London Underground has announced an urgent cut in services on the Metropolitan line after it found faults on the wheels of some of its trains. As a result of the problem they’ve found, they’ve announced that from tomorrow (Monday 11th April), there will be a special timetable on the Metropolitan line until further notice.
Peter McNaught, Director of Operational Readiness at Transport for London, said: “We identified a fault with some of the wheels on a number of Metropolitan line trains during our regular and routine inspections of our fleet. Safety is our top priority, and as a precautionary measure, we have increased the rate of inspection of these trains to make detailed checks of the entire fleet.”
The problem only seems to affect the S8 trains used on the Metropolitan line, not the similar S7 trains used on the Circle/District/H&C lines.
Peter McNaught added that TfL “will introduce a special timetable on the Metropolitan line to ensure we continue to run as frequent and regular a timetable as possible while inspections take place and our engineers resolve the fault.”
From tomorrow until further notice, the Met line trains will run to the following timetable:
Amersham to Baker Street and Chesham to Baker Street
Every 30 minutes in both directions.
Uxbridge to Aldgate and Watford to Baker Street
Every 15 minutes in both directions.
Internally, TfL expects the issue is likely to affect services through to May, and is likely to have only affected trains that were recently serviced at the wheel lathe at Neasden depot.
None of the other lines on the London Underground are being affected by the problems, but TfL warns that other lines may be busier than usual while they resolve the fault on some Metropolitan line trains.
Looks at https://content.tfl.gov.uk/wtt-342-metropolitan-12-september-2021.pdf and notes that this another odd use of the English word “special” to mean “utterly rubbish”!
I imagine those responsible for the faulty wheel lathe at Neasden depot are basking in Khan’s 8% pay rise. Meanwhile commuters have to suffer their incompetence.
The wheel lathe is programmed by an external company to cut the wheels to a specified profile. No LU employee has access to modify this data.
The pay rise was 8.4% and inline with a deal made over 4 years ago.