Northern line signalling chaos at Stockwell I Ross Lydall explains

Evening Standard

London commuters have been told to “avoid the Northern line” as signal failures cause travel chaos in the capital for the fourth day.Travellers using the Northern line have experienced lengthy delays, overcrowding and cancellations since Sunday evening.The equipment that informs the network of the location of trains has failed near Stockwell, meaning Transport for London (TfL) controllers have to manually “talk” drivers through the area. The process considerably reduces train frequency.

Transcript

00:00Passengers on the northern line have faced almost a week of chaos because of the signal

00:06failure here at Stockwell station. Now trains are running as you can see one's just arrived

00:12here behind me but the frequency is much reduced this one's going up to high bar lift but there

00:17are only maybe around seven or eight trains an hour compared to more than 16 at normal times.

00:22Now how long is this going to take to resolve? Well as it fills the afternoon we don't know the

00:30answer to that question. TfL says its engineers will be back here tonight. They have been here

00:35each night of the week but they simply don't know what's causing the problem. It means that

00:40the computers in the control room are not talking to the computers on the train and therefore the

00:46drivers on the train are having to talk by radio to the line controllers. That means the trains are

00:51running much more slowly through the area. It is safe and trains will keep running but

00:57as it stands we don't know how long this problem is going to last.

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