How to Stop a Tube Train for Exactly Seven Minutes

As a kid (a very long time ago) I was on the Met Line (somewhere near the abandoned Marlborough Road station) when the train was held at a long red signal. As I was in the front carriage, I could see the driver pull down the window and attach lines to the two parallel bare wires at window height. It was only years later that I found out he was calling the signal box.

I feel like this video ought to have been 18 seconds shorter...

"Don't lick anything you find on the underground", a sentence i never expected to hear today at 1735 on the 25th of October 2023. Thanks Jago <3

Once, when I was a kid with my Dad on the tube, he told me the big purple pipe started in a factory in the east end and pumped curry to all the restaurants on the underground network. I still think this is the case. (RIP Dad)

Re the ‘pinch and rub’, the rub bit was to remove any dirt on the TT wires so making a good electrical connection between them. Good video.

1:36 ‘Shobnall Maltings’ sounds like a character in a Victorian melodrama.

The Severn Tunnel had a similar system in use circa 1991. Unfortunately by that time false alarms were so common that when a collision occured and a driver shorted the circuit to sound the alarm, the operator at Newport signalbox ignored it.

I remember hearing on a different channel how a plucky tube driver in days long past had avoided catastrophe by reaching out from his cab and causing a short by bringing wires together. Finally the story makes sense 😂

1:14 Jago's sneaky self portrait.

That telegraph system is still in use in one way or another on national railways to this day. It hasn't stopped being used just yet!

I've wondered about those wires, but not for a long time. Thanks for explaining them.

This reminds me of the class 155 units... When they first entered service...and indeed it might still be the case I haven't worked for the Railway in the UK for close to 30 years. anyway it turned out that the emergency handle in the bathroom only armed itself with the door locked so... those evil among the general public could pull the handle with the door unlocked exit the bathroom the old lady that then went in locks the door and sets the brakes off. It was only the 155 and maybe the 153 that did that the other 150s didn't have that feature.

I remember watching a documentary with this. I do get the accident-pronness of this, but the idea that you just short two wires to remove the current from the rails is really really neat, because it creates a very reliable way to unpower the rails if you hace to in an emergency

Interestingly my father told me the function of pinching these two cables together back in the early 1960s. Why he thought I, as a under 10 year old boy, needed to know this I am not sure. 😊

It had to be a live wire like Jago to explain this clearly.

The old Glasgow Underground used a similar system of two telephone wires in the tunnel where the driver could connect a telephone hand set with two crocodile clips. The system was in use till closure in 1977. The new Underground was delayed for ages and one of the stories that went about was that when the drivers testing the new trains lifted the phone in their cab, it jammed the emergency brakes on and turned the wheels into 50p pieces. This was almost certainly misrepresented media hype for the sake of a good headline but it impressed me as a kid.

This was shown on the series Secrets Of the Underground so as soon as you mentioned a couple of bare wires I knew where this was going ;) 3:10 stand back from the platform edge!

Used to like watching the wires as the train moved, strangely relaxing.

The driver would carry the handset around in an old wooden box, along with his handlamp, control keys and tea can (The latter being the most important, of course!)

Another great video Mr Jago. I had an idea for a subject for you perhaps, would you do a video on the watertight gates installed on line which crossed the Thames, for protection against bomb damage to the tunnels during the war years?