Enter the Inferno

Getting hot under the collar as the daily commute warms up.

I nearly boiled over on the tube this morning after half an hour between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square. Not because of the inordinate delays but because of a story in the paper.

Connex, the company which maintains the rails, has neglected to adjust the tracks for heat expansion, causing the lines to buckle. Connex made over £300 million last year but will be fined £1 million for every day the fiasco continues. Good.

Indignant as this story made me, it hardly comes as a surprise. Every year the London Underground is threatened with total meltdown by warm weather, leaves on the line, or the wrong kind of rain. Our Victorian infrastructure simply cannot cope.

And neither can the passengers. As the heat mounts and delays pile up, the cattle lose all sense of decorum, shouting, pushing and fainting. Last year saw the glorious advent of posters telling passengers how to behave in hot weather.

Drink water, they counselled. If you feel hot, get off the tube. And if you really must throw up or pass out, have the common decency to stumble onto the platform first and save us any further delays.

The truth is, travelling on a hot tube is hell and there is very little to be done. Desperate Mayor Ken Livingston offered a million pounds to any inventor who could ventilate the Northern Line. The reward remains unclaimed.

How to survive as the heat rises and the pressure mounts? Those patronising adverts from Transport for London seem to spell out the attitude of ‘Customer Service’ – look after yourself. Standard TFL advice is to buy a bottle of water, or take a bus. Charming.

Self help is certainly your best recourse in the daily commute. This reporter swears by a hand held battery fan which is also a good way to make friends of your sweating, panting neighbours.

But what about a bit of help from above? Research reveals that as in London, most capital city transport systems are more concerned with advertising to their charges than looking after them.

By far the best solutions are in Paris, Moscow and St Petersburg, where trains run fast, on time. It is much easier to keep cool if the end is in sight.

In New York, Guardian Angels swap leathers for water pistols, sprays and rehydration packs in summer, but the Angels are hardly going to ride to the rescue in the UK.

Hope comes from Santiago de Chile, the best run underground in the world and priced at 10p a journey. In summer they mount free water coolers on every platform. Advertisers pay for the machines and supply branded papers cups with their logos.

Wouldn’t it be nice to see such a common sense idea applied in London? Dream on, fellow travellers – this is Britain. We don’t like clever foreigners telling us how to do things. Far better to sit and sweat in suffering silence.

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