency detraining points in some tunnels such as on the Victoria line, the Central Line, the Piccadilly line and the Metropolitan line with stairs to street level, these being between stations on some of the longer tunnel sections but I can't recall passengers having to use them in my many years on the system although I had occasion to use several of them myself.

Some of the things that I did when I was a signal lineman are probably no longer allowed, for instance rebuilding a set of points at Heathrow T123 with the current on and trains running. This was done using the 'all parties must come to complete agreement about what is to be done' rule which covered those situations which were not specifically covered under normal procedures. I think H&S rules some if not all such works out nowadays.
At one time I'd be walking one tunnel with trains still running in the other tunnel but that doesn't happen anymore since switching on and off times of adjacent current sections was harmonised about fifteen or twenty years ago. For example I could walk the tunnel from Turnpike Lane to Arsenal on the westbound before the current was off on the eastbound!

I didn't say it couldn't happen, only that traction switching times had been made to coincide to prevent it under normal circumstances.


The current awitching on/off times were deliberately made to coincide for safety reasons as it was deemed unsafe by Engineering Works controllers for staff to be in one tunnel with trains running in the other. The same applied in open sections of four tracking where adjacent roads of different lines once had different switching on/off times. Also working directly adjacent to specified areas, engineer's current areas and possessions was deemed to be similarly dangerous and was prevented whenever possible by EWC.

I used to be on the track six and seven nights a week as a SPIC, PM and person doing the work in both tunnel and open sections and I remember the grief the EWC would give out when trying to book out an adjacent section to the front rear or side of another which was occupied by a train and generally the only way was a face to face meeting with the possession master or protection master as appropriate and the site person in charge and/or trainmaster who would then also contact the EWC to indicate an agreement and safe system of work in place.