Today saw an entirely expected and predicted fall of snow, and just what chaos it caused.
Many tube lines were shut down. Seemingly, most of the rail lines going south from London were shut down. And most appallingly, the entire bus network was shut down.
There wasn’t a red bus in London to be caught this morning. I obviously used the opportunity to get up early and take photos. And I should say that despite several inches of snow locally, First Capital Connect kept all their trains running all day, with few hiccups beyond unavoidable delays (drivers tend to need to slow down and start up a bit slower than usual). The conclusion of my trip into work was via the Victoria Line which was the only unaffected line by virtue of the fact that it’s entirely underground (So’s the Waterloo & City Line, mind you, but that had weather related problems strangely).
Quite why all the buses were off the streets still isn’t completely clear to me, and I suspect that in coming days and weeks this won’t be the last we hear of this.
It was “unprecedented” we were told. Buses couldn’t leave the depots, seemingly.
I just don’t buy this. While it might be quite a while since Londoners received quite such a dumping of snow, I remember equally as bad snow when I used to go to school. It lasted a couple of weeks and while buses and traffic in general ran slowly, they kept running. Shutting down virtually the entire public transport network in a major western city is dreadful. I’m not going to lay the blame directly at the feet of Boris, but he has some questions to answer.
Anyway, I did take a few photos, and the rest are over at Flickr.