Safety on the London Underground The earliest attack on the London Underground was in 1885, when a bomb exploded on a Metropolitan line train at Euston Square station. The Provisional IRA (and its predecessors) carried out over ten separate attacks between 1939 and 1993. As a response to growing 'Mumbai-Style' terrorist attack threats, the British Transport Police has its own detachment of armed officers who will regularly patrol both the Underground’s stations and its trains. Various regulations aim to improve safety on the Tube. Smoking was allowed in certain carriages in trains until 9 July 1984. In the middle of 1987 smoking was banned for
Suicide on the London Underground rushes on overhead". A study of 58 cases showed that the presence of a suicide pit halved the number of deaths. Another safety mechanism are platform edge doors (PEDs), which separate the train from the passengers. These are installed exclusively at the below-ground stations of the Jubilee Line Extension. PEDs are expensive to install and can fail to open, adding a potential reliability problem to train services. Alison Wertheimer wrote in 2001 that there were 100–150 suicides annually on the Underground. The annual number of suicides in the 1940s was 25, increasing to 100 by the 1980s, which, according to