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Didn’t know that any still existed, here’s why they don’t in the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King's_Cross_fire?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

• lmm 8y ago
  We still allow wooden escalators but only above ground. There's one at Greenford.
  • robin_reala 8y ago
    Not any more. From the above Wikipedia article: “the last wooden escalator at Greenford Underground station was decommissioned on 10 March 2014”.
• setquk 8y ago
  I remember this. My grandmother was caught up in it coming back from holiday. Back then there were no mobile phones and she couldn’t hear her land line phone so everyone was panicking and we had to go to her house to see if she was ok. She was making some tea when we got there and shrugged it off as a minor disruption to her schedule. A lot has changed technology-wise since then. For the people who don’t know, you could smoke on London Underground back then and the place was littered with cigarette butts still burning in some cases. It was just a matter of time.
  • interfixus 8y ago
    Oh yes. I was living around London at the time, and very well remember being stranded at some station when all trains were halted, shortly after I had gotten on board at King's Cross. As for mobile phones, I actually believe there were some at the time. They started appearing sometime during the latter years of the eighties, to begin with as rather expensive status symbols, conspicuously flashed by the yuppie mob. Tangential: Being stranded on the tube was not necessarily a waste of time. Not too long before, I was in a stationary train in a tunnel near Liverpool Street Station, in muted light for the better part of an hour. A woman in her eighties (who said: "I don't like old people") told me fascinating stories about the bombing of London that she had experienced. Only gradually did I realize we were talking about bombings of the first world war. Zeppeliners. Never heard of that before, and found it hard to credit, but of course, everything checked out when I looked it up.
  • walshemj 8y ago
    Me to I owe my life to DND as my commute home would normally have taken me straight into the heart of the fire - luckily I had left early to play DnD. Good job that my parents had not watched the news that night as I didn't get home till 12 and they would have been worried sick.
• KineticLensman 8y ago
  I missed the fire by about an hour. I’d travelled to London from Leeds with a colleague and we had intended to have a quick pint before getting the train back. He felt unwell during the day so we returned early, luckily as it happened. As said elsewhere, in 1987, in the days before ubiquitous mobile phones, my wife had no way of contacting me to find out whether I was caught up in the big news story of the day (31 people died). Later on, I became professionally interested in risk management, reading classics such as Normal Accidents [0]. I also tracked down the Fennel report [pdf, 1] written during the inquest. I used the fire as a case study at work to raise awareness of the dangers of the normalisation of deviance. The London underground turned out to have been a fire disaster waiting to happen. To quote Fennel: “London Underground did not guard against the unpredictability of fire. Since no one had been killed in the earlier fires they genuinely believed that with passengers and staff acting as fire detectors there would be sufficient time to evacuate passengers safely. But they had no system to train staff in fire drill or evacuation and their attitude towards fire (which they insisted should be called 'smouldering' and regarded as an occupational hazard) gave the staff a false sense of security. They failed to appreciate the particular problems of smoke.” Fennel reports that there were a staggering 400 fires and ‘smoulders’ between 1958 and 1987. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Accidents [1] http://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/documents/DoT_KX1987.pdf http://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/documents/DoT_KX1987.pdf
• mhandley 8y ago
  For all of us living in London in 1987, I think the Kings Cross fire is the first thing that comes to mind if you mention wooden escalators. We just took for granted that the underground was safe; I used to really like the old wooden escalators. The fire was a terrible shock and wake-up call to everyone.
• dan1234 8y ago
  They were used in the Tyne pedestrian tunnel until pretty recently. They’re actually still there but the tunnel is closed for refurbishment, part of which is the replacement of the escalators. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyne_Tunnel#Tyne_cyclist_and_pedestrian_tunnels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyne_Tunnel#Tyne_cyclist_and_p...
• danso 8y ago
  IIRC, the top floors of the Manhattan flagship Macy’s had a few wooden flights: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/11/26/nyregion/macys-historic-wooden-escalators-survive-renovation.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/11/26/nyregion/macys-histori...
  • ricketycricket 8y ago
    Still did as of last December.
• F00Fbug 8y ago
  Brings to mind a great song by Nick Lowe: https://genius.com/Nick-lowe-who-was-that-man-lyrics https://genius.com/Nick-lowe-who-was-that-man-lyrics Can't find a video on youtube...
• iicc 8y ago
  Model showing the Trench Effect (as discovered in the Kings Cross Fire investigation) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSmeg-vn6ho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSmeg-vn6ho https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trench_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trench_effect >The trench effect occurs when a fire burns beside a steeply inclined surface. The flames lie down along the surface, demonstrating the Coandă effect. The flames heat the material farther up: these emit gases that autoignite in a flashover event. The flames from these areas are themselves subject to the Coandă effect and blow a jet of flame up to the end of the inclined surface. This jet continues until the fuel depletes.
• ams6110 8y ago
  Yeah that was my thought as well. Cool history, but quite the fire hazard. I suppose that they could be fitted with fire detection and suppression systems, and operated safely.
• Paperweight 8y ago
  IIRC the root cause was a 50 year build-up of grease, rat fur, ticket stubs, cigarette butts, and matches in the tracks that the steps rolled on. They had never been cleaned. One day a smoker dropped a match in just the right spot...
  • jdietrich 8y ago
    Fluff was the tinder, but the wooden escalator treads (along with layers of old paint and some temporary wooden hoardings) were the fuel that turned it into a mass fatality. The fire was so deadly because of a sudden flashover, engulfing the ticket hall at the top of the escalator in flames and acrid black smoke. If the escalator treads had been metal, the fire would have progressed much more slowly and been limited in intensity.
• dredmorbius 8y ago
  Video on the forensics investigation: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6cE9Ud6GgE4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=6cE9Ud6GgE4