Last night I went to the "Cooling the Tube" talk by Kevin Payne, director of the engineering programme at TfL, which took place at the Building Centre on Store St as part of their exhibition that runs until April 19, "Underground - London's Hidden Infrastructure". If you go during the day you can look around various exhibits, view slide shows and so on, so I may well nip down there again soon to have a proper look around. Watch the blog for a report.The talk was absolutely fascinating, and Kevin went through the long history of cooling issues on the London Underground, and then went on to look at the current solutions and explained what new things they might do in future to tackle the problem. You can read transcripts (Ian also turned up last night to take notes) on Annie Mole's blog here.
Just as an aside, Boris Johnson, who has just published his mayoral candidate transport manifesto, wants air-conditioning units on deep level tube trains, the silly man. As you will see if you read the notes from last night, if you think about it for a moment air-conditioning units would just dump more heat into the tunnels and could be downright dangerous - where would all that excess heat go if a train was sitting in a tunnel for any length of time... I'll let you guess.
3 comments:
Hello, just discovered your blog via the pub quiz post on Going Underground. Excellent! Have added you to my reading list.
I went to the Cooling The Tube talk too, and my writeup is here.
Nice one kake - I'm not an engineer by any means, but I thought the talk was absolutely fascinating!
Kulveer Ranger, now on the TfL board, used to work on the Cooling the Tube Programme, so he should have some sense of what is possible.
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