A Quarter Century Underground

On 21 May 2001, a version of me with significantly more hair and dramatically less back pain joined London Underground for “a couple of years”.

There are two types of people on the Underground. Roughly 95% are people who arrive intending to pay the bills for a bit before moving on with their lives. The remaining 5% genuinely love trains with the intensity of medieval scholars protecting sacred texts.

I was absolutely part of the 95%.

The first four weeks involved learning about tickets, trains, signals, track safety, evacuation procedures, how not to die, and various other operational details which immediately evaporated from my brain the moment somebody handed me a radio.

In June 2001, I was sent to the London Bridge group where I met the legendary Brian Valentine, star of the first series of The Tube, who delivered what was probably the most useful career advice I’ve ever received.

“Forget all that training,” he said. “Just learn as you go and ask questions.”

Then, after a brief pause worthy of prestige television:

An extraordinary workplace philosophy. One that, in many ways, still powers the entire railway.

So I muddled through my first six months in the traditional Underground manner: standing in mildly alarming situations while trying to look like I understood what was happening.

The thing nobody tells you about the railway is that every single day it invents a completely new problem. You can receive weeks of training and still end up facing a scenario that sounds like somebody generated it by shaking a bag full of operational manuals and emotional distress.

After six months, my manager asked if I wanted to become a newly created Station Control Room Operator.

Now, from what I understood, this role involved being indoors, answering phones, and consuming industrial quantities of tea and coffee while occasionally saying things like:

“Yes, we are aware of the issue.”

This seemed spectacularly preferable to standing on windswept platforms in sideways rain explaining delays caused by “an earlier incident”.

So I took the job.

And somehow stayed there for fourteen years.

At one point I considered becoming a Station Supervisor, only to be told I needed several more years developing in my current role before I’d be ready.

Suddenly the company announced:

“Remember that supervisor role we said you weren’t qualified for? Good news. Your current role no longer exists, so now you have to do it.”

The Underground has always had a beautifully chaotic relationship with logic.

So off I went for more training.

Once again I learned about tickets, trains, signals, tracks, emergency procedures, how not to die, and a collection of processes that largely exist in the same mythical realm as perfectly functioning ticket machines and fully operational printers.

And that’s been the last decade.

Twenty five years is a strange amount of time. Long enough to watch entire stations change personality. Long enough for old uniforms to become historical artefacts. Long enough to become one of those people telling new starters “this used to be a ticket office” while they stare at you like you’re describing the fall of the Roman Empire.

Somehow during all this, I’ve worked with some absolutely fabulous people.

And some extremely strange people.

One of them was genuinely called Richard Head, which remains one of the boldest things the universe has ever done.

I’ve learned more about Indian food than I ever thought possible. I’ve gone from skinny to fat to skinny again, much to the visible frustration of the uniform department, who I imagine now see me as a constantly shifting tailoring-based crisis.

I survived the horror of 7/7 and the long difficult months afterwards, when the Underground carried on moving through grief, shock, fear, and extraordinary resilience.

I’ve dealt with three “person under a train” incidents.

Two naked trespassers.

An endless collection of broken machines, broken radios, broken air conditioning, broken announcements, and at least one printer that sounded like it was trying to escape captivity.

Then came the pandemic.

While most of London disappeared indoors, the railway kept going. Quieter, stranger, eerily empty at times, but still moving. Those shifts felt like something from a post-apocalyptic film directed by someone deeply familiar with Zone 6.

And yet somehow, through all of it, the thing I remember most is the people.

The station teams. The control room gossip. The post-shift coffees. The tiny acts of kindness. The dark humour that only exists in workplaces held together by caffeine and collective exhaustion.

The last few years have been hard. Financial pressures, staffing pressures, endless uncertainty. There are days when the whole network feels held together by determination, tea, and somebody saying “just reset it and see what happens.”

But despite everything, we’ve kept London moving.

Which, honestly, feels deeply important.

Twenty five years ago I joined for “a couple of years”.

And somehow the District Line, several thousand coffees, countless early turns, a few emotional breakdowns caused by ticket machines, and one spectacularly strange career later…

I’m still here. 🚇