Monday 6 June 2016


Yesterday at 11:14 the Victoria Line Twitter feed announced that King’s Cross had been evacuated and closed due to “staff below minimum numbers” although at 11:35 it was announced that it had re-opened.  I’m pretty certain that King’s Cross has the largest staff of any station on the Tube, according to the Fit for Future station by station review for the Metropolitan Line it now has 7 CSM1s, 14 CSS1, 91 full time and 7 part time CSAs although some of them are the new “customer facing” CSA2 grade.
On a Sunday the minimum staffing level is 11 rising to 15 between 11:00 and 20:00 but on this particular Sunday there was no Circle Line due to engineering work with the Met and the H&C reversing at KX so for that 20 minutes it must have been pretty hectic at Euston Square or wherever they decided to tip out the trains.  My guess is that one or two members of staff who should have been there at 11am were delayed, possibly because like the District Line TOp I had in my cab on Saturday they forgot there was engineering work and their usual route to work was unavailable.  I guess it isn’t just the passengers who don’t check engineering work notices!
On Night Tube it seems the general opinion is to wait and see what happens.  One thing I neglected to mention about the TOps being displaced is that neither WHC or LES were getting any extra TOps for Night Tube.  Had the original plan gone ahead both depots would have had the same number as under WTT67 so these are not extra TOps who were added for Night Tube, under the current proposals both WHC and LES will have fewer TOps
Please feel free to correct me if I've got anything wrong, I usually do.........

3 comments:

  1. FFTF - Expected. But hey "Customers will have to adapt!"

    Night Tube/Depot Displacements:

    Could well be the case that those depots didn't get new T/Ops for Night tube last year; But yours and others points in the previous blog showed the unfairness and idiocy of the situation.

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  2. Staffing levels are down to minimum numbers now pretty much across the board. I had to tell someone that we wouldn't be able to meet their MIP as i only had one CSA and they were currently standing at the RVP awaiting the ambulance as I dealt with another incident elsewhere.

    The CSMs know it's a complete screw up, as does the area manager but we all know nothing will change, overtime is going completely untaken as no-one wants the extra grief that they know is going to happen

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  3. The whole customer service and world class service aspect of the job has gone due to FFTF. Daily we have tourist losing money or Oyster Cards jamming in the machines and having to call somebody from another station to come and deal with it. Happened again just this morning, 25 minutes the two customers from Finland were forced to wait. A complete shambles and joke.

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