Slum Trains of London

I took a journey across London recently, from Stanmore in the North to Richmond-upon-Thames, aiming to arrive for 9 am, a daunting prospect. I boarded the Jubilee Line at Canon's Park. This part of the system was originally not part of the Tube, and is above ground. The electric trains and cables of the Tube are an odd sight in daylight, to those of us unaccustomed.

         I was suffering severely from hayfever, and constantly blowing my nose and sneezing, so the journey wasn't much fun, even though I got a first view of the new Wembley Stadium, which is truly spectacular. Still, the train was surprisingly fast and smooth-running, and not crowded at all. Until we reached Willesden Green. An electronic babe announced we were being held at the station “for the regulation of the train service” and gave an insincere apology. We soon found out what that meant. Hundreds of people came swarming down the steps and piled in. We had been deemed to be having too easy a time of it. Still the train did not move. “Come on, come on,” I muttered under my breath. Only when the train was jammed to bursting did it move off.

         I struggled off at West Hampstead, forcing my way through packed people, and alighted with a sense of relief. Up the steps I went, and looked for the platform for the London Overground. It was not to be seen. I enquired of a West Indian man in uniform, and he told me it was fifty yards up the street. I emerged onto a pavement as crowded as the platform had been, with heavy traffic on the road alongside. The congestion was amazing. I had naively thought West Hampstead would be like suburban Stanmore, but not at all. The hot windless June day meant that fumes lingered, and the air was humid and smelly.

         It was a pleasure to get down onto the platform, which was above ground as its name had implied. I saw a train pull in to the opposite platform. It wasn't like a Tube train at all. It was the same size and shape as a conventional train, and so I thought I might enjoy the rest of the trip.

         When my train finally arrived, I got on and was utterly disappointed. Though bigger than a Tube train, the seating arrangements were the same, with seats up the sides facing inwards, and all full. I was lucky to get to lean against an odd kind of pad on the side. There were lots of things stuck to the ceiling for people to hang onto, and an array of vertical poles. The carriage was obviously new.

         As we progressed, more and more people squeezed in. An electronic babe relentlessly exhorted us to “move up the carriage and make use of all available space.” Some of the standees were reading books and newspapers, even though it was swaying a lot. I don't know how they managed it, must be long practice. I looked out the window and was disappointed by the slow speed, a mere fraction of that of the Jubilee Line train. I was astonished to see Wembley Stadium. It seemed we hadn't gone far at all.

         Gradually it dawned on me that the unpleasant conditions were intentional. This carriage had been designed with the expectation that the majority of passengers would not get a seat. A kind of moving slum.

PS I have found an article on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Overground

Some highlights from it:-
"The most recent figures released by the Office of Rail Regulation (ORR), ...showed that it had achieved 95.9% of the Public Performance Measure (PPM) target for punctuality and reliability set by the ORR. This was above the average PPM for all London and the South East railway companies."

"In the spring 2010 National Passenger Survey, conducted by Passenger Focus, London Overground received the lowest overall satisfaction rating of any UK train operating company, at 72%."

It may be that the Overground is the quickest and best way to get where you are going, in spite of the planned discomfort. My trip back in the afternoon, at a non-peak time, was comfortable, though still slow.

Giant Waves and Sea Serpents

Anecdotal ephemera are usually not the business of science. It normally deals with repeatable phenomena. This is not always understood by the public, and tragically not by all scientists, some of whom have been tempted to make themselves foolish by publicly dismissing things such as monster waves and huge sea serpents, not to mention alien spacecraft and the fairies.

Technological breakthroughs have allowed some ephemera to be brought under meaningful study. For generations, old seadogs have been trying to tell scientists of the danger of ships being overwhelmed by giant waves. They have been pooh-poohed by sneering savants, whose theories, based on the normal probability distribution, told them that such waves were vanishingly rare. The surprising rate of ships disappearing was attributed to human error and crime.

A recent U.S. orbital satellite, equipped with powerful radar to measure wave sizes, has revealed that the seamen were right. Dangerously large waves are hundreds of times more common than theory had predicted. As the physicists scramble to repair their theories, the naval architects are left scratching their heads. The risk to shipping is much greater than expected. If an excessively large wave comes along, the ship is supported by wave crests at bow and stern, but not in the middle. Its back breaks, and it sinks very quickly, often without distress signal or survivors.

From ancient times, seamen have told tales of  ferocious sea serpents which wrapped themselves around ships and pulled them over. Very large ocean-going fishing boats, with huge deep-sea nets, have in recent years landed giant squid. They have found a complete baby one, and the tentacle of an adult. Extrapolating from the tentacle, the adult is much greater in total length than a blue whale. These creatures usually stay at great depth, and rarely venture to the surface to grapple with ships. When they have done so, the survivors have been mocked, and told to stop talking nonsense. Yet we now know they were telling the truth. The tentacles would seem snake-like to someone who couldn't see the squid's submerged body. Such attacks are now very rare, possibly because modern ocean-going ships are too big and fast for the squid to catch.

Some people claim to have seen fairies. I recently heard someone sneering at this, saying he 'preferred to take a more scientific approach'. Was he doing so? He could not have been more wrong. Science has nothing to say about fairies. How can we establish that there are no fairies in someone's garden, if we don't know how to develop a fairy detector? Fairy theory has not advanced to the point where we have the vaguest idea how to do this. The problem is more fundamental than that of the giant waves. So the whole topic remains outside the realm of science, and that is that. I myself am sceptical about fairies, and suspect that they are figments of over-active imagination. I do not pretend that my hunch on this owes anything to science. It is merely a hunch.

It's a sad fact that many confuse dogmatic scepticism with 'being scientific', their own conservative prejudices with rationality. It has held up the advance of science on many occasions.  Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory, allegedly said, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it".

The Queen, by God!

God save the Queen!

With every shop festooned,

She seems in not much danger.

Red, white and blue,

Will for the Euro also do,

I might suppose.

Or can't they get enough

Of Jube-jube-jubilee?

People stand for hours,

To catch the merest glimpse.

What do they see

They can't see on TV?

Somehow that's not enough,

If you can't hold out, that's tough;

A great endurance test,

The strong outstay the rest.

Two days off with pay,

So dour republic go away;

I'm pleased enough to say,

God bless Her Majesty!