Helping Transport for London Keep Tube Customers Cool
05th April 2010
Morgan Sindall Professional Services is one of the many partners working with TfL on the Power and Cooling Programme, having secured a contract to provide multidisciplinary design services.
TfL is investing to address the issue of heat on the Tube. Getting heat out of the London Underground (LU) network is a huge engineering challenge. TfL has established a dedicated programme team to provide solutions to prevent temperatures on deepest parts of the network rising to unacceptable levels.
The need to avoid increasing temperatures on the Underground system is actually the flipside of TfL’s success. Services are planned to increase by 25%, and new trains, that can accelerate quicker, are on order. But moving more customers and more trains takes more energy, even when the best of modern technology is applied, and more energy creates more heat.
And, controlling temperatures is harder than ever before, because the ground around the tunnels has heated up over the many years since they were built.
Keeping the Tube’s customers cool involves developing new technologies, as well as making best use of more traditional approaches. And every effort is being made to ensure that “green” methods are used wherever practicable. The work of the Power and Cooling Programme has already earned two prestigious awards for sustainability.