faulty communication equiptment

Bloody hell! What were they doing at Acton Town last weekend. Engineering works my rear, it sounds more like sabotage!!!

Glad I'm not working much this week as I bet this will last throughout the week

Is someone trying to make a point with the number of suspensions? If so do you think it will work?

*by making a point, I'm interpreting Alan's comments as meaning that there are actions short of suspending the line that could be taken, but which are not being taken in order to impress upon the powers-that-be the seriousness of the situation in terms of concrete "this is happening on a daily/weekly basis and affects the bottom line" rather than "if we get another disaster like 7th July then we might be able to save more lives with a new system", as in my admitedly limited experience, bean counters rarely attach as much importance to opinions about the future by front-line staff as they do to the immediate monetary figures they see.
I do not mean that someone is sabotaging the system or that there should be unsafe working.

There were no engineering works at Acton Town last weekend - all engineering works were between Chiswick Park and West Kensington.

Train radio has only existed since the second half of the 1980's.
The nature of the failure would play a part in waht happens to the service. If it were a partial failure in one small area, trains could be run through empty or more reliable hand helds could be issued. If the failure directly affects the line controllers unit, the whole line is affected - so the only course of action is to suspend the whole service.

Short notice service suspensions are never done to 'make a point'. They are done because an unsafe situation exist's -it's that simple.

To clarify, before 7/7 if a sub-surface line had a train radio failure we allowed the trains to continue to operate in passenger service. The thinking behind this was that as it was sub-surface there were no issues with OPO alarms and assistance could be requested by various other methods not available to deep tube lines. In fairness to staff, they had been campaigning against this decision, and some even refused to work on the grounds of safety at one point.
Following 7/7 it was identified that radio was a much more important tool than we had anticipated, even on sub-surface lines. Whilst we deny any allegations that the radio hampered rescue operations (IT DID NOT!), our Managing Director took the decision to issue an instruction on how we should operate in the future.
As mentioned above, now if we lose a section of the radio system we run empty through that section or utilise a particular type of radio which remains unaffected by the failure. If, as today, we lose the whole system then we suspend the service totally. Yes this is disruptive, yes it is a poor customer service, yes it makes us look completely inefficient, but it ensures that our customers safety is intact - and customer safety is our priority.
If it's any consolation, I had a nightmare getting to St James this morning as a result of this suspension!