Down the Tube is a thoroughly depressing book. That’s no fault of Christian Wolmar’s, we hasten to add, because the author of Broken Rails (the troubled tale of rail privatisation) has made an equally impressive job of piecing together the history of London’s Underground Railway.

For students of British transport history it’s all here – the unplanned chaos of Victorian days (‘A row over a siding led to a tug of war involving the Metropolitan trying to pull away a locomotive chained to the rails…’), through the glory days of the 1930s, when somehow the management came right; the funding came right (bonds – remember that); the architecture, the trains… even the graphics and maps. For a dozen wonderful years, London’s Tube was the biggest and most advanced metro system anywhere in the world.

After the War, the Tube became a political football – surplus to requirements, thought the Tories (who were trying to create a sort of Los Angeles-on-Thames), and an expensive nuisance to the Socialists, who had other things to spend money on.

There followed a nightmarish period of decay, populated by greasy I’m-all-right-Jack union job’s-worths (‘…more than my job’s worth to fit that hot tap washer, guv…’) and greedy, out of touch executives (at one stage there were 26 chauffeur-driven limousines at HQ, costing some half a million pounds a year). Between them, they tore the system apart.

It took the Tube a surprisingly long time to enter the intensive care ward, but it finally succumbed in 1987, when a small fire developed – through the usual mix of incompetence and poor training – into a fireball, killing 31 people.Thereafter, politicians sat up and took notice.They’ve been passing the buck ever since, but the Tube remains on the critical list…

And so, in 2002, the battle lines are drawn: In the left corner, we have London mayor Ken Livingstone, with dreams of funding a Tube renaissance through an issue of bonds. In the right corner, a group of Treasury zealots and assorted fruitcakes, with a Frankenstein’s monster of a scheme called the Public Private Partnership, the details of which are beyond mere mortals, but seem to involve tearing infrastructure from operations (see Railtrack), and paying private-sector companies a great deal of money to do a modest amount of work, at little risk to themselves.

For reasons that our cousins from overseas might find hard to understand, Britain’s well-entrenched and nominally left-wing government is whole-heartedly behind the right- wing zealots, rather than Ken – the people’s choice. Confused? It’s all horribly familiar, and we know what happened to the railways.Whether the absurd PPP wins through (how will anyone actually know?) or fails miserably, we can be sure that politicians will continue to blame each other for decades to come, and that a vast amount of public money will be thrown at the Tube. As we said at the start – depressing.

Down the Tube £9.99
Pages 246
ISBN 1-85410-872-7
Publisher Aurum Press