Unlocked safe, stack of explosives...not a scene from a Guy Ritchie heist movie, but Golders Green Tube station.
It was revealed yesterday that rail union staff discovered maintenance detonators (along with what was thought to be petrol) in an open, unattended safe at the station. The explosives are normally used to alert track workers to oncoming trains during night work. After this security embarrassment, they're being used to illustrate "a worrying slip in safety standards under the public-private partnership," by union TSSA.
Unattended explosives, no matter how small, are indeed alarming. This latest blooper by Tube Lines certainly won't help the tattered public image of the public-private partnerships responsible for running the Tube, after the recent Metronet fiasco.
There, we used the words alarming and fiasco in the same paragraph. Can we have a job at the Standard, please?
By Kai
