Station Master App

A case of the false facade

13th January 2014

We thought that we were all tubed-out in terms of Sherlock after we’d been dished up a lot of mixed up trains a couple of weeks ago in the first episode, but we knew that something might be going on when we received a text message from a friend saying “Is it true about the houses?” – as we were half an hour behind watching it on catchup.

“That’ll be a Leinster Gardens reference then” announced this Station Master, and sure enough, when we got to part in the programme ourselves, there was Sherlock, Watson and Mrs. Watson all holed up in the best-fake-addressed-house in London.

The best way to visit the houses-that-aren’t as created by the Metropolitan Line is to of course visit them yourself, but for a cosier warmer view you can just use Google Maps from above to look down on the location, where clearly there is a gap in the houses and the railway runs instead.

One thing we’re not clear on though is how much of an ‘inside’ of 23-24 Leinster Gardens there really is. When Station Master Geoff passed through last year whilst making the District Line video for the Londonist and he dropped by (scroll to 3m 38s), there was only a small crack in the window revealing a tiny room which I doubt leads to a long corridor as shown in the programme.

So if you’ve never been, next time you’re in central west London, hop out at either Bayswater or Paddington, to discover London’s best false address.

This post categorised under: Secret trains / Tube / Tube on TV
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S7 Rollout Continues

12th January 2014

We’ve been watching with interest the amount of new S7 trains that are coming into the network, replacing the old C-Stock on the Hammersmith & City and Circle Lines.

Three more C Stock units are being scrapped this weekend – leaving only a couple left on the lines. When they get replaced in the next couple of weeks, attention will then switch to the Edgware Road to Wimbledon branch of the network, which is run by just eight units.

For us, it’s meant having to go back and visit a whole load of stations again to get the new exact carriage and door positions all over again for stations where this has changed. This usually occurs where the exit is at the rear of the train and the nearest exit is no longer in the sixth carriage, but in the seventh – as these new trains have an extra carriage.

The new data won’t be in the App until the next update, after which we’ll switch our attention to the rest of the District Line – as the new trains get rolled out on the rest of the line into 2015 – and that will mean a major upheaval of the data for us all over again.

With the extra carriage making the train longer, we expected to find more stations where the whole train didn’t fit, but the only places it really affected were on the western side of ‘the Circle’ – namely Paddington, Bayswater, Notting Hill Gate and High Street Kensington are all stations where not all the doors in the rear carriage open.

This post categorised under: Tube
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Victorian Machinery

11th January 2014

Last trains of the are almost always a good way of seeing different train movements that you don’t normally get during the regular day service, or I find it’s always fun to be on a train that gets ‘lamped out’. Or you’ll often last thing on the tube see a yellow battery-powered maintenance loco come trundling through a station, but here’s something I hadn’t seen before.

Travelling home on the 00:09 last Victoria Line train out of Walthamstow to Brixton, some rather unusual passengers got on at Seven Sisters – a whole gang of maintenance engineers – who’d obviously decided that the fastest way to get their gear to tonight’s job was to take it on a passenger train with them!

Lots of large pieces of scary looking tools and machinery got loaded on, whilst the driver had to wait many seconds longer than he normally would until they signalled to him that they were all clear … and they went one stop to Finsbury Park, where they took a good minute to unload it all again.

Victoria Machinery

This post categorised under: Uncategorized
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TubeSquared

10th January 2014

We stumbled again upon Chromaroma the other day – the game you play with your Oyster card that lets you score points as you travel around London touching in and out at tube stations completing ‘missions’ and generally trying to be the most travelled person in town.

But we never really liked doing it because it only worked with Pay as you Go users (no good for us Oyster travelcard holders), and also because you had to give them your username and password to the Oyster system, so that they could scrape your journey info from TfL and bring it into their own system.

Which is why we’ve been busy trying to complete something more straightforward – checking into every tube station using Foursquare.

Geofftech has got two lists on the site covering all the stations – split because on Foursquare, there is a maximum limit of 200 places, so it’s not possible to have all 270 tube stations on one list, so below the ‘Zone 1’ list has had a few Zone 2 stations put into it, to allow the ‘rest of…’ to max out at 200.

We’re now just two check-ins aways for completing all the tube stations in London. In San Francisco (where Foursquare originated) you get the ‘Subway Rat’ badge for travelling to all the station on the BART. We suspect nothing will happen when you tick off all 270 tube stations, but wouldn’t it be great if London had an equivalent ‘Tube Badge’, once you’d checked into all of them?

Foursquare List – Tube Challenge (200 tube stations outside of Zone 1)
Foursquare List – Zone 1 Stations (The other 70 Stations)

Foursquare List – DLR Challenge (All 45 DLR Stations)
Foursquare List – Overground Challenge (All 82 Stations)

This post categorised under: Tube
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Overground to Chingford, Cheshunt and Enfield

9th January 2014

We’re a little puzzled here as to why this became a ‘news’ story again this week, when the Evening Standard ran a story that had already been confirmed back in July 2013 – that TfL were taking control of the West Anglia services out of Liverpool Street to Chingford, Cheshunt and Enfield.

