The interchange with the Central Line at Tottenham Court Road is now closed for a year, and you’ve only got one week left to see this area (and the mosaics) before it’s closed completely. This includes some of the entrances, which will never be open again when the new ticket office opens on January 12th. The Central Line interchange re-opens in December 2015.
Central Line Closed
The posters up at the station said ‘July 2014‘ that it would be open, so it’s only five months late in coming, but the new entrance/exit at Hammersmith H&C/Circle Line station is now open. There are five standard sized gates, and two wide aisle gates, and is predominantly being used as an exit from the station, with the original gateline being used as entry only.
Actually, there’s now some work being done on the gateline at the original entrance – as they perhaps install a wide gate there too, so we won’t have a final count on the number of gates at the station until that work is done … who knows when?
New gateline
With the Northern Line escalators currently out of action at King’s Cross and passengers being diverted the long way round, there are lots of posters up on the platforms to say ‘This way..’ and take you to where you want to go.
Except that here, the arrow pointing to the right is odd, because visible to the left is the staircase that takes you up to the Piccadilly Line. If you follow the sign, it will take you at least five minutes to get to the Piccadilly platforms, however, if you take the stairs that you can see in the background of this photo, it will take you 30 seconds!
Not this way
Flagged as being back open by ‘mid-December’, it was a pleasant surprise to find Jubilee line trains stopping again today at Bond Street station as the works finished early. However, due to the nature of the works you’re not able to enter or exit at the station, you’re only able to change between the two lines at the station if that’s what you want to do!
The station entrance/exit should re-open by mid-December, as planned though.
Bond Street open again
We were lucky enough in the last few days to get a ride in one of the two new shiny lifts at Covent Garden. The station has been exit only since February of this year whilst two of the lifts have been replaced, and we can now report on the new lifts!
New Covent Garden Lift
We timed it, and on average the lift is about 8 seconds faster than the old ones. Their capacity is also 56 people – six more than the 50 of the old lifts. All this will help get more people moving. But perhaps the smartest thing is that the doors now have intelligent software installed, meaning that they can sense if no one is getting in or out at a certain leve, and rather than lingering around for wasted time, it’ll shut the doors and whizz back up or down to collect people who may be waiting at the other level.
All in all – people should be shunted up and down more quickly than before!
The respite is only for a couple of months over the Christmas period though – come February of 2015, Covent Garden will become exit only again whilst the other two lifts are replaced, and you’ll have to wait until November of next year for the station to be fully open again.
Latimer Road Closure
It is frustrating that we can find nothing about this on the TfL website, and that the only way that we knew about it was by seeing a poster at Hammersmith tube station the other day.
Latimer Road will be half-closed throughout most of October as you won’t be able to get on or off an eastbound (towards Baker Street) train for several weeks whilst work is being done.
It was only a couple of years ago that the station was closed completely for several months whilst they extended the platforms, and now it’s being part closed again …
A tweet doing the rounds last night pointed us in the direction of the Construction Enquirer website, which was running the story that a preferred bidder for the Northern Line extension had been announced.
The project is still awaiting approval from the government’s Transport Secretary, but assuming it gets the nod (as is expected) construction is due to start early next year.
Full story on their website here.
Northern Line Extension
We noticed this when passing through Embankment the other day – all the shops in the ticket hall area have now been closed – permanently – and the southern entrance/exit is having tiling work done.
We spoke to a member of station staff who said that the shops were going to be replaced with a ‘Pop up shop’ instead, followed quickly by ‘Or maybe a Marks & Spencer’s’, which seem like two different things to us. We’ll keep an eye on it, to see what they put there … but that means we’ll have to update our App (and Map!) for facilities at this station!
Closed shops
We spotted this on some publicity the other day concerning Gloucester Road – sure Piccadilly trains aren’t stopping there whilst the lifts are replaced, but what’s this below? NO TRAINS at all for a few weeks at the end of July and beginning of August? Surely that’s just at weekends, right?
Piccadilly Closures
Err, no. We checked out the TfL Planned Works calendar – and there must be some major work taking place as there really are no Piccadilly services beyond Rayners Lane for 20 days, and the Metropolitan is affected too, with trains only going as far as Rusilip. This means there will be NO TUBE TRAINS at all beyond Ruislup and Uxbridge between July 19th and August the 10th. Replacement buses will of course operate
No trains to Uxbridge!
Not stopping at Gloucester Road
We spotted this last week, but forget to mention it .. so let’s mention it now – another ‘last minute’ closure that TfL have snuck up upon us (normally in the past there’s been a lot of notice on these things, but not this time) Gloucester Road will not have Piccadilly Line trains stopping at it for six months between Saturday 24th May until December whilst they replace the lifts at the station.
Circle and District Line trains will stop as per normal, meaning you’ll have to change to these lines if you normally get the Piccadilly Line here.
There is a full news article about in on the TfL website.
That now means there’s quite a few closures in the Zone 1 area at the moment – Covent Garden is currently exit only, at Bond Street – Central Line trains aren’t currently stopping (and when they resume again, Jubilee Line trains then won’t stop) and of course at Embankment, the long term works there means that Bakerloo and Northern Lines still aren’t stopping. That’s a lot of Zone 1 disruption!