The Underground - It's not just transport, it's an institution

Click here for map of the London Underground.

I am constantly amazed by the London Underground. After coming from a town like Brisbane, which thinks running trains any more often than 30 minutes apart is the work of the devil, the Underground is a different world entirely. For starters, when we say underground, we mean underground. At some points, up to 60 metres underground. Apparently some of the longest escalators in the world are deployed here. Getting on a train at city stations is like descending into the bowels of the earth. You descend down innumerable corridors, stairs and escalators, pass through the ticketing machines, work your way onto the platform, get assailed by the steamy smell of oil and machinery, almost get blown off your feet by the air ventilator, and settle down to wait for a train. Which doesn't take long. Trains run very frequently here. 2 minutes is all you'll ever need to wait on the main lines.

But despite this, there are a few flaws. For starters, the underground is old. It had already been in operation for quite a few decades when Londoners had to sleep in it at night due to German bombing raids during the second world war. Therefore, being old, it requires a lot of maintenance. Which means that for starters, it doesn't run 24 hours, as they do maintenance in the early hours of the morning. This is a problem, for a city that expects to host the Olympics and a population that is being encouraged to depend on public transport. They also do maintenance on weekends - however, again, due to the age of the tracks, they can't just shut down a single track on a line. For whatever reason, the underground wasn't built so that trains could keep running while work was being done. The result is that maintenance equals shutting down that whole section of the line. Fortunately the underground is a maze, and you can always find a way around a track closure. You just might need to go through an extra stop or two. (Or twenty.)

Perhaps the most irritating thing for Londoners (not me, I'm used to Queensland Rail's own particular brand of ineptness) is the fact that tube trains aren't ventilated. Most of the trains date from the 70's, and keeping cool wasn't really a problem back then. Living in England was to live in a perpetual grey drizzle, where sun sightings made headlines. But, since then, for whatever reason, the climate in England has changed. I've been here for close to 2 weeks now and it hasn't rained in all that time. It's actually been quite hot (for England.) 35 degrees celsius yesterday. (Cue gasps and fainting) Hellish, I know. But this was apparently the hottest ever July day in Britain, so we had the sight of water being handed out for free at the tube, and people dragging themselves about as if they'd just got ten rounds with Tyson and also had the fluids squeezed out of them. The trains themselves were apparently like saunas. I went on one yesterday, to sample this so-called sauna and quite predictably, found it to be a load of hot air. I can assure all of you worried about Britain's "LETHAL KILLER HEAT WAVE" (according to the Daily Mail's display of redundancy) that the midday temperature at Knightsbridge tube station on the Piccadilly Line has nothing on the steamy fug that is associated with Brisbane Central station at 5:10pm on a January afternoon.

But it's these things that make the Underground so unique. The incessant calls of "mind the gap" are apparently world famous, a call necessitated because the 20th century trains ride about 30 cm higher than the 19th century rail platforms. The fact that you can hear the tortured metal of the train's suspension screeching while you travel, because all the windows are down to let some ventilation into the train. The fact that the pass you buy to travel on buses and trains is called an Oyster. I'm not sure why. Don't ask. Come to think of it, the thing that most amuses me most is how Londoners piss and moan about their underground, call it a stone age relic in between berating the Mayor of London Ken "Sturmbahnfuhrer" Livingstone and generally dwell on the faults.

I've been left standing on the platform of Central station more than once, wondering why my Ferny Grove train just disappeared from the computer timetable. I've been driven past the Los Angeles subway system in a bus, just in time for the driver to point out a guy injecting himself on the platform and warning us never to travel on it if we value our money, possessions and lives. I've got bruises on my shoulder from the argy bargy on the New York subway, and a sore neck from the whiplash associated with stopping. I've been assailed by beggars, water sellers, food sellers, organ grinders, cripples, hare krishnas and fucking accordion players more times than I can remember on the Italian train system. I will no doubt get irredeemably lost when I have to take the Istanbul train system from the airport to where I'm staying when I go there for ANZAC day.

More to the point, I haven't had any of that here. No trains cancelled, no undue waiting, no heroin addicts, no shoulder barging, no neck injuries, no goddamned squeezebox players and I'm yet to get lost. London - it's not too bad. It's by no means perfect (that's the Metro in Washington DC) but on the whole, it's not too bad.