TUBE travellers face years of long delays and station closures, Transport for London has revealed today, as disruptive upgrade work on the Jubilee and Northern lines is planned to carry on until 2014.
Popular on LondonNet
Once fully installed, new signalling on the Jubilee line will eventually let London Underground run 30 trains an hour instead of the current 24. In the meantime passengers are likely to be hit by severe delays on top of the many run of the mill delays that have caused trouble for London Mayor Boris Johnson.
“If we look forward to July on the Jubilee line, we should certainly expect that we will have teething problems,” said Isabel Dedring, Deputy Mayor for Transport.
“We want to make sure people are prepared.”
Similar signalling work starts on the Northern line later this year and is to involve eight weekends during which the whole line will be closed and 14 weekends where substantial parts are shutdown.
Those closures are to be spread over 2013 and 2014 and could have been worse – at one time 65 full-line weekend closures were planned.
“The Northern line is the busiest line on the Tube network and some of the signalling dates back to the 1950s,” said Mike Brown, London Underground boss.
“Its essential upgrade will deliver huge benefits for passengers – with more frequent services, quicker and more comfortable journeys, and the capacity to carry an additional 11,000 passengers an hour.”
