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Loading ...Have you actually been to New York, Will? It’s absolutely baking down in the subway; London’s Tube is far, far cooler. Much cleaner too.
Cool tube
By Will 2 months ago Leave a comment on this post
One of the reasons I love cities is seeing how they cope with all the people. On the surface, in London at least, all seems quite normal and even habitable. Underground is a different story, with thousands of miles of pipes and cables and sewers and dead bodies and all the crap we don’t want to see. We can fly to the moon and find new (old) rivers on Mars, but there’s one aspect of London living we can’t yet alter: the heat on the tube.
I was amused to hear that Boris Johnson, the London mayor, has promised to install airconditioning on 40% of tube trains by 2010. That’s in 18 months - which astounds me. People have been trying to cool the tube for years, and although the potential of technology to improve lives increases year on year, I still have yet to hear any evidence about how the Tube will expel these gallons of boiling hot air.
The problem is, it’s so bloody deep. I gather New York’s subway has quite a lot of aircon, but (geek moment…father/family all architects) their city is built on much tougher volcanic rock, so they didn’t need to dig particularly deep or have any fear of it collapsing. Our Tube goes down to 60m in places, surrounded by weak and pourous clay, hence why it’s about as comfortable as the pit of hell. I refuse to use it in the summer unless I have two of those giant water butts used in offices for the thirsty work-shy gossip-hunters.
Secondly, or thirdly - whatever - Ken Livingstone passed the buck on any initiative during his tenure. I think he offered £100,000 about five or six years ago to anyone clever enough to design an efficient cooling system. Well that’s all very well, but it would cost ten times as much to implement. And five years on, we’re still sweating on eachothers newspapers and wondering if the heat would be sufficient to trip a suicide bomber’s explosives unexpectedly. (”Sorry - it was meant for Bond Street, not Shepherds Bush” etc)
My grandfather - a very brilliant man who designed this - told me that the Tube has to keep running for as long as possible, as the trains push the air through. He told me other things, mainly rude jokes about Australians which were probably not true, but I think he was right about the tube.
How will Boris manage it? It’s a tall ask from the mad-hatter. Aspiring engineers, offer your solutions below.
Tags: cooling, london, the-tube, tube |
2 Responses to “Cool tube”
July 18th, 2008 at 7.51 pm
July 21st, 2008 at 10.44 pm
Open the windows perhaps!?
Comments
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