The London Underground response to terrorism is not a raft of training and evacuation exercises, nor a deployment of gas masks and tube marshals as in the US. The underground's response to terrorism appears to be roughly equivalent to its response to the Argentinian economic crisis.
I can dimly remember a piece of paper that turned up one day at my station, the message being that if you happened to notice on your CCTV screens that a lot of people on the platform were lying down with no obvious cause, the thing to do was not to go downstairs and take a look, nor even to send your station assistant as a sort of overpaid canary, but instead to escape as quickly as possible before ringing the police.
Beyond that piece of paper, however, we on the stations rely, as is disturbingly common, on the Evening Standard. After the Madrid bombs, for instance, I read that the underground's response was to tell the drivers to wear their orange fluorescent bibs at all times - perhaps to blind a would-be suicide bomber with glare. It also hit upon the cunning idea of asking drivers to check their trains twice over before taking them out of the depot instead of the more usual once, presumably going by the logic that if you ask someone on the underground to do something twice you've got twice as much chance that they will do it.
What should be done, however, is not so clear. I am loath to suggest sending staff on a training course, knowing from bitter experience that when the underground decides we need a training course it spells an extremely dull day on the outskirts of Neasden, learning only that you should have brought some sandwiches since the nearest shop is three miles away. Or it will do what it usually does, which is keep it cheap by tagging an extra hour on the end of the day after the annual test of rules.
Possibly, of course, the underground is to be commended for keeping a cool head when all around are losing theirs. It seems unlikely, but anything's possible. When you consider all the absurd things that have been done in the name of the war against terrorism, we should probably be grateful for its reticence.
It is also possible that the management are doing lots of things, just not telling their staff about them. I hear from an unlikely source that the underground is trying out a special new CCTV system that can automatically identify suspicious-looking people and alert control room staff. Quite how it can tell a person loitering suspiciously from a person waiting for a train is not immediately obvious, nor exactly what measures are going to be put in place when you see the suspect. No supervisor is going to approach a potential suicide bomber or chemical attacker and the police are going to tire very quickly of being called out every time one of these machines bleeps. No doubt there are very good answers to these questions, but as no one is telling me anything, I don't know them.
Even the House of Commons science and technology select committee doesn't know a great deal more than I do. In its report, "A scientific response to terrorism," it says that it was not told what the underground was doing because it would undermine national security. The response it did get apparently suggests that the bulk of the preparation is done by the British Transport Police (BTP). Anybody with experience of the BTP will not find this particularly comforting. Understaffed and underfunded, their response times on day-to-day problems can be shockingly poor. They have only one 24-hour station and less than 500 full-time officers serving the whole London area. Spending most of their time chasing vandals and arresting fare-dodgers, they are widely seen as a consolation prize for those who failed to get into the Met.
The underground's official literature suggests that as Londoners have lived with the threat of terrorism for 30 years, we are already well trained in spotting unattended bags and evacuating stations. There is some truth in this and while the threat from al Qaeda may be of a greater order than that of the IRA, it is still much the same problem. At every station, in principle, at least half the staff must have taken part in an evacuation drill in the last six months. Drills are usually done at times least inconvenient for passengers, like Sunday morning. The line controllers are notoriously unhappy about having drills in the rush hour when they would be most useful for training purposes. Supervisors are told that if they want to do a rush hour drill they should tell the controller that it's a real evacuation to stop him getting arsey.
As for real evacuations, they seem to happen less and less. I haven't done one for many years, except for clearing a station after a suicide which doesn't have quite the same emergency zing to it.
For all the hype and fear, one good thing about the underground is that nobody can fly planes into it. And in any case, all this talk about dirty bombs and gas attacks is a bit wide of the mark. If a terrorist really wants to cause chaos in central London, bring the underground to a grinding halt and return the city to its medieval past, all they have to do is make it snow.
