London Underground is resuming a normal Metropolitan line timetable from next week, after announcing an urgent cut in services on the Metropolitan line earlier this month due to problems with the wheels on its trains.
The problem is understood to have been related to a wheel lathe at Neasden depot, which is used to reprofile the wheels on Met line trains, and may have been misconfigured.
Apart from issues such as reducing long term wear on wheels and tracks, and reducing wheel noise, there’s a safety aspect as a good wheel profile and flange is one of the elements that helps to keep the wheels on the tracks. The Met line’s trains typically visit the depot for wheel lathe work on average once every 18-months.
What’s been carried out over the past few weeks is checks to see which trains were affected and needed corrective action, and which are fine to continue in service.
TfL says that the safety checks and repairs on the Metropolitan line fleet are nearly complete and that from Tuesday 3rd May the normal weekday timetable will resume, however, there are still a few trains to be repaired therefore some cancellations may still occur during the day.
From Monday 9th May TfL expects the full Metropolitan line service to resume.
What is normal?
The service before this timetable was well below what it should be.
If you’ve tried getting a train at Watford off peak or weekends you are met with a list of cancellations (my record is 90mins).