Category: London Station by Station

Special Post: Euston and Euston Square

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the latest installment in my series “London Station by Station“. I am treating these two together because they are so close to one another that it makes no sense to split them up.

EUSTON AND EUSTON SQUARE

Euston Square, served nowadays by the Circle, Hammersmith & City and Metropolitan lines is one of the 1863 originals, and as with Baker Street has been restored to look as it would have done when first opened. The City and South London Railway station at Euston was opened on May 12th 1907 and the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway on June 22nd 1907. These two together are now the Northern line, and occupy four platforms here – although widely separated – to change between the two branches you would be well advised to continue northwards to Camden Town where the interchange is cross-platform. The Victoria line station opened on December 1st 1968.

The southbound platform on the Bank branch of the Northern line is very wide at this station because when it was opened as the City and South London Railway station there were two tracks either side of an island platform (an arrangement still in evidence at Clapham Common and Clapham North), and the extra width of that platform comes from the reorginastion when this arrangement was deemed unsuitable for such a busy station.

INTRODUCING THE RAILWAY DETECTIVE

Euston was the first of London’s railway terminals to open, serving the London and North Western Railway, and it was on that route that Edward Marston’s greatest creation, The Railway Detective (a.k.a Inspector Robert Colbeck) investigated the case that first earned him that title (and introduced him to his future wife). These stories are set thus far) in the 1850s, before the opening of the Metropolitan Railway in 1863, but I could see Colbeck still being in business when that momentous event occurs. He would undoubtedly embrace the underground railway wholeheartedly, although his colleague Sergeant Leeming would take some persuading of its virtues!

CONCLUSION AND PICS

I hope that you have enjoyed this post and will be inspired to share it. Here are a couple of pictures to finish…

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A close up of the key area
The Diagrammatic History
The Diagrammatic History

Special Post: Hammersmith

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the latest installment in my series “London Station by Station“. Whereas my regular posts contain links, photographs and sometimes infographics as well as the title piece, these posts contain no links, no infographics and only pictures that relate directly to the matter in hand.

HAMMERSMITH

The colours of the title are those of the modern lines that serve the station. The Hammersmith and City line, in the days when it was the original Metropolitan Railway reached Hammersmith in 1864, although the current station for that line was opened four years later in 1868. From 1877 to 1906 a viaduct diverging from the current line at Goldhawk Road and having a station called Hammersmith Grove Road connected to the District at Ravenscourt Park and thence to Richmond. The District line station at Hammersmith opened in 1874, and it was the original western terminus of the Piccadilly line in 1906.

The station which now serves the District and Piccadilly lines was completely redesigned a few years back, although the track layout remains the same – District line tracks on the outside, Piccadilly line tracks in the centre. Except for occasional services which also stop at Turnham Green, where the Richmond branch of the District diverges from the Ealing branch, Piccadilly trains run non-stop between Hammersmith and Acton Town. Just west of Hammersmith on the District and Piccadilly lines one can see the remains of the viaduct referred to in the opening paragraph.

Hammersmith is home to a major shopping centre (the reason for the redesign mentioned above) and also to the Lyric Theatre, at which I saw several good plays.

Here are a couple of pictures to conclude the post…

The Diagrammatic History
The Diagrammatic History
A close up of the key area for this post.
A close up of the key area for this post.

I hope you have enjoyed this post and I encourage you to share it!

Special Post: King’s Cross St Pancras

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the next installment in my station by station guide to London. Following the success of my piece on Paddington I have gone for the other main line terminus among the original seven stations on the Metropolitan Railway…

HISTORY

King’s Cross and St Pancras are next door neighbours to one another, and therefore served by the same Underground Station. Although this was one of the 1863 originals, the platforms that now serve the Hammersmith and City, Circle and Metropolitan lines have been resited – the present ‘surafce’ level station dates only from 1941. The Piccadilly line station was part of the original section of that line which opened in 1906, while the City and South London Railway (now the Bank branch of the Northern line) got there in 1907. Finally, it was part of the second section of the Victoria line to come on stream in December 1968.

ST PANCRAS

Although King’s Cross (of which more later) is by some way the larger of the two main line rail terminals here, St Pancras is an extraordinary building, resembling an outsized fairy castle. St Pancras is now an international terminus, running trains to the continent, and meaning that over a century after he just failed to make it happen the dream of Edward Watkin, who guided the Metropolitan in its great era of expansion, of being able to travel by rail from Paris to Manchester by way of London is now a reality.

