East-West Page 4

  I noticed that when we passed a train going the other way, the driver would wave at some, but not all, of the other drivers. Then I realized he was waving at District Line drivers and ignoring those from the Circle; nothing hostile in that, just that he knew one set of drivers from the depot, and didn’t know the others. I’ve asked several TfL people if there are major differences in the character of the lines’ workforce: I think I was hoping that the answer would be yes, and that I’d be told the drivers on one line are all unpublished poets, on another they’re all ex-military, on a third they all day-trade stocks and shares in their time off … But that doesn’t seem to be the case. The demographics of the workforce are very similar across all the Underground lines, with the slight qualification, noted earlier, that drivers as they get older sometimes graduate from the deep Tube lines to the pleasanter working conditions of the sub-surface network.

  That isn’t the only thing that happens as they get older. I wasn’t exactly warned about this, but the issue was raised. ‘The thing about the drivers,’ I was told, ‘is that they spend a lot of time on their own. They can get a bit cranky, especially the older ones.’ I can’t really comment on that, since my driver wasn’t at all cranky – but I can certainly confirm the point about the isolation of the driver’s job. Indeed, that was the most striking thing about it. A packed Underground train can have a thousand people on it. And yet the driver is on his own in the cab, the other side of a locked door. When he’s on duty, he’s completely isolated: there’s no one to talk to, and the concentration required means that any of the forms of distraction and entertainment available to everybody else on the train are forbidden. No mobile phone calls, nothing to read, no music. It is as isolated a working environment as any I’ve ever seen. The round-trip from Upminster to Richmond and back took three hours and twenty minutes, and the only moment of variety in it was when the driver got out of the cab, locked the door, walked to the other end of the train, unlocked the door and got in the cab to begin the return journey. In the trip we took, the driver once spoke to central control, to report that one of the monitors at Whitechapel wasn’t working properly, with lines flickering across its screen so that it was hard to see. Apart from that, if I hadn’t been there, he wouldn’t have exchanged a word with anyone in nearly three and a half hours. The announcements that are piped through the train at regular intervals – about the stops we’re coming to, about disruptions on other lines, status updates and all that – are all from the line’s central communications control. He himself didn’t once speak to the passengers.

  I once saw a television documentary about a French baker whose work involved getting up at three in the morning. ‘C’est mon travail, c’est ma solitude,’ he said – it’s my work, it’s my solitude. Being a driver on an Underground train is like that. I’m an only child and like time on my own, and since I’m a writer my work is by definition solitary, so I’m used to a solitary working context; but I would find the degree of isolation in a train driver’s working life hard to get used to.

  Some trains on other lines are largely automated, and all the driver does is press the Start or Stop button when going into or coming out of stations; the regulation of the train’s movement is done through electronic signals transmitted through the track. (The Jubilee Line is fully automated, and could adopt driverless trains right now; the Victoria Line isn’t far behind.) The new trains coming to the sub-surface lines will have this technology too: from 2015, all the trains on the network will be the new S-stock, replacing the C- and D-stock trains currently in service. (The train I went out on was D-stock, which runs on the line from Upminster to Richmond; the line also has C-stock trains, running from Edgware Road to Wimbledon. This makes it the only line which has two different sorts of train running on it, and drivers who are trained for both. All drivers have to re-pass competence tests every year.) The new kind of train can be seen already on the Metropolitan line, and it is, even to people with no interest in the subject, instantly distinguishable, because it doesn’t have separate compartments: the train is open all along the inside. The effect is airier and less claustrophobic, I was told, though I’m not sure: I like the windows you can open at either end of the compartments on the existing stock. ‘They’re more modern,’ a manager told me about the S-stock trains, ‘and one of the things that means is they have fewer seats.’ Seeing from my expression that I didn’t regard that as an improvement, he laughed and added: ‘That also means we can get more people on them.’ Another improvement which seems to me more of an improvement is that the new trains will be the first on the Underground to have air conditioning. The order to Bombadier in Derby for nearly two hundred new S-stock trains is the largest single order of trains ever made. It’s part of the huge upgrade coming to the entire Underground network, which, along with Crossrail – the biggest infrastructure project in Europe – will see a signifcant increase in both the capacity of the network and the pleasantness of the experience for its users.

  This, however, is the District Line of the future, not of today. Here, the drivers still drive the trains: boost and cut back the engine, put on the brakes to come to a halt, watch out for signals and so on. At platforms, the driver has the responsibility for letting people off and on the train, in that order of importance. ‘You try to make sure everyone gets off,’ he told me. ‘That’s the main thing. When it’s busy, you sometimes don’t have time to let everyone who wants to get on a train get on, and if you do it just slows things down anyway. People sometimes behave as if it’s the overground and there won’t be another train along for an hour, instead of another one coming in two minutes.’ He sees the passengers getting off and on via either a small bank of TV monitors, or via mirrors at the end of the platform, positioned so that the driver can watch them when he looks across from his cab.

