Station Master App

Victorian Machinery

Last trains of the are almost always a good way of seeing different train movements that you don’t normally get during the regular day service, or I find it’s always fun to be on a train that gets ‘lamped out’. Or you’ll often last thing on the tube see a yellow battery-powered maintenance loco come trundling through a station, but here’s something I hadn’t seen before.

Travelling home on the 00:09 last Victoria Line train out of Walthamstow to Brixton, some rather unusual passengers got on at Seven Sisters – a whole gang of maintenance engineers – who’d obviously decided that the fastest way to get their gear to tonight’s job was to take it on a passenger train with them!

Lots of large pieces of scary looking tools and machinery got loaded on, whilst the driver had to wait many seconds longer than he normally would until they signalled to him that they were all clear … and they went one stop to Finsbury Park, where they took a good minute to unload it all again.

Victoria Machinery

Uncategorized — — 11 Jan 14

TubeSquared

We stumbled again upon Chromaroma the other day – the game you play with your Oyster card that lets you score points as you travel around London touching in and out at tube stations completing ‘missions’ and generally trying to be the most travelled person in town.

But we never really liked doing it because it only worked with Pay as you Go users (no good for us Oyster travelcard holders), and also because you had to give them your username and password to the Oyster system, so that they could scrape your journey info from TfL and bring it into their own system.

Which is why we’ve been busy trying to complete something more straightforward – checking into every tube station using Foursquare.

Geofftech has got two lists on the site covering all the stations – split because on Foursquare, there is a maximum limit of 200 places, so it’s not possible to have all 270 tube stations on one list, so below the ‘Zone 1’ list has had a few Zone 2 stations put into it, to allow the ‘rest of…’ to max out at 200.

We’re now just two check-ins aways for completing all the tube stations in London. In San Francisco (where Foursquare originated) you get the ‘Subway Rat’ badge for travelling to all the station on the BART. We suspect nothing will happen when you tick off all 270 tube stations, but wouldn’t it be great if London had an equivalent ‘Tube Badge’, once you’d checked into all of them?

Foursquare List – Tube Challenge (200 tube stations outside of Zone 1)
Foursquare List – Zone 1 Stations (The other 70 Stations)

Foursquare List – DLR Challenge (All 45 DLR Stations)
Foursquare List – Overground Challenge (All 82 Stations)

Tube — — 10 Jan 14

Overground to Chingford, Cheshunt and Enfield

We’re a little puzzled here as to why this became a ‘news’ story again this week, when the Evening Standard ran a story that had already been confirmed back in July 2013 – that TfL were taking control of the West Anglia services out of Liverpool Street to Chingford, Cheshunt and Enfield.

In fact the only ‘new’ thing that we could find (but we’d assumed anyway) is that the new Overground service will indeed appear on the tube map.

The ES and Time Out Blog (who got excited about it too) ran a clean map showing what the services would look like out of Liverpool Street, but what’s actually worth considering is how messy this is going to look when you throw in all the other tube lines – and Crossrail as well.
Knowing that TfL have publicly stated their desire to take over more inner suburban London rail services, to become ‘Overground’ too – at what point is the tube map going to look just too cluttered and TfL will have to bow to the pressure of a redesign?

Of course, a map for all railway services already exists, but you don’t see this in printed pocket form at tube stations – and that’s where we suspect something new is going to have to be created. If they keep adding in new Overground lines, the map is going to look horribly cluttered and not that usable or readable at that size – look for example how squashed London Fields, Cambridge Heath and Bethnal Green already are – so surely something, somewhere, is going to have to change…

Map / Overground — — 09 Jan 14

No Bakerloo or Northern at Embankment

A reminder that work started today at Embankment station to replace the old escalators down to both the Bakerloo and Northern Line platforms, meaning that from today – and until November when it is projected work will be finished, only District and Circle line trains will be stopping at Embankment station. This is actually the only new thing that we’ve spotted on the latest tube map, everything else looks the same as before!

TfL point out on their website, that it’s literally a 60 second walk up or down Villiers street between Embankment station and Charing Cross meaning you can get to your Bakerloo and Northern Line services there instead.

Engineering / Escalators / Map / Tube — — 08 Jan 14

Detailed LU Track Map

Ah, you have to love the Freedom of Information Act, under which large companies and corporations are obliged to release certain information to the public upon request.

