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Tube Status at a Glance on Apple Watch

Your Apple Watch has finally arrived!  Oh, you’re still waiting too?

But when it does finally land on your wrist, you’ll be wanting something to tell you the state of the Tube at a glance won’t you!

Well, we have just the thing!  Visual Tube Status for Apple Watch!

VisualTubeBezel_42mm

The Apple Watch is all about (we believe) short (~5 second) interactions, called “Glances”.  Swipe up from the watch face and you can see a single screen of information at a glance.  We spent a long time thinking about how to quickly convey which lines were having problems and think we found the answer, with this target-cum-roundel-style graphic…

Watch Glance

The Tube was obviously having a very bad day when we took this screenshot, but it shows the colours of the lines that were having problems.  In fact it was early on Sunday 19th April 2015 – the Central, Northern and Overground lines were on weekend closure for maintenance, the Circle, Hammersmith & City and Metropolitan lines were having Severe Delays and the Waterloo & City line was closed as usual.

But whatever’s going on, Visual Tube generates the image to show you the state of all the lines at the time you glance at it, so you’ll quickly know if there’s something you need to take into account on your commute.

Want to know more details?  Tap the Glance on Apple Watch, and you’ll be taken to the lines view where you can see a more detailed list of the lines with the problem lines at the top.  Tap a line that’s not showing “Good Service” to see all the details.  This was Tuesday morning when the Central line had a derailment of an engineers’ train. (The Glance showed just a red symbol).

Watch LinesWatch Central Delay

And on the (rare in the last couple of weeks) occasions when there is a “Good Service” you’ll be able to see the green tick.

Watch Glance Good Service

Head on over to the Watch App Store in the Apple Watch App on your iPhone to get hold of Visual Tube for Apple Watch (tap the search icon and search for “Visual Tube”).

(Visual Tube works on the iPhone and iPad too, but today’s all about the Apple Watch so we’ll tell you about those features another time!)

24 Apr 15

D Derailment

A small hiccup in Ealing Common depot occurred earlier this week, when a 3-car unit (half a normal train) being moved about had a small issue and became derailed.  It meant that no unit that would normally enter the depot from Ealing Common station could do so, and had to do so via Acton Town instead.

This Station Master was caught in that delay which is how we knew about it!

D-Stock Derailment

D-Stock Derailment

 

05 Feb 15

Closed at South Ken

Closed sign

Closed sign

Our favourite station to avoid (due the thousands of tourists who dither in front of the barrier gates daily) has a couple of redeeming features about it – our favourite being the information office at the eastern end of the sub-surface platforms.

The best thing about them is that they had two computer monitors up in the windows of an internal-tracking system that showed exactly where the next few trains were on the system, how many minutes they were away, and messages such as ‘Approaching … now’ so you could get a real sense of where/when the next trains were.

Closed Office

Closed Office

So we were disappointed to see last week that it’s now been closed with a sign telling you to go up to the ticket office area instead – which is shame. It’s very helpful (especially at an extremely busy tourist station at South Ken) to have staff to talk to! Yet another demise of something useful on the Underground.

31 Jul 14

Circle Time

You know how Circle Line trains are the rarest thing on the tube? Well that’s because they run to their own special schedule … so special that they’re out of sync with the rest of the Underground – as proved here at Aldgate station.  Another thing to fix please, TfL before you start trying to give us a 24-hour tube service!

Aldgate Clocks

Aldgate Clocks

We later found out that the Circle Line clock (on the right) was actually correct, and it was the Met Line clock that was wrong! Photo courtesy of @squarewheels_

 

27 Feb 14