London Banter - Not screeching to a halt

On 12 Mar, 13:53, MIG wrote:
On 12 Mar, 08:29, wrote:

On Mar 12, 7:47*am, MIG wrote:

On Mar 12, 12:07*am, Uncle Toby wrote:

On Wed, 11 Mar 2009 13:47:43 -0700 (PDT), wrote:
And what if the screeching is at such a high level that it is
potentially damaging to the hearing of people on the platforms,
without the track being dangerous itself? The noise wasn't ignored, as
the track lubrication problem was fixed and the station reopened; this
is nothing like taking the batteries out of a smoke alarm.

#
This is not a new problem, but deserves to be taken seriously. I have
been on the platform at Bank in the past (at least five years ago)
when the screeching was so loud that it hurt my ears. Now I'm a 50+
guy who's attended a few gigs in his time and used to have a serious
habit of headphones so loud that they hurt after, perhaps, 30 units of
alcohol.

There is a story here. It's not health and safety gone mad: it's why
the level of maintenance is inadequate.

I don't know if it was dangerous or not.

My point was that the tone of the reporting was to mock the fact that
LU responded to reports of noises, and to recall the different tone of
reporting when LU didn't respond to reports of noises (different
situation obviously).

Your point seemed to be to question LU's reponse, not the reporting of
it. Especially as you also made comments on safety at Bank during the
current works.

I think it's right that there was response, but I am a bit bewildered
by the nature and timing of it.

The fact that trains continued running with people excluded just adds
mystery to it all. *It could be sound levels, but these were not
apparently measured. *I wonder if people "complaining" were asked if
they wanted the station closed?

How do you know sound levels were not measured?

It was reported that they weren't. *(So maybe not true.)

Noisy rails on a curve
do not make unsafe trains, but might mean an unsafe environment around
those trains. In fact, there may be monitoring already in place, of
the lubrication system, if not the noise. If there have been
complaints, then surely the correct response is to remove the people
and investigate, rather than waiting for an engineer to arrive, take a
measurement, and say 'yep, there's a problem', then closing the
station and potentially having damaged a few thousand people's
hearing. The people inside the train will have been partially
insulated from the external noise.

Did the problem arise so suddenly that it had to be done in the rush
hour, particularly if there was monitoring of the lubrication system?

A sudden, unexpected increase in noise, might well mean a misaligned
track or something for all I know. *I can't see how anything to do
with the tracks could be investigated in detail while trains were
running.

Bank Central line is always noisy, due to the tight curvature, indeed,
it is one of the tightest curves on the Underground. The lubrication
is not there to allow trains to run safely (they'd do that anyway),
but to allow them to run more quietly. It would be quite hard to
investigate track noise without the trains running and if any
equipment can be fixed whilst trains are still running then surely it
should be.

But if it was known for certain that the problem was lubrication, by
means of some kind of remote monitoring, why deal with it at that time
of day?

Surely you deal with any problem when occurs, time of day shouldn't
matter. As the closure was only of the platforms to passengers, not of
the line itself, it wasn't a big issue in the overall scheme of
things.

Still, it's a press story, so almost guaranteed not to be true.

I certainly agree with that sentiment. I think that people would be
amazed at the number of incidents on the underground that occur each
day and that don't get reported in the press.