On London Extra: Tube trouble

Central line problems point to larger ones. Plus election campaign latest, school exclusion issues, a Corbynite comes a cropper and conversations in a lift

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I'm already in the habit of avoiding the Central line, with its crocked flagship fleet. The 85 trains are all 30 years old, and it is showing. Each has eight carriages and every carriage has four electric motors. If just one of those packs up, the whole train goes out of service until the faulty one is fixed, by which time another will have gone on the blink. Engineers are running flat out just to stay still.

That's a précis of an excellent report by the Standard's Ross Lydall, who's been to the London Underground's Hainault depot to get the full measure of the problem. He interviewed TfL's chief operating officer, Glynn Barton, who provided the best reassurance he could, explained that the technology in question is "obsolete" and said an investment programme to "completely refresh" the fleet has been hampered by "uncertainty around government funding".

In that last respect especially, Barton was totally on mayoral message. Sadiq Khan's critics say he should forego his forthcoming fares freeze and invest money from TfL's surprise operating surplus in new trains instead. But there's a tangle of political and economic arguments in that debate encompassing the balance of powers and responsibilities between different layers of government and the overall merits of holding down fares. And Barton's case is hard to argue with.