Literary disappointment

[ethelthefrog]

I finished reading Shaun Hutson's Necessary Evil last night. By the end, I was barely able to stop myself from shouting at the book.

Comments

[gerald_duck]

• I wasn't aware the tunnels were cleaned nightly. Areas the public can drop litter, yes.
  
• Some of the cut-and-cover lines are in brick-faced cuttings for much of their length.
  
• Most tube trains also can't take a sharp bend in a tunnel at 60mph because they can't go that fast.
  
• Getting between carriages on a moving tube train isn't such a big deal, actually - you'd probably make it comfortably 999 times out of 1000. Obviously the remaining one screw-up in a thousand would equate to hundreds of deaths a year if they didn't prohibit it, though.
  
• The bulkhead would only be bloody once you'd shot the driver.
  
• Actually, a fire extinguisher did start a fire in my school: it burst and damaged an electrical cable. :-p

[ethelthefrog]

The wind from trains' passage carries litter from public areas into the tunnels and it would constitute a serious fire hazard if not cleaned. It is cleaned every night (or at least it was cleaned every night when I last watched a documentary about it).

By "scary and nontrivial", I meant that it's sufficiently scary that I certainly would not be tempted to do it. It is treated as totally trivial in the narrative as if passage was eased by the kind of links seen on mainline services. I got the distinct impression that the author had never been on an underground train.

I didn't mention that the tunnels concerned were on the Northern and Picadilly lines, which are deep-level tubes.

[garpu]

Did the author ever ride any subway? And even the gas in containment systems for servers is *inert*. You don't want your frigging servers exploding when the gas is pumped into the server room. Although blowing a burning server to kingdom come is one way to deal with it.