The silence was defeaning

I'm still taking my time a bit, rambling on on Monday's post. For the time being, though, let me just fill you in on today (Wednesday) - which was uneventful.

I arrived at ROV having had to leave in a big rush - but with 2 minutes to spare. All in all, it actually went rather well to be honest :P I took a WOO train and changed on to a NOR train with (again) no chimes and no Sonia. I mentioned that I'd been on a train without chimes and Sonia before and it actually happened again a few weeks ago. I know from "ASLEF shrugged" that there are rumours going round that Central line trains are being pressed into service with minor defects and I fancy this might be what's behind this. The reason for this is that the new Central line timetable demands more trains in service, but unfortunately the number of Central line trains actually in the fleet has stayed the same. This means that fewer trains can be out of service, there're fewer replacements available and there is less time to work on all the trains in the fleet. Expect more of this, by the way, with the coming of the 'Night Tube'. Admittedly, it's easy to be cynical and service frequencies should be pretty slim and the 'Night Tube' is not going to be operated every night, but I am very much of the view that if you want a good railway, you have to spend time and money looking after your trains and the p-way. The more you run, the harder it gets to run it and I think liberties are starting to be taken now.

Anyway, anyway, at least it was a peaceful journey and that was probably the only thing of note on the journey to LIS, where I changed onto an S7+1 to Wembley Park. This took me to King's X perfectly well.

On the way back I started out at Euston Square and had a little wait for an Aldgate train. Still, when the wait was over, I boarded the S8 and made LIS, where the dot-matrix destination indicator on the Central line (EB) platform was not working. Consequently I had no idea what the next train would be - nor where it was going - but it could tell me the time :P As it turned out, it was for NEP and it turned up pretty quickly. At BEG I discovered that there was an EPP behind it and a WOO via HAI after that. I decided to chance changing off the NEP for the EPP at LES, but this was not the right move and it was a pretty long wait at WOO - a good 17/18 minutes. It was such a nice day, as well, I really should have gone round the loop and savoured the views. There was, I noticed, a bit of a gap in the EB service, with the boards showing something along the lines of an EPP train, followed by a 10 minute gap before the LOU train, then the HAI 1 minute later and an EPP 1 minute after that. Shortly before the LOU was due, I turned back to look at the indicator and it showed the HAI as the next train due. It duly departed 21 road while the LOU approached, which was nice. This gap, though, does not seem to be in accordance with the timetable at all. This smells to me like a cancelled train and maybe some late running. There could be any number of causes of this - many of them genuinely (and I really do mean this) out of LU's control (the passengers, for example, or illness). Even many others, like break-downs and wear and tell are inevitable on any railway, particularly one as heavily used (and with so much equipment in such a small space) as the tube. However, in light of my rant above and this from "ASLEF shrugged", as I stood there, I wondered whether this might not be further support for:

"I ended up getting off the train in HAI depot about the time I should have been leaving DEB on the WB, all of which illustrates that putting more trains on a timetable and actually running  a service are two very different things."