Block closures between Waterloo and Finchley Road

According to City AM, this is because of damage to tunnel lining segments caused by acidic groundwater (in some areas at pH2 - the equivalent of lemon juice or vinegar). TfL has been asked by the Lib Dems in the GLA to investigate having a block closure of the line between Finchley Road and Waterloo for 30 days to get the work completed in one go.

They said on the BBC that they were practicing techniques on the redundant tunnel at Charing Cross, so I guess the problem is the section of tunnel built in the 1970s.

Is it still possible to run trains in service off the Stanmore branch onto the Bakerloo? This would allow a service to be maintained to Swiss Cottage and St Johns Wood, and reduce crowding at Baker Street, when this section is closed.

Well this is all a bit rubbish isn't it. Yet two more examples of how the current set up in London is inferior to that offered decades ago; its going to take longer, and theres less flexibility to mitigate hardship.

@ Ben+1
"suits know best" even if a million pax know otherwise

It would seem the section in question is just Baker St - Green Park rather than the ex-Bakerloo section, some sections of the concrete tunnel between Baker St - Bond St S/B have had metal bracing on the tunnel walls for a few months at least now. This corrosion problem also caused the tunnel telephone wires to become detached and wrapped around a train back a couple of years ago.

I disagree, I think today's LUL no longer has either the engineering expertise or management expertise that it once had and it seems to have become the norm to screw the travelling public which in bygone days was an unforgivable cardinal sin. Closing at weekends is very bad for home grown tourism especially as LUL has become so bad at dissemminating correct and appropriate information to those that require it.

For anyone who works at LUL getting around London should be a doddle regardless of misinformation and line closures, the trouble is that most travellers do not work for LUL!

Of course it suits the unions to have weekend closures, it shouldn't suit LUL but of course the vast majority of travellers are captives to a large extent and many have already paid their fares in advance so have to put up with cancellation and disruption with no compensation whatever for the poorer service performance.

One sustained closure properly managed with 24/7 shift working is the fairest and least disruptive way to get the work done. There really should be no need to postpone scheduled work elsewhere or on other lines, work has to be planned months in advance to comply with SABRE so it would've been no more difficult to plan for a single closure than successive closures, indeed it should have been much easier as many fewer days of closure would be required. As for resources, they have to be allocated to the work but in the same way allocating them to a single closure should be easier than allocating them to multiple closures and would make them more available for other works.

As ever what is very visible is inefficiency at best and perhaps incompetence at worst. I'm certain that former LT engineers and operating managers are turning in their graves at what has become of what was once a decent public service.

Not quite - I said that was how they ended up tackling the problem on the Northern Line back in the 1980s. Technology has moved on since then though, so I wasn't expecting them to use Chromium Steel again.

I've got a bit more information this morning on the specific process they're actually using on the Jubilee from some LR readers, but I'm still trying to piece together the full details. Looks like with the Jubilee they don't need to replace the invert (the bit the track sits on) so rather than a tunnel shield they've actually built a ring-replacement train for the job. This will replace one or two concrete segments each night with spangly new Spheroidal Graphite Iron segments, which are much better suited to the ground conditions in that area.

I'm going to try and wrangle a bit more info out of TfL and Tube Lines.

Kindly explain how it “suits the unions”.

There’s no reduction of staff booking on when we have special working, station staff at closed stations spend their shift dealing with frustrated passengers who haven’t read the notices that have been up all week while train crew get sent by taxi or stuck on replacement buses to pick up their trains at remote locations.

With the Met, Bakerloo and local buses all available closing at weekends will cause far less disruption than shutting down for a whole month, imagine the chaos at Baker Street at 08:30 on a Monday morning as passengers changed lines.

Really? RMT haven’t had a strike day since January 2011, ASLEF go on strike once a year on Boxing Day and TSSA went on strike for the first time on the Tube since the General Strike over ticket office closures in December 2010. In the last two years almost every dispute has been settled by negotiation, if disruption is the unions’ raison d’etre as you claim then they’re failing miserably. Unless you subscribe to the Gospel according to the Daily Mail who claim that it’s strike day everyday!

Again I ask, how exactly would shutting down the Jubilee for however long it takes during the weekdays when demand is at a maximum be better than closing at weekends when demand is less? It might be more expensive, I have no idea of the costs for each option, but it will cause significantly less disruption to passengers.

Actually Sundays seem the busiest day of the week. There may not be the rush hour crush but I would be interested to know the total people traveling on a Sunday vs the total people traveling on a Tuesday

Additionally there’s less road traffic at a weekend. But there are less operational bus lanes and parking restrictions are relaxed at weekends which can in themselves create delays. But obtaining parking restrictions to create bus stands is easier and getting staff & buses to assist is easier process too.

Just before the Olympics we were called to assist on the Central line when contractors burst a watermain at Old Ford. The weekday traffic in East London was horrible. In fact after setting off from Stratford I was beaten to Leytonstone by two pedestrians one of which was a pregnant lady. The point was we all got nowhere fast!

We have done a few weekday closures mainly during school holidays. And theres much to be said for one week closures from an engineering point of view. But the timing needs to be right. In the summer we get a lot of visitors to London, so care needs to be taken to choose the right moment to do this work.

Although closing the line at weekends might seem undesirable, the consequences of doing this during the week are far less desirable.

So what are the figures? You can't say trains appear 3 times more crowded because of longer gaps. If there happened to be a 6 minute gap at 1130 on the JLE on a Tuesday, you hardly notice it passenger-wise. Even if trains happen to be passing every 3 minutes at the weekend or 2 minutes - which they often do despite what service levels are planned to be, it is consistently much more crowded throughout the weekend day.

No, because that isn't the point that is being made.
Weekdays carry far more people, but the loadings are heavily biased to the peaks whereas the loadings through the weekend are far more even. What is needed to prove or disprove @aliturk's point is the average ridership per hour figures for each hour.

Back before the JLE opened,the Bakerloo was closed between Piccadilly Circus & Elephant for about 6 months for repairs to the tunnel lining under the Thames(that's when 3257 met its' end)as there was insuffient space at Queen's Park & Stonebridge Park for all the stock(London Rd was also closed for the duration)4 Bakerloo trains were stabled at Neasden,the trains were changed round between Stonebridge & Neasden every week night(2 trains per night)going to Neasden late evening & from Neasden early morning before first SB Jubilee.