KING’S CROSS

King’s Cross is a station of two parts – the main concourse and platforms 1-8 which run long haul trains to the north and scotland, and off to one side platforms 9-11 from which trains to much more local destinations such as Peterborough, Cambridge and King’s Lynn depart. It is here that you will find the sign to platform 93/4  from which the Hogwarts Express departs in the Harry Potter stories. Having mentioned one literary association, King’s Cross plays a passing role in more than one of Edward Marston’s stories involving Inspector Colbeck a.ka. The Railway Detective.

MAPS

I have my usual style map images to help those of you not familiar with the area to orient yourselves:

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CONCLUSION

I hope that you have enjoyed this piece and that you will be encouraged to share it.

Special Post: Paddington

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the next installment in my station-by-station guide to London.

PADDINGTON

THREE STATIONS BECOME ONE

Paddington was one the original seven stations that opened as The Metropolitan Railway on January 10th 1863 – it was the western terminus of the line, although right from the start there were track links to the Great Western Railway, which supplied the Metropolitan with rolling stock before it developed its own. In 1864 the western terminus became Hammersmith, over the route of today’s Hammersmith and City line, and the origins of the station can still be seen because the H&C platforms are structurally part of the mainline station, although ticket barriers now intervene between them and the rest. The second set of London Underground platforms to be opened at Paddington were also originally opened by the Metropolitan, although they are now served by the Circle and the Edgware Road branch of the District line. They opened in 1868 as Paddington (Praed Street) – as opposed to Paddington (Bishop’s Road), the original 1863 station. In 1913 a northern extension of the Bakerloo line included a deep level station at Paddington. By 1948 the suffixes of both ‘surface’ stations had been dropped, and all three sets of platforms were known simply as Paddington.

A LITERARY DISAPPOINTMENT

In 2013, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the opening of the Metropolitan Railway Penguin brought out a series of books, one for each line. I wrote about all of these books at the time, but I am going to mention Philippe Parreno’s “effort” about the Hammersmith and City line again. Given the line that contains all seven of the original 1863 stations Mr Parreno produced a book that contained no words, just a series of pictures. Had these pictures been meaningful and clearly associated with the line and its stations this might have been acceptable, but these pictures were blurry and meaningless (it was barely even possible to tell what they were supposed to be of).

OTHER LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS

Of course, when thinking of Paddington’s literary associations the one that springs instantly to mind is that with the fictional world’s best known refugee: Paddington Bear. Also however, Dr Watson (see “Baker Street” in this same series) had his first practice here after moving out of Baker Street to set up home with his wife (see A Scandal in Bohemia for more details).

CONCLUDING REMARKS

I hope you have enjoyed this post and will be encouraged to share it. To tie everything together, here are a some pictures.DSCN6527DSCN7490 DSCN7491

Special Post: Barons Court

INTRODUCTION

This is the latest post in a series I have been running giving a station by station guide to London. Today’s post will feature a measure of London Underground history, a bit of tennis and some music…

BARONS COURT – A MEETING OF TUBE AND SURFACE

HISTORY

Barons Court opened in 1906, as part of the original Piccadilly line section from Finsbury Park to Hammersmith. District line trains had been travelling the route since 1874 but there was no station at Barons Court before the Piccadilly line opened. The Piccadilly when it opened was either a compromise involving elements of three different plans or if you prefer a bodge job trying to combine elements of three different plans. Desmond F Croome’s “The Piccadilly Line: An Illustrated History” gives full details. Of relevance to our post, one of the roles that was subsumed into the making of the Piccadilly line was that of ‘deep level district’, easing congestion on the older subsurface level route. Thus, from South Kensington to Earls Court the Piccadilly follows the district, and from Barons Court, where the Piccadilly surfaces, it shares a set of four tracks with the district as far as Acton Town, and on the Heathrow branch as far as Hounslow West and the whole of the Uxbridge branch the platforms are at the compromise height used for platforms shared by ‘tube’ and ‘surface’ stock, as the district used to run these routes as well. A couple of pics between subsections…

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QUEENS

Barons Court is the home of the Queens Club, host of the best known of all the Wimbledon warm up tournaments. For most of the year tennis is played on a variety of surface other than grass, and Queens gives men (it has no women’s section) a chance to get to used to both grass and London before the big one,

THE MUSICAL CONNECTION

Barons Court’s musical connection comes by way of St Pauls Girls School, just across the A4 from the station. For some years the Director of Music at that establishment was Gustav Holst, famous both as a composer and for collecting folk stories to serve as an inspiration for his composition. His best known work today is The Planets, which focuses on the attributes of the gods whose names the planets bear (yes I would wish for the focus to be astronomical rather than astrological/ mythological – but it is still excellent music).

