Tube Lines has introduced a variety of improvements and innovations in the way it does its work. Employees are continuously coming up with new ideas, solving problems, increasing productivity, improving safety and saving money, making Tube Lines a beacon of good industry practice.
Tube Lines Escalator Services took just eight weeks to rebuild an escalator at Green Park in 2006, making it the fastest ever full-scale refurbishment of an escalator on the Underground. The challenge at Green Park was the toughest yet - 285 steps, making it the seventh longest escalator on our network. This achievement saw us beat our previous record of nine weeks, also at Green Park. The fast-track approach has also been successfully used at a number of other stations, including Camden Town, Colliers Wood, Tooting Bec and Clapham North. Prior to transfer, escalator refurbishments took as long as 26 weeks to complete.
For our first 30 station upgrades, we employed a principal contractor which would then employ sub-contractors to do each individual element of the work: for example decorating, electrical work and communications installation. On the most recent station upgrades, we are now engaging the sub-contractors directly ourselves, thereby cutting out bureaucracy and cost.
We have invested £1 milion in a vacuum excavation machine which dramatically improves track maintenance. The Swedish Tubevac, which is effectively a hi-tech vacuum cleaner, is one thousand times more powerful than domestic machines. It mechanises the demanding manual processes typically used on British railways to replace ballast, the small stones which ensure good track drainage. This impressive piece of kit immediately proved it could increase productivity on track upgrade activities by 300 per cent. Ballast has now been replaced at over 2,000 sites. The result is smoother journeys for Underground users.
Computerising the planning of daily tasks has made maintenance more efficient. By using a system called Maximo, individual jobs are logged into a planning database. These can be picked up and undertaken by individual operatives on site using handheld devices. These handhelds also contain information about the history of each asset, so that engineers on site can make more informed judgements on how to tackle failures when they occur.