London Banter - View Single Post - Tottenham Court Road escalators, December 2003.

Barry Salter · December 16th 03, 04:38 PM posted to uk.transport.london

On 16 Dec 2003 07:43:04 -0800, (Boltar) wrote:

Take apart escalator and shipping to factory - 1 week approx.

Refurbish and test at factory, well lets be kind and say 3 weeks.

Ship back to staton, rebuild and test - 2 weeks.

Thats 6 weeks and I've been pretty generous with the time. What exactly do they
do with the other 4.5 months out of the 6 it generally takes themn to fix these
things??

Right...Now schedule that for the 4 or so hours a night that you can
actually do the work (i.e. when the station is closed to passengers) and
add in the fact that escalators are custom built for each site,
nominally at a 30 degree angle though I believe there's one station on
the Northern Line with an incline of 23 and a bit degrees.

There's also the small matter of them needing to run for the best part
of 20 hours a day, 364 days a year and carry around 13000 passengers an
hour, unlike your average department store escalator.

HTH,

Barry

--
Barry Salter, barry at southie dot me dot uk
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