Weird. Idly flipping around during a five minute afternoon tea recharge, I noticed some weird stuff about the Tube. The Jubilee Line, which I’ve always thought of as a long one, is in fact one of the shortest of the ‘big’ ones (discounting little 2km oddities like Waterloo & City) at 36km. While the Central line, which I thought was quite short, is in fact the longest at 72km.
(How this came up, incidentally, is that a newsfeed just churned out a figure of 2000 Tube drivers talking about strike action and I wondered how many drivers per train the system actually has. With 12 main lines, 63 trains on the Jubilee, and 408km of total track, a scratchpad figure would be 1 train per 600m max (that’s a lot, isn’t it? Do they have all the trains in operation at once?) making over 700 trains. So about 3 drivers per train which doesn’t sound too overmanned. )
Paul
January 17, 2006
Presumably not all of those 2,000 are working at the same time; the tube's run for about 3 working days so there's a chop right there. (I say 3 since don't Tube workers have unusually short weeks?)
Having lived out in Z4 on Central and regularly cycled it I can assure you it's really bloody long