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Unusual platform at Finchley Road

With major tunnelling works taking place on the Jubilee line over the Easter weekend, there are no Jubilee line services between Finchley Road and Waterloo.

We always like it when something like this happens, as it means you get to see an unusual working – in the case a Jubilee train departing northbound out of Platform 3, which is where they normally run through southbound.

Watching the movements for a few minutes revealed that the normal northbound platform for Jubilee line services (Platform 2) was closed altogether and trains instead were scheduled every 5 minutes to arrive into Platform 3, and then reverse out north again.

Interestingly on the hand-written sign though, we can’t work out why NEASDEN is so important as to be written all in upper case?

Engineering — — 20 Apr 14

Bond Street Closures

Normally TfL make quite a noise and give you a lot of advance warning about station closures, but it feels as if this one has crept up on us.

It was only when we saw something in the Metro two weeks ago that we became first aware of it, but now signs are springing up all over the place on the network – with quite a short period of notice.

Another sign

Bond Street is having a lot of work done to it for Crossrail meaning that there will be no Central Line trains stopping at it for three months, and no Jubilee Line trains stopping at it for six months! That’s a hefty amount of time for such a major station in the Zone 1 area.

The shutdown starts on the 23rd of April, which is Wednesday of next week. The full document from TfL can be found here.

Engineering — — 19 Apr 14

Easter Bus

That nice chap Tim Dunn created a rather fun picture doing the rounds on the internet yesterday which we rather like – although targeted towards National Rail services (and closure by Network Rail over the weekend) the Tube is having its fair share of replacement bus services (e.g. on the District Line) over the weekend.

Happy Easter everyone!

Easter Replacement Buses

Engineering / Fun — — 18 Apr 14

London’s Longest Pub Crawl

We stumbled upon another Tube themed blog that we liked yesterday – that of the one written by Sam Cullen who is visiting one pub for each of the 270 stations on the network, and he’s just passed his 100th stop – West Ham.

The Mission (as he describes it) is to “Visit a pub for each of the 270 stations on the network.”

270 stops on this pub crawl

His journey started in March 2013 at Paddington Station, where the first train on what is now the Underground departed on 9th January 1863 and is progressing in the order each Underground station opened to the public.

Fun — — 17 Apr 14

Professionally drawn maps

We’re considering hiring John Cutts (@CEOJohnCutts) here at Station Master to help us draw up some of the 3D Station Maps. He recently sent us a pictorial CV, as a demonstration of his work …

Nicely drawn map

Alternative Tube Maps / Fun — — 16 Apr 14

Come on board

Thanks to the nice people over at TfL Accessibility for giving us a plug today, they’ve been mentioning on their Twitter feed over the past few days the winners of their competition that they ran last year, of which we were one of the four winners.

TfL Accessibility

Station Master does indeed have comprehensive accessibility information about all the Tube, Overground and DLR stations in London, telling you exactly how many steps there are, if there are lifts and/or escalators at each stations, and with 3D maps too of the stations so you can visualise what it’s going to be like to access before you even travel there!

Buy the App from the iTunes store here.

Accessibility — — 15 Apr 14

Mapping Stratford

A lot of people ask us ‘How do you draw your 3D maps of the stations?’ and when we give them details of what software we use they say ‘No, no!’ as they mean how do we know how to draw them?

It’s because we go to each station in turn – with a notebook – and draw out a rough sketch of what its’s like, and then if we have to – go back and visit it again and fill in any details we might have missed and check that we’ve got it right.

We’re down to the last few maps to do (there are less than 10 left for us to draw to have completed all 270 tube stations) and one of the last tricky ones is Stratford! It’s got to be the most complicated station on the whole network, with two Tube lines, National Rail, The Overground and two different branches of the DLR all coming together.

And here’s how it looks in the very early stages of us designing it and putting it together. It’ll take a while, but it will be done!

Stratford 3D Map

3D Maps — — 14 Apr 14

Untitled

Station Master passed through Paddington yesterday (on the H&C/Circle Line platforms) and couldn’t help but spot the signs on the platforms that were put in place when the S-Stock were starting to be rolled out. It was to notify passengers the C-Stock trains (being shorter in length) wouldn’t go all the way to the back of the platform.

Well, with all the C-Stocks gone now, TfL could really do with taking the signs down, but something even more bizarre happened whilst we were there – what looked like a Station Supervisor, was showing around what looked like two new members of staff, and we clearly overheard him say ‘The C Stock trains don’t come all the way down here, only the new S-Stock ones do’.

Errm, perhaps someone should tell him that all the C Stock trains are now gone, and a passenger train with that stock will never stop there again!

Signage / Upgrades — — 12 Apr 14

No more cash on buses

It’s been coming for a while, but now a date has been set. You’ll no longer be able to use cash to pay for bus fares as from Sunday July 6th from this year. You will either have to use an Oyster card, or a bank card that also works as a contactless card, that will charge the same ‘cash’ fare as an Oyster card.

What happens if a contactless bank card fails to work though? In our experience, we see plenty of people wave an Oyster card at the reader on a bus, but it gives the error-beep rather than the ‘happy beep’ and the driver in most cases does nothing about it and the person rides the bus anyway. Will it be easier to say ‘Oh my bank card should work’ and pretend a non-contactless card is a contactless one, as there are many differing designs of bank cards, but Oyster cards all look the same.

Contactless on buses

Buses / Oyster — — 11 Apr 14

Alternative Poetry

Ah, you’ve all seen those badly-scanning poems on the tube that advise of things like to take your newspaper with you, yes? They irritate us just as much as you – don’t worry, but someone’s finally done something about it.

The Poke website have got a whole page with parodies of them – and whilst we haven’t actually seen one on a train yet, surely it can’t be long until someone actually does print one out and stick it up for real … right?

Don’t be a twat

Fun — — 10 Apr 14

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