It’s been a while since we stumbled across this one, but we found it again lurking in a place where it shouldn’t have been in our archives last night and it felt like we’d better share it again.
Take the tube map – flip it upside down and then map out where the places on the tube would be if south London had the generous share of tube stops the north of London currently enjoys. (Click map for larger version)
Upside down map
Station Master Geoff made a new production for Londonist, this time out on the DLR.
Update: We can’t believe no one’s noticed this yet, so we’re going to mention it. Look closely at the captions. Take the FIRST letter of every caption – write them down, and see what it spells out!
As part of the London Infrastructure plan for 2050 that TfL released, Ian over at Randomly London highlighted the hotspots of the tube by 2031.
We see no mention of Crossrail or the Overground on TfL’s map though … ?
London 2031
The new station link between Walthamstow Central and Walthamstow Queens Road is almost open … almost.
It’s only taken almost 20 years to happen since it was first touted, and talking to the station staff at Queens Road yesterday, they said it was all “Down to the council digging their heels in with red tape” which had slowed it down.
New Entrance/Exit
The new ramped entrance at Walthamstow Queens Road has in fact been in place since 2013, and there are articles online suggesting that it would have been open last summer, but instead – it now really looks as if it will open next Monday – 11th August.
There’s a new footpath through the car park too – which is necessary to form a quick path between the two stations, and it’s been named Ray Dudley Way after a long standing member of Barking to Gospel Oak Rail User Group (BGORUG) who sadly passed away last year without seeing this project come to fruition.
Through the car park
But for the geeks amongst us, it means that you’ll be able to change between the Victoria Line and the Overground here in a short 2-3 minute walk instead of the 6-7 that it took previously.
Walthamstow Map
Contactless Card
With the contactless roll out for all modes of transport still set for Tuesday 16th September – TfL have got ahead of the game a little, by enabling its Monday to Sunday fare capping system for those using contactless cards to pay on buses.
You can read the full press release here, but it’s summarised here in these two paragraphs:
“Bus customers paying for their journeys with a contactless payment card will now benefit from having their fares capped, automatically calculating the best value for their contactless travel over a seven-day period. The added benefit is part of Transport for London’s (TfL) huge range of improvements for customers making it easier and more convenient for them to pay for their travel.
“Daily fares for bus journeys are capped at £4.40, the same as they are for Oyster, meaning that after the fourth journey each day, any further bus travel is not charged. A Monday to Sunday cap now also applies for users of contactless payment cards at £20.20, the equivalent of a weekly Bus and Tram Pass. The development of this technology is the first step towards the next generation of Oyster. “
Andy Drizen over at Tube Tracker posted a cool picture of the tube on twitter yesterday – using his software to plot real time position of trains, he then stripped everything else away just leaving us with ‘blobs’ showing you where the trains are. the results of which are …
Tube Tracker ‘Blob’ map
Hanger Lane Sign
TfL have been sneaky buggers and gone and snuck in a brand new station on the Central Line without telling anyone!
In fact, it had us confused for a moment, as we thought they’d connected up the Central Line to a Hammersmith & City / Circle Line station – but that’s Shepherd’s Bush Market, but no! This is a brand new station.
What are we talking about? Well the platform signage at Hanger Lane tells the tale, here are the signs on the platform from a distance.
Hanger Lane Signage
Then, when you get up close, you realise something a little odd about one of the station names – that’s right, instead of ‘Shepherd’s Bush’, they’ve indicated that the Central Line stops at ‘Shepherd’s Bush Green‘ which is new to us!
Shepherds Bush Green on the Central Line
It’s not the first time that this has happened – LU have form, for adding in the word ‘Green’, there used to be a sign (see it here) at Mile End station indicating that the District Line stopped at a station called Putney Green. They removed it in 2010. I wonder how long it’ll take them to correct this one at Hanger Lane …
(Thanks to Shrey Puranik for the heads up on this)
Update – We’ve heard on Twitter that there might be a sign like this at Chancery Lane too, we’ll pop down later for a photo…
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
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.
On Wednesday evening at 7pm, TFL are having a ‘#AskTFL’ session on Twitter, where you can ask Shashi Verma about new contactless payment system. We believe though that we’ve already got the answers to the two questions which have been bugging us most:
How do ticket/revenue inspectors check you’ve tapped in with a contactless card?
Unlike Oyster, nothing is written or stored on a contactless bank card – the system just knows what card you’ve used. So if you are stopped by a revenue inspector when on the tube, the (new) device that they use records the tap of your card and is then checked overnight to determine if that same card was used to tap in at the start of a journey earlier. If not – then a Revenue Inspection Charge (different to a penalty fare) is applied to the offending card.
This might mean though that if you have more than one contactless card, and you accidentally present the wrong one, you’ll be charged more for the journey that you are making.
(TfL wouldn’t answer our question about what the Revenue Inspection Charge would be in the #AskTfL session referenced above, so we FOI’d TfL and were told: “When, as a consequence of revenue inspection activity, we detect that a customer had not touched in at the start of their journey when using a contactless payment card, the inspection event will result in the customer being charged a maximum Oyster fare (as referenced in the TfL Conditions of Carriage available via the following link. [1]http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/terms-an…, being issued with a Penalty Fare Notice or referred for prosecution.”)
What happens if you don’t have any money in your contactless account?
TfL are able to settle some of the transactions that the card issuer may decline, and if a card issuer declines a transaction the system will not allow the card to start new journeys.
Upon a decline, the issuer will still honour the value of the transaction up to a certain amount (on average, more than the daily charge on Oyster Pay as you Go), so the card issuer takes most (not not all) of the risk on declined cards.
All of this is is possible because of the TTM (Transit Transaction Model) that TfL and the card issuers have created to make contactless payments possible.
iOS 7 icon
Happy birthday to us! Happy birthday to us!
Station Master has been on the App Store for 2 years today and we’ve come a long way since we woke up on a Saturday morning to find our original version 1.0 had been approved by Apple (after 10 long nerve-racking days of waiting) and was finally on sale just as the London 2012 Olympic Games kicked off.
Since then we’ve added iPad support, 3D station maps, enhanced accessibility information, carriage graphics and kept our data up-to-date as the network has changed over time.
We also won an award for best App for accessibility / step free information from TfL too!
Just recently too we added two new Apps to the Station Master family; Exit the Tube with just the exits from Station Master in it, for those of you who want even faster access and Oyster Errors that tells you what those funny numbers mean that sometimes come up when you fail to touch in or out correctly.
Thanks too, to everyone who got in touch to tell us where things had changed or where they needed tweaking here and there! We’ve always taken your comments on board and updated our information based on those comments.
So, to celebrate, until midnight tonight, we are giving you a chance to get your hands on Station Master for a 2nd birthday price of just 99 pence! And if you’ve bought the App already, why not gift it to someone or spread the word!
Download Station Master on the App Store!
Cheers! The Station Master Team. (Matthew and Geoff)