But, Robert Wright wonders, can lessons of the past be applied to the Jubilee Line?
I grew to dread media coverage of the Glasgow Underground modernisation when I was growing up. As the underground’s superintendent – its main engineer – my late father, John Wright, was one of the project’s public faces. His task was to turn two circles of eccentrically-gauged Victorian underground track into one of the world’s most modern metros. When the project was at its height between 1977 and 1980, my primary school teachers would buttonhole me about its progress. I quickly wearied of the stupidity of the media reporting and of my teachers’ swallowing of it. ‘I’ve read that this underground of your father’s is never going to open,’ I recall one asserting, shortly before the opening. The experience has given me a lifelong sympathy for those charged with pulling together major, complex infrastructure projects within timescales and budgets often of someone else’s devising. It has also given me a keen appreciation of how poor relationships, false assumptions and misunderstandings aro