  This takes concentration and practice. The train’s movement is controlled through a single handle, with four settings for forward motion and seven for slowing down. I noticed that the driver had an especially subtle touch with the brake, constantly adjusting its settings to bring the train to a stop at exactly the right spot on the platform; he was making small changes to the braking more or less all the time, and, over his decade on the trains, the work involved had become entirely internalized and unconscious. This handle, which controls the movement of the train, has to be twisted into position at right angles for the train to move at all; let go of the handle and it snaps into a vertical position. That makes the train comes to a halt. This is the famous ‘dead man’s handle’ (a much more evocative term than the official ‘driver’s safety device’). The full run from Upminster in the East to Richmond in the West takes an hour and a half, and the driver’s hand is clamped to the handle all that time, except when the train is in a station. I hadn’t appreciated this element of physical discomfort involved in train driving – it looks like a certain recipe for arthritis or RSI.

  All in all, the driving was a mixture of monotony and concentration, and although I’ve written about how much I enjoyed the view from the front of the train, the drivers of necessity enjoy it much less, since they’re having to look out for signals. These aren’t all that easy to spot, in changing light conditions: easier for the drivers, maybe, since they know where they are, but much harder than (say) traffic lights, and although the tunnels make the lights stand out far more, there are also sections where the tunnels bend and the perspectives make them quite hard to decode – you can’t instantly see which is the light immediately in front of you and which the one in the middle distance. I don’t quite know what I was expecting the job of driving trains to look like, but it wasn’t what I found: the mixture of monotony, isolation, concentration, responsibility and occasional dramatic crises – my driver had twice had to walk all the passengers on his train down switched-off tracks to the next station. It’s an unusual job. Even the shift pattern is unusual: because the Underground is open about nineteen hours a day, the shifts move through the hours in a pattern designed to avoi
d overly brutal jumps between day and night work. This schedule is set out 110 weeks in advance, so everyone can look at the calendar for more than two years ahead and see when they will be at work and when they’ll be having time off.

  For anyone curious about what it’s like to drive an Underground train, I’ve already mentioned the driver’s eye DVDs which let you see the view from the front of the train. But for a more immersive or hands-on version of the experience, one which lets you get to grips with what the drivers are actually doing at the front of the train, I can recommend a video game with the catchy title, World of Subways Volume Three: London Underground, and no, I’m not joking. This game got a good review in Train Sim Monthly (still not joking) and offers you the driver’s perspective of the Circle Line, all 53 kilometres and thirty-five stations of it, except here you don’t just look out of the window, you take decisions about operating the train. The extraordinary graphics are deep in what nerds call the ‘uncanny valley’ between full realism and cartoon artificial. If you’ve ever been curious about what it’s like to drive an Underground train, get hold of a copy and knock yourself out. Maybe best not to mention it on a first date, though.

  5

  More people use the Underground to commute than for any other single purpose. If there is one single activity which sums up people’s experience of the Underground – I would argue that there isn’t, but if there were – it would be commuting. This, like Tube, is another word which has been on a journey. ‘Commute’ in its original sense means to give something in exchange for something else, or to change one thing into another. A criminal sentence might be ‘commuted’ from, say, hanging, to life imprisonment. The word crossed over to use in a railway context in the USA, where regular travellers began to swap day tickets for better-value season tickets; they ‘commuted’ their daily tickets into season tickets. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the first instance of the modern, dragging-your-weary-bones-to-work sense as in the American magazine the Atlantic Monthly, which defined a commuter as follows: ‘one who purchases a commutation-ticket’. A commutation-ticket was the American term for a season ticket. Commuters commuted ‘commute’.

  This kind of travel, commuting in the modern sense, was a new thing: travelling a considerable distance, there and back every day, in order to work in one place while you lived in another. This new kind of travel was to be central to the growth of the modern city, with London as the first and biggest example of its importance: the modern map of London, the modern city, was created by commuting. One of the consequences of it, gently hinted at in The Subterranean Railway, was that people had more sex – they moved to bigger houses, where they could sleep in separate bedrooms from their children.

  Commuting is interesting and important for another reason too. It was a new kind of time in the day: an interstitial mental space between home life and work. Companies like Starbucks talk about, and try to position themselves in, what they call the ‘third place’, in between work and home. Commuting can be a mental form of ‘third place’. It can be when people get some of their most sustained reading or thinking done, their most extended daily period of introspection or of listening to music. In order to be that, though, the commute has to be sufficiently reliable and sufficiently comfortable to not introduce extra difficulties into the day: if your commute is a source of stress and hassle, then you aren’t likely to accumulate any benefit from it. My first commuting days were on the District Line, Parson’s Green to Earl’s Court and then Earl’s Court to Euston Square, and one of the things I remember most vividly about it was that sense that it was a new thing, different from any other travel I’d ever done. My own experience was that commuting was two entirely different experiences: a packed, unpredictable, airless standing trip into work, during which it was impossible to read because there wasn’t space to hold a book in front of me; then, at the other end of the day, a calmer, more reliable, often seated, reading-friendly trip home.