The latest gem to emerge is from a request to LU/TfL here, where someone had requested a detailed signalling and track plan map.

They don’t quite meet the requirements with their response (if you read it carefully you can see why they don’t have to), but they do link to a rather fabulous – and previously unseen by this Station Master – map of the Underground, a small section of which we’ve got for you here.

Follow this link for the full map, but be aware it’s 17MB in size, so will take a longer time to download on slow connections.

Pedants will note that it’s a little out of date where in concerns non-Tube lines, if you look closely at Stratford it still shows the old ‘Silverlink’ North London Line track which has now been replaced by the DLR. You might argue too, that the Thameslink track to Barbican shouldn’t be shown, as this service no longer runs and is being turned into Crossrail, but it’s still a beautifully detailed map that even shows disused stations and unfinished ones (such as Bull & Bush on the Northern Line).

LU Track Plan Map

Map / Tube — — 08 Jan 14

Labyrinth Update

So it’s coming to almost a year since Art on the Underground announced that they were installing 270 unique labyrinth artworks at all tube stations – in the order that the 2009 record holder for ‘All stations, fastest time’ followed, and we wondered just how many had been installed now, and how many we’d found.

A quick count up on the AotU website, reveals that their maps shows that 239 of them have now been installed, with with just 31 left – although we’re still betting that Heathrow Terminal 5 (a non-LU owned station) may prove problematic for AotU to install that station’s labyrinth at.

In terms of spotting them, they’re still not that easy to find – their own website usefully and usually shows at least four photos at each station to give away their location, but some of the stations just have one picture of the labyrinth and no ‘location’ shots, meaning to find it you have to go there and hunt it down for yourself.

Over at Geofftech, there’s a list now of 123 that have been found, and we’re trying to fill in the gaps. So if any of the missing ones are for your local station or a station that you travel to frequently, fancy dropping us a tweet to help us fill in the gaps? Maybe there’s even a new one at one of the last remaining 31 stations that AotU haven’t told us about yet, and we can get well on the way to filling in all 270 …

Art on the Underground / Labyrinths — — 07 Jan 14

The Case of the Bad Continuity

Twitter exploded in a frenzy the other night when halfway through the new Sherlock episode The Empty Hearse, there were some continuity issues with the tube train scenes. But there were a couple of other things that we noticed too…

It was set up nicely at nine minutes in that there might be some more tube-action to come when Martin Freeman is travelling on a Jubilee Line train – and yet this is interspersed with some cab-view images from a subsurface train, a shot travelling through Tower Hill, and then one going eastbound through Blackfriars is clearly visible.

Then onto the main feast one hour in – the CCTV images are labelled St. James’s Park with again it clearly being a Jubilee Line train, and the shots all filmed at the disused Jubilee Line platforms at Charing Cross. Sixty two minutes in and the action switched to the characters entering Westminster – I’d like to think that they filmed that, not out of hours, but during normal operations as the clocks on the departure boards show 21:34.

The next scenes (supposedly in the same station) are filmed back at Charing Cross again – in the corridor leading to the Northern Line, and they then enter a service shaft – which is real because we’ve been in it! It’s the old ventilation shaft for again the disused Jubilee Line platforms.

They climb down and enter a long tunnel with sleepers piled to the side – this is the service tunnel used during construction of the station, and runs north from Charing Cross and goes right underneath Trafalgar Square.

Then, they appear on the platforms of the abandoned Aldwych station – whilst all the time making out that they’re still beneath Westminster and the Houses of Parliament.

And the the huge continuity mistake which had all the ardent enthusiasts screaming blue murder. They approach a train – red in colour on the front – which is an old 1972 Northern Line stock train, and one that is kept parked between Holborn and Aldwych.

They then proceed to get on this train, and it really gets a bit silly. The inside-the-train shots of the carriage, are clearly a modern-day District Line train – a subsurface train which is squarer in shape, and not a deep level ‘tube’ shaped train. And this subsurface train (complete with under-seat and under-floor wires and timers) looked very much like it was in “tube” tunnel – because it was actually a set specifically built for the shoot.

So they’ve gone from a Jubilee train, to an old Northern one, to a modern-day District one. (And at 45 minutes in when they meet the guy that has the CCTV footage, he even says “I work on the District Line” – when all the main shots are of Jubilee Line trains).