In fact the only ‘new’ thing that we could find (but we’d assumed anyway) is that the new Overground service will indeed appear on the tube map.

The ES and Time Out Blog (who got excited about it too) ran a clean map showing what the services would look like out of Liverpool Street, but what’s actually worth considering is how messy this is going to look when you throw in all the other tube lines – and Crossrail as well.
Knowing that TfL have publicly stated their desire to take over more inner suburban London rail services, to become ‘Overground’ too – at what point is the tube map going to look just too cluttered and TfL will have to bow to the pressure of a redesign?

Of course, a map for all railway services already exists, but you don’t see this in printed pocket form at tube stations – and that’s where we suspect something new is going to have to be created. If they keep adding in new Overground lines, the map is going to look horribly cluttered and not that usable or readable at that size – look for example how squashed London Fields, Cambridge Heath and Bethnal Green already are – so surely something, somewhere, is going to have to change…

This post categorised under: Map / Overground
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No Bakerloo or Northern at Embankment

8th January 2014

A reminder that work started today at Embankment station to replace the old escalators down to both the Bakerloo and Northern Line platforms, meaning that from today – and until November when it is projected work will be finished, only District and Circle line trains will be stopping at Embankment station. This is actually the only new thing that we’ve spotted on the latest tube map, everything else looks the same as before!

TfL point out on their website, that it’s literally a 60 second walk up or down Villiers street between Embankment station and Charing Cross meaning you can get to your Bakerloo and Northern Line services there instead.

This post categorised under: Engineering / Escalators / Map / Tube
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Detailed LU Track Map

8th January 2014

Ah, you have to love the Freedom of Information Act, under which large companies and corporations are obliged to release certain information to the public upon request.

The latest gem to emerge is from a request to LU/TfL here, where someone had requested a detailed signalling and track plan map.

They don’t quite meet the requirements with their response (if you read it carefully you can see why they don’t have to), but they do link to a rather fabulous – and previously unseen by this Station Master – map of the Underground, a small section of which we’ve got for you here.

Follow this link for the full map, but be aware it’s 17MB in size, so will take a longer time to download on slow connections.

Pedants will note that it’s a little out of date where in concerns non-Tube lines, if you look closely at Stratford it still shows the old ‘Silverlink’ North London Line track which has now been replaced by the DLR. You might argue too, that the Thameslink track to Barbican shouldn’t be shown, as this service no longer runs and is being turned into Crossrail, but it’s still a beautifully detailed map that even shows disused stations and unfinished ones (such as Bull & Bush on the Northern Line).

LU Track Plan Map

This post categorised under: Map / Tube
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Labyrinth Update

7th January 2014

So it’s coming to almost a year since Art on the Underground announced that they were installing 270 unique labyrinth artworks at all tube stations – in the order that the 2009 record holder for ‘All stations, fastest time’ followed, and we wondered just how many had been installed now, and how many we’d found.

A quick count up on the AotU website, reveals that their maps shows that 239 of them have now been installed, with with just 31 left – although we’re still betting that Heathrow Terminal 5 (a non-LU owned station) may prove problematic for AotU to install that station’s labyrinth at.

In terms of spotting them, they’re still not that easy to find – their own website usefully and usually shows at least four photos at each station to give away their location, but some of the stations just have one picture of the labyrinth and no ‘location’ shots, meaning to find it you have to go there and hunt it down for yourself.

Over at Geofftech, there’s a list now of 123 that have been found, and we’re trying to fill in the gaps. So if any of the missing ones are for your local station or a station that you travel to frequently, fancy dropping us a tweet to help us fill in the gaps? Maybe there’s even a new one at one of the last remaining 31 stations that AotU haven’t told us about yet, and we can get well on the way to filling in all 270 …

This post categorised under: Art on the Underground / Labyrinths
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The Case of the Bad Continuity

5th January 2014

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.

Buzzfeed and IanVisits all picked up on it too.

This post categorised under: Disused Stations / Tube on TV
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Tube Kultura

4th January 2014

A small plug for a tube-related event taking place the week after next. Andy Green from www.tubespiration.com has oganised the event ‘Tube Kultura’ feature a mixture of guests with London Underground themed interests.

The ‘Kultura’ name comes from ‘PechaKucha’, a presentation style that originated in Tokyo. Instead of long, rambling presentations, people are invited to make short snappt points – everything summed up in just six minutes, which tends to leave people with a bigger impression – and if they want to know more they can talk to you afterwards.

Andy’s London event includes the man who created a tube map based on taste, a tube worker that records sounds on the underground and makes songs from them, a poet, and also someone familiar to us all – the current record holder for travelling to all London tube stations in the fastest time possible.

The event takes places at Toynbee Studios (nearest tube: Aldgate East) on Wednesday 15th January. Tickets are £5 and should be bought in advance from this website here.

This post categorised under: Events / Tube
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