For Halloween, I might dress up as the Northern line. This most erratic, unruly, unreliable of London Underground lines frightens the life out of any city commuter forced to rely on its sprawling black tentacles. You never know what you’ll get.
On Monday evening as I prepared to leave the Palace of Westminster for home in southwest London, I checked the Transport for London (TfL) app to see what merry japes the Northern line had in store. Checking ahead for disruption on the line is an integral part of the experience.
“Northern line part suspended between Stockwell and Morden.”
This meant, of course, that I couldn’t use the Tube to travel south to my local area, which is served only by that portion of the line that had been suspended. So began the wearying task of working out a different route home. This once would have been a stressful chore but now it is just bland routine.
Latest power failure on London’s Tube network fuels passenger paranoia
Donald Trump leans left in bid to revive flagging poll numbers
Israelis have no appetite for extending the Gaza war, but the suffering of Palestinians barely registers
A ‘very nice gesture’: Trump accepts gift of new Air Force One plane from Qatar
Somewhat masochistically, I suspect I may even secretly enjoy figuring out the logistical challenges. Monday evening’s route recalculation, however, was complicated by the fact that the entire Tube network in central London had been plunged into chaos by a massive power cut. A bus or a taxi home was out of the question as London’s streets would be clogged for hours.
Britons, like many others, watched on agog last month at the rolling blackouts that afflicted Spain and Portugal, and thanked their lucky stars that it wasn’t them. Yet the frequency of the power failures that have recently affected London’s extensive but ailing transportation network have become almost as disruptive for city life here.
The catastrophic nature of the rush-hour faults and the similarity of some of the fires that have caused them – not just on the Tube, but also near airports such as Heathrow – have also left many Londoners wondering if a campaign of transport sabotage may be behind it all. Authorities such as TfL, London Fire Brigade and the National Grid, however, insist they are just unfortunate accidents.
I had been blissfully unaware of the full extent of Monday’s major incident until I logged into the TfL app to check the availability of my route home. I had spent the day around Whitehall, moving about on foot and ignoring all news alerts about travel disruption. Beneath my feet was chaos.
Piecing together explanations from TfL, National Grid and London Fire Brigade, it seems that something caused a power surge on the system on Monday afternoon. This sparked a fire at a substation in Maida Vale, an affluent district in northwest London. This was the second such fire at the same substation in two weeks, which has fed suspicions on social media of sabotage. That fire also came five weeks after a separate substation fire shut down Heathrow, grounding 1,300 flights.
Monday’s fire burned through critical cables in Maida Vale and power dropped across the network, but most critically in central London. Platforms went dark in many stations, which had to revert to emergency lighting. At various times, up to 20 Tube stations were evacuated and shut, including critical hubs such as Piccadilly Circus, Tottenham Court Road and Waterloo.
Some trains were also stuck for a short period in Tube tunnels. The fault knocked out the entire Bakerloo line, which cuts through Maida Vale on its way to central London, the Jubilee line, Waterloo & City line and a huge section of the Elizabeth line that links many Tube stations to the main hub of Paddington. It also shut down tracts of the Northern line.
Simultaneously, parts of the London Overground network were affected by separate trackside fires that delayed trains, fuelling the paranoia of some commuters that it was all orchestrated by some malicious power. The authorities, however, have stuck to their line that it was just bad luck. The last thing they want is more panic in London about the city’s transportation network. Hackles were already up after an IT fault crippled Stansted Airport on Sunday morning.
For once, the travel gods were with me on Monday evening as I tried to figure out how to get home. One of the few parts of the network that had been completely unaffected, the westbound portion of the District line, took me from Westminster to Victoria Station. From there, I squeezed on to a National Rail above-ground commuter train heading south out of London. It took barely 15 minutes to get me to a station that was not my normal one, but close enough.
I strolled home in the evening sun feeling pretty pleased with myself, as I considered whether to switch to this remarkably easy above-ground route on a more regular basis.
But I realised I had actually grown fond of the craziness of the Northern line, the Tube route that sometimes feels like a scene of chaos painted on a triptych by Hieronymus Bosch – all legs and arms, triumph and despair, copulation and death.
The truth is: I’d probably miss it.
