Text 1: The stairs are quicker, by Miriam Cole

An original contemporary newspaper feature.

The escalator at Northgate station is switched off before the first train. I meet maintenance engineer Salma Hussain beside its motionless steps. She does not begin with a toolbox. First, she walks the length of the machine, listening at each landing and marking two places with a stub of chalk.

“A noise is a clue, not a diagnosis,” she says. The inspection is planned: the station has recorded a rough vibration for several weeks. Salma removes a narrow panel and shines a lamp into the machinery beneath the steps. I can see a row of teeth turning slowly as she tests the drive by hand. She measures the chain, checks its tension and writes figures in a small notebook.

The problem is not a snapped part but a bearing that has worn unevenly. Salma explains that replacing it now will take most of the morning; ignoring it could damage the drive. Her colleague brings a lifting frame, and together they ease the heavy assembly onto a padded stand. Their movements are deliberate. There is no race against a clock, but every tool has to be placed where it can be found again.

With the bearing exposed, Salma compares its surface with a new one from the parts box. The old metal is scored in thin, dark arcs. She lets me turn the new bearing in my palm: it is smooth and surprisingly light. The station manager arrives to ask whether the escalator will be running for the lunchtime rush. Salma says she cannot promise that until the drive has been checked too.

By mid-morning, the steps are still behind a barrier. Salma has left a clear note for the next shift and gone to inspect another machine. Commuters climb the stairs in both directions, glancing at the silent escalator as they pass.

Text 2: The pressman's patience, by Arthur Fenwick

An original magazine article written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this article, set in 1891, a writer describes a visit to a newspaper printing works and the maintenance of its press.

Mr Pritchard took me behind the composing room, where the great press stood idle between editions. He had been summoned not by a breakdown but by a pale stripe appearing down the centre of yesterday's pages. “Ink tells tales,” he said, and asked the boy to fetch a sheet from the waste pile.

The machine was broad enough to fill the room, its iron frame bolted to the floor. Pritchard turned the flywheel a little at a time while I watched the rollers pass over the type. At one end, a narrow screw had loosened. It had tilted a roller by no more than the thickness of a coin, yet that small difference had left the centre of each sheet faint.

He stopped the wheel and loosened the collars. The apprentice wiped the roller clean while Pritchard adjusted the screw, then tightened it again. They did not hurry. A careless turn, he told me, could make the ink heavier on one side and spoil a whole stack of paper. When the roller was set, the boy inked the type and fed in a test sheet.

The first impression was dark at the edges and pale in the middle. Pritchard frowned, then spotted a lump of dried ink clinging to the roller. He scraped it away with a blunt knife. The next sheet came out evenly printed. The apprentice held it up, grinning; Pritchard only asked him to mark the setting in the maintenance book.

Outside, the edition was already being called for. Inside, Pritchard examined the test sheet under the gaslight and made the boy print another. He said a machine was not mended merely because it had moved again; it was mended when its work could be trusted.

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• what the writers say about the work of maintaining machinery
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