CONCLUDING REMARKS AND PICTURE

I hope you have enjoyed this post and that you will be encouraged to share it. My final picture is of a Piccadilly line promotional poster…

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Special Post: Ongar

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the latest in my series “London Station by Station“, the second post in this series to feature a station to have fallen victim to the axe (see also the piece on Aldwych).

THE ONE TIME NORTHERN OUTPOST OF LONDON UNDERGROUND

Ongar became a London Underground station immediately post World War II, and was closed, along with North Weald in 1994. There had been a station between North Weald and Ongar called Blake Hall, but that was closed in 1981. I travellled out there more than once before it closed. The village of Chipping Ongar is home to a 900 year old church among other things.

Ongar is 24 miles from the centre of London, and with no interchanges to other lines between Stratford and Ongar, and the fact that one had to change trains at Epping (now the end of the line) it took a long time to get there. This meant that few passengers actually did use the route. This graphic, taken from Danny Dorling’s “The 32 Stops”, shows how far beyond the boundary of Greater London even Epping, the current outpost is:

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The solid black route is the 32 stops from West Ruislip to Woodford that Dorling covers in his book, while the grey lines show the other parts of the Central line that are still open.

11.3 miles beyond Ongar is Chelmsford, the county town of Essex, and home to a major rail station with a fairly quick route into London (this picture, extracted from google maps, illustrates):

Ongar to Chelmsford

You might notice from the above picture that there is not a great deal between Ongar and Chelmsford, and indeed my idea for an extension to integrate an otherwise very isolated branch into a wider network features just one intermediate station, at the village of Great Baddow.

An even bolder notion than the one already outlined that occurred to me when I gave such a scheme serious thought some years back was for the Central line to reopened to Ongar, running straight through rather than having the change at Epping, and for Ongar to become the Northeast node point of a London Orbital Railway (with the Ongar-Chelmsford link being a spur off this to the Northeast (well actually rather more east than north). The southeasterly node point would be at Maplescombe in Kent with a spur to Maidstone to connect with existing railways there, the southwesterly at West Byfleet, linking to the existing routes to and through Woking, with the northwesterly node at Rickmansworth, connecting with a northwesterly route to Aylesbury. The northern arm of this orbital route, from Rickmansworth to Ongar makes extensive use of existing but currently lightly used routes (reopen the connection between Rickmansworth and Watford, take over the Watford to St Albans branch, connect to St Albans (Thameslink). Between St Albans and Ongar would be new track with stops at Welwyn Garden City, Hertford North, Hertford East and Broxbourne (all offering connections to the existing network.

To finish, here are some more pictures which might help you grasp some of the detail I have covered above…

A close up of the the end of the Central line as it used to look (from The Diagrammatic History)
A close up of the the end of the Central line as it used to look (from The Diagrammatic History)
An illustration of the Rickmansworth-Watford connection mentioned in the text.
An illustration of the Rickmansworth-Watford connection mentioned in the text.
A view of the Watford-St Albans links mentioned.
A view of the Watford-St Albans links mentioned.
An old London Connections Map with the emphasis on main line railways.
An old London Connections Map with the emphasis on main line railways.

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I hope you have enjoyed this spectacularly speculative post and will be encouraged to share it.

Special Post: Covent Garden

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the latest installment in my “Station by Station guide to London’. Previous posts in this series are available on this link.

MUSIC, MAPS, A MARKET AND A MUSEUM

Although Covent Garden is on the original 1906 section of the Piccadilly line it did not open for business until 1907. This may be because with being only about 300 yards from Leciester Square the need for an extra station there was not immediately obvious.

That said, as the title of thsi section implies, Covent Garden is a major destination. Access from the platforms to the street is either via lift or by climbing 200 steps (I generally choose this latter option btw since I am not a big fan of lifts).

The music part of the title refers to the English National Opera, housed in a splendid building in Covent Garden. I have not been there for good while but I remember enjoying a performance of ‘Simon Boccanegra’ there.

