A TfL press release today has confirmed the plans to start the new ‘Night Tube’ service next year on the 12th September.
TfL are being upbeat and optimistic about it, the RMT union has come back highlighting issues and problems which are yet to be resolved. The BBC reports on the story here.
Night tube
Jay Foreman’s all stations tube song is now somewhat legendary already, but yesterday we heard from a lovely chap, Joseph Moëd, who pointed us in the direction of a similar thing he’d done a year before, but featuring just the stations of Zone 1…
(Joseph has since moved to Toronto in Canada, where he’s made a similar video for their subway system there…)
Another video we stumbled just recently but from the past – a posh dinner party on board a tube train? Yeah … that’s been done as these people show from a few years back on board a Jubilee Line train.
A visit to the LT Museum Acton Depot last weekend is always an enjoyable thing and never a waste of time. We always make sure we head for the mezzanine at somepoint which has all the tube maps and signs, and gawp as we go back in time to how the transport network used to be. In particular this time, a pre-Beck map for 1926 had us comparing differences between what used to be, and how it is now…
1926 Map
Here’s where Clapham North was called “Clapham Road”, and what we know as Clapham South was almost called Nightingale Lane – but this never appeared in a printed tube map, just this poster. Green Park was of course Dover Street, but on this map labelled as “Dover Street (St. James)” which we had never seen before.
Another bit of 1926
in 1926 the Hounslow Barrack to South Acton service (and Acton Town to South Acton one-carriage shuttle) was in operation – look though also at the curve of track that goes just to the right of Turnham Green – an old non-tube railway that used to run. And the lovely curve of track (when the Central Line was blue) and Wood Lane was referred to as ‘Exhibition Station’ instead.
Last bit of 1926
And out east .. when Limehouse was called Stepney East, and you can also see plenty of remnants of the railway that existed in the Docklands area before the DLR came to be, including a station at Connaught Road – now the site for a major tunnel for Crossrail.
It’s amazing what a little Googling can do for you! After we dug out the old (15 years!) Evening Standard article from yesterday about the original ‘Beat the tube’ runners, it appears that that event is still taking place – and we think with maybe some of the same people?
The run from South Kensington to Fulham Broadway took place back in May of this year – and yes, the Evening Standard covered it!
Fulham run
The internet got very excited yesterday when a viral video doing the rounds showed a man getting off a Circle Line train at Mansion House and running along the streets to get back on the same train at Cannon Street.
We saw it, but it didn’t stop loads of people tweeting us telling us about it.
The thing is – it’s been done before, and we knew we had pre-internet evidence of it too tucked away in a storage box – so last night we dug it out and scanned it in – an instance of this happening fifteen years ago in 1999, and then a repeat performance a year later in 2000, as they attempted to make it an annual event. The Evening Standard newspaper covered it both years.
(Click on the images for full size scans of the Evening Standard newspaper article)
1999 Event
The feat here though was even harder – you had to jump off the back of a District Line train at South Kensington, and then run the the 2.5 km down the Fulham Road to get back on the same train at Fulham Broadway station. And what’s more, they had no running gear – they did it in business shirts & ties.
2000 Event
Would this still be possible today? We did some quick calculations. The TfL journey planner suggests a train takes 11 minutes to travel this – although as we all know Earl’s Court (a bit like Edgware Road) is a bit of a Bermuda Triangle of the tube where anything can happen and trains can get held, so maybe you’d get a bit of extra time? Although Fulham Broadway has now dramatically changed with a new entrance that involves you running through a shopping centre and would add at least half a minute to your time.
Fast runners though can easily do a kilometre in 4 minutes, meaning that 2.5km should be doable in 10 minutes .. so yes! It’s still possible.
Perhaps the chaps in the YouTube video between Mansion House and Cannon Street would like to try this as well? Get in touch ..
There’s really only one thing we can mention today, and it’s this …
Card Clash!
It’s here! Beware the £8.60 maximum fare penalty charges on each card that you’ll get if you tap in with one card and tap out with another. TfL really want you to make sure you use the same contactless card all the time, or there will be issues!
Also, have fun getting stuck behind a whole bunch of people getting either error 70 or 71 on the tube dateline (as we did the first time we touched in with a contactless card). The first means an NFC communications error, as it’s not sure what card to read, the second means it has detected two or more cards and (luckily for the passenger) it hasn’t charged either.
Good luck out there today … we think you’re going to need it.
Brian Butterworth (follow him at @briantist) who likes to design tube maps in his spare time now and then, came up with a projected tube map of the future last week – what the network might look like in 2050, if all the future TfL plans and new lines actually come to fruition and are added to the map.
Click on the small image here to get a VERY large image (in SVG format) of the whole thing!
Briantist Map
The LT Museum Depot at Acton is open this weekend for the second time this year, and it’s a haven for geeks! What do you mean you’ve never been?
Full details on the LTmuseum website of what to expect – or here’s Vicki a few of years ago with video of what to expect!
TfL released their consultation a couple of days ago about a proposed extension to the London Overground which would extend it east and south by 4 kilometres – mostly over existing track but a new section over a new piece of proposed line to bring a railway station to the housing development planned at Barking Riverside.
Diamond Geezer looks at the social issues here, but for the consultation you’ll want to look at the TfL page here.
What we liked most of all though, because of how oddly strange it looks, is the new proposed London Overground map, which also contains the section between Romford and Upminster which may go over to the London Overground.
Click on the section of the map here to get the large PDF of the whole thing …
Barking Riverside