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Travel to Parliament - Monday

As is often the case I started out with a meeting in The Council House in Birmingham. I then got on the 12.30 train from New Street which left about 20 mins late (thereby cancelling the 12.50). I went to Waterloo to find that the Jubilee Line wasn't working and hence walked to the House of Commons and got there by 3pm.

I really do wonder what has happened to the UK infrastructure. I think a lot arises from "spoiling the ship for a ha'porth of tar". The West Coast Main Line coped reasonably well.

Comments

Tristan said…
Or our infrastructure has never coped with extreme weather (for that is what we had in London).

If this were Chicago, where such events are common then we would expect everything to be running, but their bus drivers are trained for driving in this weather, ours are not (and driving in this weather is a skill which few in London posess).
They have fleets of snow ploughs because they are needed every year, we don't because we rarely need them.
Their trains have snow ploughs to cope with this, ours do not, again because we so rarely need them.

You are falling victim to the 'good old days' syndrome...

(it is true that nationalisation took a massive toll on infrastructure, removing any incentive to provide a good service or invest in infrastructure effectively. It introduced diseconomies of scale and distorted the market signals which are relied upon for individual planning in society).

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