And there the action ends … and we haven’t even mentioned the massive plot hole that in real life a whole tube carriage could not go ‘missing’ without being noticed. Nor does it take five minutes for a train to travel between Westminster and St. James Park (it takes two), for them to be able to add on another whole five minutes for the journey to take ten to allow them time to ‘remove’ a carriage.

There’s one other thing to mention – a touch which I don’t think anyone else mentioned on Twitter on the night, but we spotted … at 46 minutes in when Sherlock is having one of his ‘deep thinking’ moments, there are several fast sequences where a tube map is super-imposed – here showing it on these escalators – and it’s not a modern day map – it’s an old 1930’s pre-Beck map, that has been subtly inserted in, and we really liked that.

One final thing to mention – ‘Sumatra Road’ station – which is meant to be the tube station that never was, is actually a reference to The Giant Rat of Sumatra, which first appears in a 1924 original Sherlock Holmes story.

Buzzfeed and IanVisits all picked up on it too.

Disused Stations / Tube on TV — — 05 Jan 14

Tube Kultura

A small plug for a tube-related event taking place the week after next. Andy Green from www.tubespiration.com has oganised the event ‘Tube Kultura’ feature a mixture of guests with London Underground themed interests.

The ‘Kultura’ name comes from ‘PechaKucha’, a presentation style that originated in Tokyo. Instead of long, rambling presentations, people are invited to make short snappt points – everything summed up in just six minutes, which tends to leave people with a bigger impression – and if they want to know more they can talk to you afterwards.

Andy’s London event includes the man who created a tube map based on taste, a tube worker that records sounds on the underground and makes songs from them, a poet, and also someone familiar to us all – the current record holder for travelling to all London tube stations in the fastest time possible.

The event takes places at Toynbee Studios (nearest tube: Aldgate East) on Wednesday 15th January. Tickets are £5 and should be bought in advance from this website here.

Events / Tube — — 04 Jan 14

Station Master 1.7.1 released

iOS 7 icon

We released the new iOS 7 version of Station Master on the last day before the App Store shut down for its Christmas break, which means it’s taken us until now to put through a small revision to fix a couple of minor issues.

During the time we’ve added another and updated a couple more maps again, so that’s now 84% of tube stations mapped out in 3D.

Either way, make sure you download the update today to get the latest version, or if you’ve not bought it at all yet, head over to the App Store and buy it now!

We’ve also been experimenting with the design on the 3D Map ‘Info Box’ which each one has – by incorporating the tile design that that station has into the background box … here’s the one for Belsize Park for example.

3D Maps / App update — — 03 Jan 14

Piccadilly to Ealing Broadway … permanently?

Piccadilly Line to Ealing Broadway

A thought that’s been discussed before but one worth mentioning again here on the blog is what happens when the S7 stock trains are rolled out onto the District Line.

Let’s look at a couple of things that have been in previous posts here on this blog. We know that 1973 stock Piccadilly trains can run to Ealing Broadway ok, and we know that S7 District trains are running in and out of Olympia in a regular hourly service.

So what happens when all the D-Stock trains are replaced? When the current District trains are all replaced by S-Stock (by 2015) it raises up an interesting thought – why not swap round the western end of the District and Piccadilly Lines.

The Piccadilly could then concentrate on going to Heathrow, with a smaller ‘spur’ off to Ealing Broadway. If there’s any disruption in service, Ealing Broadway could almost be considered an reversing siding for Picc trains to turn and come back again.

The District – using S-Stock – would then go on up to Rayners Lane and Uxbridge meaning that the same style stock would be used on the stretch of the line – rather than mixed height (as we have at the moment), meaning that it would be so much easier to make that stretch of the tube map have step-free from platform to the train, with just one type of train.

But running a District service from Upminster to Uxbridge is a loooong way, which is where Olympia comes into play. You could have a District Line service that runs from Uxbridge to High Street Kensington, and an Upminster service that runs into Olympia, thus replacing the odd ‘shuttle’ that used to/still does take place between these two stations.

You might therefore see the District Line completely changing its service patterns to look like this:

Uxbridge to High Street Kensington
Wimbledon to Upminster
Wimbledon to Edgware Road
Uxbridge to Mansion House
Richmond to Upminster
Olympia to Plaistow

Future services / Map / Tube — — 02 Jan 14

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