Station Master App

Five car Overground

Out of the fleet of 25 trains required to service the East London Line part of the Overground, the halfway point for the extended trains has been reached, as 13 units are now five cars in length.

Whitechapel, Wapping – and here at Rotherhithe though – are three stations on that line where the fifth carriage doesn’t fit, (you can just make it out in this picture here). The fifth car sits in the darkness of the tunnel, and Selective Door Opening makes sure that the doors in the last carriage don’t open into the tunnel.

Five car Overground train

Overground / Upgrades — — 06 Feb 15

West Brompton Extension

With five car trains arriving on the London Overground, many of the platforms have been extended. An oddity arising from this can be found at West Brompton, where due to the southbound Overground trains now stopping further forward than they used to, it has been possible to open up another space in the fence that is adjacent to the eastbound District Line platform.

This exit data has been added to Station Master and will be in the next release!

New West Brompton

Overground / Upgrades — — 27 Jan 15

Victoria Station Upgrade

Both Station Masters, Geoff & Matt, got to go underground at Victoria Tube station last week to look first hand at the upgrade work taking place to expand the capacity of the station. The new entrance will be complete in 2016, with the whole upgrade finished by 2018 …. it’s a Londonist exclusive!

Upgrades / Video — — 23 Dec 14

Jubilee reopens at Bond Street

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

Engineering / Upgrades — — 24 Nov 14

Embankment Re-opens

New Embankment Escalator

Embankment station re-opened last week on the Northern and Bakerloo lines and so we popped down to have a look at the new escalators. We noted that it’s only some of the escalators that have been replaced, others are still the same old ones.

Amusingly, the down escalator to the southbound Northern Line was already broken when we paid a visit, with many men from OTIS standing round in their bright orange jackets wondering how they were going to make it work again.

New tiling

Many of the passageways have also had a complete facelift, with nice new shiny cream tiles along many of the corridors and the stairwells, so it looks all clean and new, although other parts of the station could still do with a scrub – the northbound Bakerloo line platform here looks rather dull and uninspiring,

But the best bit the very best bit – is some of the new signage that they’ve installed, and a blatant error that appears!

Willesden Green is now on the Bakerloo Line!

Wrong!

On the Bakerloo Line maps they’ve put ‘Willesden Green’ instead of Willesden Junction, which is hilarious … Willesden Green of course is on the Jubilee Line.

So someone has had some ‘JCTN’ stickers made up (not even the full word!) to cover them up, but they’ve missed one and we found where it was …

Escalators / Signage / Upgrades — — 07 Nov 14

S Stock Collision

S7 Damage

Details have now come out about a minor collision between two District Line trains last week.

It occurred near Putney Bridge between two of the new S7 trains running on the branch between Wimbledon and Edgware Road, and all new S Stock trains were immediately withdrawn, whilst an investigation took place.

It also led to the unusual occurrence of some C Stock trains not running to Wimbledon and being sent to Ealing Broadway and Richmond instead.

D Stock trains continued to run to Wimbledon as normal.

The story appears in the Evening Standard and on the BBC News website.

Infrastructure / Tube / Upgrades — — 10 May 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

S-Stock at Ealing

Another view from the Acton Depot last weekend, where the open day allowed us to wander down to the fence at the far end where you can get a view through it of some building work going on.

Depot Extension

The metal extension to the Ealing Common depot can only be because the S7 stock trains are longer, and so they need to extend the building a little so that it can accommodate the length of the new trains. S7’s are coming to Ealing!

S7 at Ealing Common

And as if to back it up, we then spotted an S7 hidden away as well behind a regular ‘D’ Stock District Line train.

Upgrades — — 23 Mar 14

Wimbleware 7’s

We took a trip out on the Wimbleware branch yesterday to check up on the progress of the roll-out of the S-Stock to the line. It’s served by eight ‘C’ stocks normally, and so we made a note of how many were still being run by C’s and how many new S7’s we saw.

S7 at Fulham Broadway

Four is the answer … although we did spot a C Stock in the sidings at Parsons Green as well, which looked all fired up and ready to go if needed.

Which means that the days of the ‘C’ stock, really are getting close to being numbered! Any day now, there will be an announcement for a rail tour for the final run of these units, the S’s will be on the Edgware Road to Wimbledon line, which means they’ll then start to make an appearance on the rest of the District Line proper …

Tube / Upgrades — — 14 Mar 14

Victorian Northern

This still tends to confuse us .. especially if we get onto the train at Stockwell or Euston. Think you’ve got onto a Northern Line train? You have! It’s just that the units that have been refurbished for a moment make you look twice at the line diagram on the carriage wall because you think from the bright shiny floor pattern that you’re in a Victoria Line carriage.

Victoria Line Carriage?

Then you see the dark blue grab poles (You know… Dark blue, the colour of the Northern Line) and the seat patterns and all is good. But it still doesn’t look very ‘Northern’ to us, more Victorian!

Tube / Upgrades — — 04 Mar 14

Recent Posts

Archives

Upgrades