On Sun, 25 Jan 2009 09:30:12 -0800 (PST), Mizter T
wrote this gibberish:


On 25 Jan, 15:56, MarkVarley - MVP
wrote:
Traveling around the other day I found myself late in the evening at
north acton, heading home (east) the train I got on announced that
someone had committed suicide at liverpool street and hence the
central line was suspended, also that this train wasn't going anywhere
anytime soon and we were advised to take local busses, I got as far as
the top of the steps when the train pulled out...

when getting announcements like this is it generally better to 'wait
it out' on the train or bail-out onto another line or the local
busses?

I made it as far as shepards bush in the end after 30 minutes waiting
on the train on the other platform, then took the overground to
willesden junction and a freezing 30 minute wait for a stratford-bound
train.

Always a bit hard to say really. In your particular case it seems as
though the Central line was at least partially suspended if the next
train from North Acton only got as far as Shepherd's Bush - shame that
the driver of the first train basically said he was going nowhere and
then the train did set off, though he would have made the initial
announcement in good faith. As ever in such situations things are
rather fluid and can change quickly, that doesn't mean it's not
annoying though! (I'm wondering if the first train was in fact heading
back to the new (replacement) depot under White City shopping centre.)

The driver of the first train was, I'm sure, just passing on what
information he had, someone calls and tells him to move off and away
he goes, regardless of what he was told 2 minutes earlier!

The second train, the one I was on, was going as far as queensway, at
least it was when I got off at shepards bush!

In your situation I might have gone to the ticket hall at North Acton
and checked the local bus map there, then taken the 266 to Willesden
Junction - see (PDF):
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/gettingaro...orner-2189.pdf

Of course hindsight is a wonderful thing, but there's much to be said
for decisively adopting a plan B and getting oneself on the move
again.

I was on my way to the ticket hall in the hope of finding such a map
:-)

I take it this was a Sunday, hence the half-hour wait for a North
London Line (NLL) train at Willesden Jn?

It was friday night and I remember looking at a timetable on the wall
and noticing it was the last train of the night, delayed by 16 minutes
IIRC.

It's perhaps worth consulting a couple of WAP sites on your mobile -
the first being the TfL's WAP site at http://wap.tfo.gov.uk which
has live information on all transport modes but is best for looking up
stuff on the Underground network.

The second is the London Overground journey check site at http://
wap.jcheck.com/londonoverground which has live information on the LO
network - there's also a full website at http://www.jcheck.com/
londonoverground too.

Lastly the National Rail live departure boards system can be accessed
via the NR WAP site at http://wap.nationalrail.co.uk - this includes
all stations on the London Overground network too so is useful for
checking up on the NLL.

If one is on a pay-as-you-go mobile tariff, then the amount of
chargeable data transferred can be reduced by turning the images off -
this is perhaps worth doing anyway as it can makes the WAP pages load
faster.

I'll bookmark those on my phone for future reference, thanks )

I'm pretty sure I heard announcements on the jubilee line earlier in
the day (friday) that the line was suspended for similar reasons,
people ending up under trains seems to be alot more common than I'd
realised, an unpleasant prospect all-too-common for the drivers and a
job that must come very low on the list of things I'd like to do every
day for the people who clean up the resulting mess, my sympathies with
them all.

Indeed. I saw some firefighters attending a 'person under a train'
incident a while back, one of the young guys amongst them in
particular looked a bit shaken up by it all. I think the members of
the LU Emergency Response Units have, unfortunately, seen it all
before.
--
Mark Varley
MarkVarleyPhoto.co.uk
TwistedPhotography.co.uk
London, England.