Night Tube Discussion

This is causing quite a lot of excitement, anger and confusion on the BBC London facebook page, and I shall repeat what I've just posted there.

"What a lot of people don't realise is that with the tube running 24 hours, services on Saturday and Sunday morning will have to be cut, due to the fact that there will still only be a finite supply of drivers, so in actual fact the day time customer and tourist will almost certainly suffer. We know this already because it's what has to happen when the tube runs all night on New Year's Eve. The tube is not ready to go 24 hours. There is a reason it doesn't run for 24 hours at the moment, that reason being that there needs to be time for repairs, maintenance, cleaning and upgrades to take place. Not everything can be done in one 4 and a half hour window, which is all that's available at night for this work to be done, outside of weekend closures of course.

As to the ticket office proposal, it's the same with the supermarkets. The supermarkets moved with the times and retrained a large number of till staff to supervise and troubleshoot the self service checkouts. TfL will do the same with the ticket offices. Those that were in the ticket offices will almost certainly be out on the station floor, trouble shooting the ticket machines and helping people top up oysters."

the only reason for Chancery Lane to have any night time trade would be due to punters leaving Fabric nearby. When I used to open up on a Sunday there would be a gaggle of kids waiting to get the first tube home after a night of clubbing.

As a new driver I'm not particularly enamoured with 24 hour running - one of the main reasons I left the NHS was to avoid the dreaded night shifts

Odd that the map shows Baker Street and Bank as interchange stations, to what?

Holborn was always pretty manic from when the Theatres kicked out up til COT. Thurs/Fri/Sat nights in particular. The worst thing about working at Chancery Lane was the fact it was so quiet, freezing cold due to the 4 exits creating a wind tunnel and there's no other staff aside from the SS who you hardly ever saw.

I don't see it working well. New Year's Eve is already hurrendous with the number of passenger 'incidents', and Thursday-Saturday nights at certain stations can also be similar. We will just see more of the same on a wider scale. Meanwhile, the rest of the service *will* suffer. Trains receive a lot of preventative maintenance over night, and any issues left over from traffic hours are also dealt with overnight. You can not always plan when repairs will be needed (broken rails, failure investigations etc), so something that occurs at 0700 on a Friday can't now be dealt with until the Sunday night, causing a risk to the daytime service on the Saturday and Sunday.

I'm sure the numbers of people using the system during the daytime over the weekend far outweighs the number who will use it over night (despite the latter group causing a disproportionate amount of trouble), surely their interests are more important. Or maybe weekend passengers don't matter to LUL as evidenced by the large amounts of the system that are shut weekend after weekend?!

I'd also be interested to know how the economics of 24-hour services add up, although some of the staff will be present anyway (e.g. Supervisors and Duty Managers on duty, albeit to skeleton numbers), many won't be. There will be a requirement for additional CSAs and Train Operators, neither of which come particularly cheap. Currently most lines only have a handful of Train Operators on duty overnight, only enough to run a very token service even if they were driving continuously right through the night. Will the increased revenue cover this additional cost?

There seems to be many bus drivers who prefer nights and wouldn't do daytime work so I wouldn't have thought there would be any shortage of tube staff wanting to do nights especially if it was at an enhanced rate of pay?

Aren't the ticket office closures inevitable now that almost everybody has an oystercard?

As a trainee driver i quite like the idea of the 24 hour running i wouldnt mind doing all night running the only trouble is at present i am on the district line however i imagine as i am in the project pool i can see me getting shifted to one of the lines whose depots will operate all night running

Considering that the VLU is complete, and it is operating well, I'd imagine that the Victoria Line would be one of the contenders for introducing the idea. The Northern Line and Jubilee Line should be done as well by then. I can see the Piccadilly being one of the more problematic lines, especially when they start to upgrade it. I think that if they get enough T/Ops trained ( possibly why there have been some large recruitment drives recently?), running through the night shouldn't pose too much of a problem, especially as I can only see realistically a limited service running.
They could run these late night trains by using the inter-peak stablers which could be cleaned and prepped during the day, then these are run until early morning, at which point some of the early morning departures start to come out a bit earlier than they do at the moment, and the peak stablers go back early in the morning, when they are cleaned before being returned to serivce as the last trains out of the depot.

I have no doubt that someone will come along and tear the idea to shreds, but that's the idea of a forum!

I wonder how ticketing will work. "Yes sir your travelcard was valid at 11:30 when you made your outbound journey, but it's now 4 a.m. and that counts as 'tomorrow' so you need to pay again." Just when will a day end - isn't it something like 2 a.m at th moment (after the last train is tucked up in bed..?)

And for the conspiracy theorists - only seems to be deep tube lines - no SSR's. Time for a strokey beard moment - isn't the projected introduction of this about the same time as the EVO stock (potentially driverless) is due for introduction. Mwhaahaahaa maybe they won't need extra TOp's.

Seeing how the residents of Amersham/Chesham got upset when they lost their fast services how are they going to feel if the don't get a 24hr service. Will the Met ultimately rub for 24 hrs to Watford Jct?

The point I was making is that in their eyes is they are missing out on something whether there is a demand or not

The already unreliable service will just become even more unreliable with even less maintenance being carried out on the already knackered P-way as well as the neglected rolling stock, with customer service standards dropping even lower due to job cuts. I bet that clown Boris is behind all this, just like his stupid overpriced bus and poxy cable car.

TfL talk as if they've mastered running a train service during the day but truth is they can do so much better. Rather than reassuring passengers every 10mins that a 'good service' is running on certain lines, make an excellent service the norm. Run trains on time and maintain them to a higher standard than they currently are as well as having them clean inside and out. Also maintain the infrastructure to a higher standard so you don't get anywhere near as many TSR's which eventually turn permanent or annoying signal failures. Have a smart card system that actually works properly. Improve customer service by recruiting more staff and raising staff moral. Once they've mastered that, then try to run a 24hr service. Then they'll realise they can't do, as to actually run an excellent train service they need to maintain it.

I've just come back from 2 weeks in Tokyo and now the Tokyo commuter network really is the definition of an excellent train service but look at what time the trains finish at night in Tokyo, it's around the 23:30-01:00 mark. You hear all train companies wanting to run punctual trains that are clean as well as providing excellent customer service. Well judging by Tokyo, what it takes is committed staff and lots of them, very stringent maintenance regimes on rolling stock as well as infrastructure and last but not least money. It's frustrating to see that TfL and other mainline TOCs are doing the complete opposite just to save a bit of money.

Likewise the Northern Line frequently struggles to receive its full peak time train service, even with a reasonably generous allocation of trains compared to some other lines.

I would be very interested to know the (projected) economics of running the 24-hour service. The additional running costs (extra staff, plus all the incidental costs like extra power consumed, wear & tear on the trains, escalators etc etc) versus the extra revenue generated. I just can't see it paying for itself, surely many users will be Travelcard holders who will thus have already paid for their travel. If it pays for itself and can be operated without compromising reliability for the existing core service hours, and doesn't simply become a drunken brawl, then all well and good, but I just can't see it making money, and given it's a time when we're supposed to be spending money wisely then that's not good.

For the places where staff taxis and night buses actually run. How many station staff actually CAN make use of these arrangements to get to and from work? I know many who can't.