London Underground’s experiment with a carpeted tube train
Fifty years ago, the London Underground put a carpet on the floor of one of their tube trains to see what the public thought. The verdict was not favourable.
At the time, tube train floors were made of slatted wood, but London Underground faced a problem. The floors were usually made from hard-wearing Canadian maple, but in the 1970s, there was a growing shortage of Canadian timber, and prices for what they could get were soaring.
The ones that would eventually come to replace wooden floors were the vinyl floors — although awkwardly, the vinyl used for the tests on two District line trains also contained asbestos, which would have been a very big problem had that particular vinyl been used on the rest of the fleet.
Just one carriage on the Piccadilly line (No. 9153) was converted for the tests, which were intended to determine how hardwearing the carpet would be once the public trampled all over it.
At a time of austerity, the public saw laying carpet in a train as an expensive extravagance when, in fact, it was a cost-saving measure to avoid using expensive wood. The perception that carpet was more expensive, even though it was actually cheaper, proved a publicity problem that the facts could not overcome.
