London – Snaking lines at taxi ranks, crowded and sweaty buses, long delays into work: Londoners are bracing for all that and worse as workers at the city’s sprawling 150-year-old underground train network – known as the Tube – go on a series of strikes beginning Tuesday night.
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Some 3.5 million people journey each day on the network’s 11 lines and 270 stations, leading to predictions of widespread travel chaos as much of the capital grinds to a halt for four days. Here are the details of the possible Tube turmoil:
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HOW BAD WILL IT BE?
Union members are planning two 48-hour walkouts, the first kicking off Tuesday evening and running until the early hours of Friday. The second is due to take place next week.
One of the world’s largest and busiest train networks with 1.2 billion passengers a year, the system is already pushed to its limit at rush hours. Commuters already used to getting the squeeze can expect much worse.
A limited number of trains will run, though they will be less frequent – around every 10 minutes. And although officials have provided a list of services they expect to run, they warn that “the situation may change throughout the day.”
Dozens of stations will be closed and there will be no service at all on much of two of the busiest lines – the Central line slicing through the middle of the city and the Piccadilly line, which heads to Heathrow Airport.
They will react like Londoners always do with a stiff upper lip.