  That less pleasant form of commuting is something which has attracted attention in the growing new field of happiness studies. People have all sorts of fantasies about what might make them happier, most of them centring on the theme of what they might do if they had more money, or had some specific material possession or other (a Porsche, a nose job, a holiday in Ibiza). By and large, these beliefs aren’t valid. You quickly get used to the new state of affairs and start wanting the next thing up: having that extra £10,000 makes you want a further £10,000 on top, the Porsche makes you want a Ferrari, the nose job a boob job, the Ibiza holiday another longer Ibiza holiday. This is called ‘the hedonic treadmill’: we’re all hamsters running on a wheel, chasing a notion of happiness which is permanently just out of reach. One of the things this finding implies is that there is something innate about people’s level of happiness, a ‘set point’, as it’s called, which varies from person to person. The hedonic treadmill means that most of the things we do don’t move us far from our set point.

  There are exceptions, though, and one of them concerns commuting. Modern economics bases much of its analysis on the idea that people ‘maximize their utility’. The idea is that everything we do makes sense in some material way or other: the economic view of commuting would be that although people don’t necessarily enjoy it, they do it to earn money which makes up for the effort in other ways. So you commute, which is a drag, in order to have the house and holiday and lifestyle which makes you happy – yes? Well, no, according to happiness studies. Cutting down on the commute is one of the few things people can do which genuinely makes them happier. That’s because, according to one academic paper, ‘people with longer commuting time report systematically lower subjective well-being’. In other words, a difficult commute makes people miserable in ways for which money doesn’t make amends.

  This is an academic finding which hasn’t crossed over into the wider world. I’ve never seen a film or television programme about the importance of commuting in Londoners’ lives; if it comes to that, I’ve never read a novel that captures it either. The centrality of London’s Underground to Londoners – the fact that it made the city, historically, and makes it what it is today, and is woven in a detailed way into the lives of most of its citizens on a daily basis – is strangely under-represented in fiction about the city, and especially in drama. More than a billion Underground journeys take place every year, 1.1 billion in 2011, and 2012 will certainly post a larger number still: that’s an average of nearly three and a half million journeys every day. At its busiest, there are about six hundred thousand people on the network simultaneously. That means that, if the network at rush hour were a place of its own – if the rush-hour network was a city to itself, rather than being an entity inside London – it would have a bigger population than Glasgow, the fourth biggest city in the UK. The District Line also carries about 600,000 people every day, which means that it, too, is a version of Glasgow.

  There are quite a few novels and films and TV programmes about Glasgow. Where are the equivalent fictions about the Underground? New York has any number of films about its subway – The Warriors, the John Carpenter movie from 1979, is one of the best of them, one which explicitly celebrates the network’s geographical reach across the whole city, from Van Cortland Park in the Bronx to Coney Island. New York also has Joseph Sargent’s The Taking of Pelham 123, an all-subway-located thriller, among many other cinematic depictions. Paris has the Luke Besson film Subway, and plenty of other movies. London has next to nothing. (Let’s gloss over the Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle Sliding Doors – though not before noting that the crucial moment when she either does or doesn’t catch the train is on the District Line, at Fulham Broadway. Spoiler alert: in the version in which she rushes and successfully catches the train, she later dies. A District Line driver would point out that this is a useful reminder that this isn’t the national rail network, and there will be another one along in a minute.) There’s a wonderfully bad Donald Pleasance movie from 1972 called Death Line, set entirely in Russell Square U
nderground station; there were some episodes of Doctor Who in the sixties, which seemed scary at the time, about the Tube network being taken over by robot yetis. To a remarkable extent, though, that’s it. London is at the centre of innumerable works of fiction and drama and TV and cinema, but this thing that is at the centre of London life, which does more to create the texture of London life than any other single institution, is largely and mysteriously absent.6

  Why? There is one prosaic reason: it’s difficult to get permission to film on the Underground. I refer back to the figures for the sheer busy-ness of the network: with getting on for three and a half million people riding on it every day, there just isn’t time and space and logistical capacity for film crews to budge ordinary Londoners out of the way for long enough to do their thing. As an ordinary Londoner, I appreciate that: sometimes, in a city with so much disruption of so many different types, it seems as if the last people anyone remembers are the ordinary citizens trying to go about their ordinary business. But the restrictions on filming in the Underground do contribute to its relative absence in film and television.