Inspector Sands And Why The London Underground Keeps Asking For ...

If you travel by train a fair bit, you are going to get used to hearing the tannoy summoning Inspector Sands, and most of us know it’s some sort of code for a problem, but what sort of problem?

Typically, on the London Underground, you might hear a pre-recorded announcement saying “Would Inspector Sands, please report to the operations room”, it’s a fire alarm in the operations room – or wherever Inspector Sands is asked to go to.

Not an order to evacuate or anything like that — but a way of alerting station staff that a fire alarm has gone off and that it needs investigating. Probably just someone burning the toast again, but rather than defaulting to a full evacuation every time the alarm goes off, they check it first.

The message gives TfL staff an opportunity to investigate why the fire alarm is operating and is a safety mechanism that has been agreed with the London Fire Brigade (LFB) to avoid closing stations every time a false alarm sounds.

After a while, most Londoners get used to the code being issued, and presume nothing more of it. There was a suggestion a few years back that it had caused panic and was to be scrapped, but it hasn’t been, and your correspondent has heard tests of it in new Elizabeth line stations. Frankly, it’d take a lot more than a tannoy announcement to get most Londoners to even look up from their phone/newspaper, let alone panic about it.

If you’re wondering why it’s Inspector Sands instead of, for example, Inspector Jones — it’s thought to owe its origins to the theatres, where Mr Sands is used to indicate a fire backstage, and buckets of sand are quite effective at dealing with small fires.

Why sand? It’s less damaging than a fire extinguisher — which while very good at putting out small fires so they don’t spread, they also tend to cause a lot of water damage. A bucket of sand dumped on a small fire is less damaging to the immediate surrounding area.

And as the sand can be swept up afterwards, so long as it wasn’t used to put out oil fires, it’s even recyclable.

Apart from the London Underground, Inspector Sands also serves duty on Network Rail stations as well.

Away from Inspector Sands, there’s also Codes that get called out “Code 3 on Platform 4”, tells the cleaners that someone has been sick on the platform. And that’s more useful than you think as the cleaning team have different tools for the job depending on what’s happened, and traipsing to the end of the platform only to have to go back and get a different cleaning product would be a pain.

The codes you might hear include:

• Code 1 – Blood
• Code 2 – Urine/Faeces
• Code 3 – Vomit
• Code 4 – Spillage
• Code 5 – Broken glass
• Code 6 – Litter
• Code 7 – Anything not fitting these categories