As we’re doing a lot of work at the moment on disused & abandoned tube stations, we thought we’d bring you an update to our Abandoned tube station map that we brought out a while back.
It’s got a few tweaks and updates – including one station that previously didn’t appear on it (Uxbridge Road) that we’ve now added.
Click the image for the full-size version!
Abandoned tube stations
Head on over to the Wikipedia article for Osterley Station and you’ll find a reference to the former station that was a little way up the line ‘Osterley & Spring Grove‘.
We’ve had this heated discussion (no, really!) with people before about whether the station was actually called Osterley Park & Spring Grove, as it seems that some people don’t think the word ‘Park’ was in there. Looking at the historical timeline diagram that the wikipedia article offers up, it’s certainly not mentioned in there.
Yet head on over to the excellent Abandoned Stations website where it talks about and they certainly do have the work ‘Park’ in the title.
We’re now going to have to fall on the ‘park’ side (and no doubt get embroiled in an edit-war on Wikipedia) after a visit to the old station this morning – now a bookshiop, where the lovely owner took time out to show us old historical photos of the former station building, clearly showing the full name as Osterley Park & Spring Grove.
Osterley Park & Spring Grove
Station Master Geoff was down there this morning, filming a sequence for the forthcoming ‘Abandoned Stations on the Underground‘ video for Londonist, which will be released on DVD before the end of the year – sneak preview here though!
From today’s Guardian. One “tube” station you’ve never heard of before!
Union Street
Celebrating the fact that it’s been 20 years since the Epping to Ongar line closed at the end of the Central Line, a tube train returned to the rails today on this part of the network. Today and all weekend, a 3-car 1960 stock Craven set will travel back on the line as part of the Epping to Ongar “End of tube” special event.
We popped up today, and although we went to see the tube stock, it’s always nice to see Met 1 and bit of steam – here at North Weald, where they have installed classic LU roundels just for this special event – this signs will disappear at the end of Sunday! So go now for photo opportunities if you want one …
North Weald Steam
This might help add a bit more shine to the tube in case you’re suffering from post-strike blues. On the second day of the strike, the London Transport Museum quietly announced that tickets are going on sale on Monday of next week for more tours down to the abandoned station Aldwych, and whereas before it’s been quite limited, they’re now opening it up for four days a week – all Thursdays to Sundays, throughout the month of June, so it should make it much easier to get tickets this time unlike on previous occasions when tickets have been limited.
Also, teasingly – this time it promises to “include some tunnels, and inter-connecting walkways – some of which have very rarely been seen by the public”. We’re not sure if that means we’ll get to see anything new from last time we went there, but we’ll be on the phone on Monday trying to get tickets too …
1938 stock at Aldwych
When the BBC ran a story a few weeks back on the allure of disused tube stations, they linked to a Ghost Station of the London Underground map which had us gasping slightly about various aspects of it.
First, it had used a version of the map that had the ELL dotted out whilst in ‘bus replacement’ mode, the zones had been left in, as had ugly connector blobs and blue-accessibility-blobs which just made it look ugly. They even included the DLR, whilst missing the fact that there are a couple of resited stations on that too!
There was no clarity between what was a proper abandoned/disused station (e.g Aldwych) and what had been re-purposed as something else (e.g the Bakerloo Line stations up to Watford that became National Rail and now London Overground).
Also, there were some glaring errors with Grove Road and Uxbridge Road stations (in the Hammersmith / Shepherd’s Bush area) actually being London & South West Railway stations, and never part of the London Underground. They’d also missed out things like Hyde Park Corner and Euston having old abandoned surface buildings, which the ardent tube-geek might like to go and spot today.
So we made from scratch (drawn ourselves, not editing a current day version of the official map) our own version, a nice, clean, and accurate map of just disused and abandoned tube stations, showing everything – correctly – in the right place, with a key to help you distinguish between the different types.
Abandoned Stations
With thanks to Bed Pedroche for his help. Click on the image for the full size, it’s a large size image, and needs to be!
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.