London Underground, the underground transport service for the UK’s capital city, has completed a renovation of the Victoria line.
The remodelling project has seen the launch of an upgraded signalling system and a new fleet of trains, aiming to offer a service of 30 trains per hour on the route. The route upgrade has benefited passengers on the Victoria line with more frequent services, and less crowded trains.
Mike Brown, the managing director for London Underground, said, ‘The Victoria line has seen enormous growth in demand in recent years, and this upgrade helped to deliver a successful London 2012 Games.
Our customers are now experiencing the benefits with more frequent and more reliable services and a huge number of accessibility improvements. We’re now running a train every two minutes at peak times and early next year we will begin to run even more – with 33 trains per hour at the busiest times.
On top of this, our engineers have been working extremely hard making the line more reliable – modifying doors and passenger alarms and installing automatic track monitoring, to quickly detect any track defects, which will all be rolled out over the next year. This work is already paying off, but we are not complacent and will leave no stone unturned in our effort to further improve the service.’
The Victoria line upgrade cost £50m and included many improvements to make the service more dependable, with minimal delays.
The line upgrades are part of the core upgrade programme, which is intended to deliver a 30 percent boost in capacity. Currently, London Underground is working to upgrade lines at the Northern, Circle, District, Hammersmith & City and Metropolitan lines. The programme also includes a capacity increase at stations including Victoria, Tottenham Court Road and Bond Street.
