Sherlock Holmes solves the intractable problem of the black hole in the Aldgate area
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
It was Sherlock Holmes who first identified the black hole in the Aldgate area. By now it is engulfing ministers and mayors and money, but in his time it had already swallowed the Bruce-Partington plans for the Royal Navy's latest submarine. The clerk in charge of them had been found dead beside the track near Aldgate station, but the secret papers had disappeared from his pockets. Holmes inspected the scene: Points, and a curve. By Jove, if it were only so.' He deduced that the clerk had been murdered by a spy who lived near Gloucester Road, in a house whose back windows opened on to what is now the Circle Line. The spy waited until a train was held up at a signal (a frequent occurrence there, as Holmes percipiently noted) and then dumped the body on the roof, leaving it to trundle round to Aldgate, where, because of the points and the curve, it fell off. More recently the black hole in the Aldgate area has proved itself capable of reducing signals and services to anti-matter, much to the dread of passengers whose daily journeys take them, or are meant to take them, to the City. Desperately, London Underground has sought to blame this on the interaction of new equipment and old track. Holmes would not have been fooled. The hole's malign influence spread through the tunnels and up the escalators. It doomed London Underground's ill-conceived project to build a railway to the Dome. Hopelessly behind time and over budget, the Jubilee Line extension had to be put into the hands of project managers from the private sector. In the Treasury, the penny dropped.
The messy bit
MICHAEL Cassidy is chairman of Line, which is one of the two preferred bidders for the Bakerloo, Central and Victoria Lines. (Linc also wants to get on to the District Line, but, as you might expect, this service is now running six months late.) The Treasury has laid down,' he says, 'that this is going to be a part-privatised project. The customers' end — running the trains, writing the timetables — will still be in the public sector. The messy bit behind the scenes — tunnels, tracks, signals, escalators — is us. We provide the trains, and we only get paid if those trains are clean and well maintained and can run the whole day without stopping.' All this will require Linc to find and invest a matter of £5 billion. Its backers are a train builder, a signals engineer, a contractor, a project manager, and a water company, Anglian, because, as Mr Cassidy says, it will be wet down there. Between them they are valued on the stock markets at £90 billion, so Linc can raise all the money it needs.
Squaring the Circle
INTO this orderly prospect irrupts Ken Livingstone, the people's mayor. Hands off the people's underground railway, he cries. His first thought is that it could raise the money with a bond, but bonds need to have their interest payments made or guaranteed, and there is no rush of volunteer paymasters or guarantors. His next is to import Bob Kiley, the retired secret agent credited with sorting out the New York subway. (I can say from my own observation that most of its escalators work and that it seldom suffers signal failures in the Wall Street area.) Mr Kiley says that the part-privatisation proposal is crazy. Balkanisation, he calls it, and goes on to liken the Chancellor of the Exchequer to the Wizard of Oz. The Chancellor's spokesman retorts that Mr ICiley's plans amount to a couple of bullet points on a sheet of paper. The Prime Minister pushes for some sort of deal or at least for a patch-up that will hang together until the election is over. It looks more like an exercise in squaring the Circle.
Showing who's boss
THE trouble about squaring it in Mr Kiley's favour (the policy some focus group has foisted on what passes for an Opposition) is that it will be here when he is gone. He will soon qualify for a free pass on his railway, his return air ticket to New York is sticking out of his pocket, and in Mr Livingstone he has a doubtful ally. He is right to
believe that the railway needs managing, he does not think much of the incumbents' efforts, but he must have noticed that the unions shut it down from time to time, just to show who's boss. When they last called a strike the Mayor was all for them, promising to be out on the picket lines, although when the day came he was lurking in Brighton. Some manager is going to have to run it for the customers, no sensible investor will go nap on him until he does, but getting from here to there, past the intransigent unions and the ambiguous Mayor, can only be tricky and may mean a fight. This is the reality in the black hole.
Vertical thinking
HOLMES, of course, had the solution. Points and a curve, as he realised, were unusual in a railway system with few junctions. Four different lines flow through the Aldgate area, but the deep-level tubes keep clear of one another. They were built as self-sufficient railways. Mr Cassidy himself, when he was in all but name the leader of the Corporation of London, came close to prising the Waterloo and City Line from London Underground's enfeebled grip and making it a showpiece. What a pity that Linc cannot bid for it. This kind of Balkanisation — vertical, not lateral — would keep the customers' end of the railway and the messy bit in the same hands, where many railwaymen believe they should be. I.K. Gricer (my railway correspondent) and I would not mind showing the way with the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway. We would extend its four-track line from Hammersmith beyond Northfields (where it now ends) and run expresses all the way to Heathrow. As Holmes told Watson on the way to Gloucester Road, when other contingencies fail, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Roll, Britannia
I.K. GRICER called on Monday morning from his train, which had got as far as Crewe North Junction. There he was encouraged to see Pacific locomotive 70000 Britannia (star attraction at the Festival of Britain half a century ago) with steam up. At least, he notes, Virgin Rail, unlike London Underground, has a Plan B.
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