Living in an Olympic City – Part 13 – Gold or Trains – which is better?

Apart from the extraordinary sight of a winning Gold Medalist taking public transport home in the small hours of the morning:

a man holding a medal

Ruben Limado from Venezuela won Gold in Fencing, and took the DLR in to Central London, complete with Gold Medal, to the cheers of the other passengers.

Apart from that – well there hasn’t been a lot of reporting on the position of the transport required to get passengers to the various events. There was a bad day in the week when a train broke down and there were signal problems on the lines to Stratford, but it was first thing in the morning and the system recovered well. Friday, the first day of the Stadium being full passed off without incident. Saturday was fine too, with just the odd signal problem (Waterloo and City Line) and delays following a person under a train on the Overground – but not the one serving Stratford.

Transport for London reported a record day on Wednesday with 4.25m journeys on the Underground. The same day last year saw 3.8m journeys. The new record was quickly broken when 4.31m journeys occurred on Thursday. TfL also reports record days for the Bike Hire Scheme as well as the Dockland Light Railway. (It is worth noting that the New York subway delivers about 5.3m rides on an average day).

So, after a record beating day for British Athletes with six gold medals, I do pause to think – which am I proudest of – the medals or the trains?

Comments

  1. That is very cool. Used to live in Docklands (Isle of Dogs and then East India) and very sad not to have made it back “home” for the games. Seeing an Olympian with a gold medal on the DLR must have been very cool

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