Covent Garden Market is well worth a look around. Also, adjoining the market, is the London Transport Museum, a place I have visited several times and which I thoroughly recommend.

Finally, as a map lover, I cannot mention Covent Garden without mentioning Stanfords, THE map shop. On the subject of maps I recommnend to those with an interest in such things the blog mapsworldwide.

Before I finish with a couple of pics, a couple of last comments:

1)I hope that you have enjoyed this post and that you will be encouraged to share it.

2)A reminder that previous posts in that series are can be seen here.

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Special Post: North Greenwich

INTRODUCTION

Yes, another post in my series giving a station by station guide to London. I felt that it was not inappropriate for a series based on British public transport that after none yesterday there should be two in a row today!

A GOOD IDEA DEFLECTED

North Greenwich is one of the stations on the Jubilee line extension finally opened in 1999. North Greenwich serves what is now the O2 arena, having started life as the Millennium Dome. Unlike any of the other stations featured in this series (more available here) this is one that I personally have never used as destination, though I have passed through it a few times.

When the Jubilee line opened in 1979 it was intended that there should be a south eastern extension from the then southern terminus of Charing Cross. Unfortunately, a combination of obsession with the Canary Wharf development and the vanity project of the Millennium Dome caused the original plans to so warped that the new terminus of the Jubilee line is  at Stratford, and it no longer serves Charing Cross.

By the way, although as a public transport user I am always keen on improvements to public transport, I do not automatically support. For example I do not consider that a high speed railway that only the wealthy will be able to afford to be something to celebrate, and neither does a cable car link between two minor stations seem especially impressive to me!

A couple of pics to end…

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Special Post: Waterloo

INTRODUCTION

This is the latest post in my series providing a station by station guide to London. Previous posts in the series can be viewed on the following link. Enjoy…

THE SOUTH BANK OF THE THAMES

Waterloo has more main line train platforms than any other station in the country, is served by four underground lines (all ‘tube’ rather than ‘surface’). The Waterloo and City line, originally run as part of the London & South West Railway, opened for business in 1898 making it the second oldest of London’s deep level tube lines after the City and South London Railway (now part of the Northern line). The Bakerloo line opened in 1906, the second underground line to serve Waterloo. A southbound extension of the Charing Cross, Euston & Hamsptead line to enable an amalgamation with the City and South London to form today’s Northern line took place in 1926, making it the third underground line to serve Waterloo. Finally, in 1999 the Jubilee line was extended via Waterloo, although the original intent to serve the still under-equipped parts of south east London and west Kent has been warped by a combination of greed and vanity about which more in my next post.

Waterloo is as the above makes clear a major interchange. It is also a superb destination in its own right, being home to The Old Vic theatre, The Royal Festival Hall, The complex of the Purcell Room and the Queen Elizabeth Hall, The National Film Theatre, The National Theatre, The Museum of the Moving Image, besides serving as a good starting point for a walk along the Thames which depending on how energetic you are feeling could be stop at Southwark (Jubilee line), Blackfriars (District, Circle and main line railways), London Bridge (Northern, Jubilee, main line railways) or even further east.

To end this post here are a couple of pictures for orientation purposes. I have chosen (as will be general policy in this series) to use the Diagrammatic History rather than a current schematic diagram…

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Special Post: Loughton

INTRODUCTION

This is the sixth post in a series I have started recently, in the form of a station by station guide to London. Before moving on to the meat of today’s post, here is a link to the previous five.

LOUGHTON

Loughton has been served by the Central line since 1948, but before that it, along with the rest of the eastern end of the Central line was part of the Great Eastern Railway. Nowadays there are only three stations beyond Loughton on the Central line, but as you will be seeing in a later post there used to be more. This is the first of the stations I have covered in this series to be on the Central line, so a mention of Danny Dorling’s marvellous book ‘The 32 Stops’ is mandatory – complete with link to snapshot review and a picture…

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As a preamble to talking about Loughton itself I am going to say a bit about going there, for which I need to make some very brief technical points. London Underground (the correct name for the whole network) comprises two separate systems, the older lines (Metropolitan, District, Circle and Hammersmith & City) known as ‘surface’ lines whose tunnel sections were built using the self-explanatory ‘cut-and-cover’ method and the newer, deep-level ‘tube’ lines. The older lines were built to the same spec as mainline railways, while the newer lines are built for much smaller stock. Where there are direct cross-platform interchanges between older and newer lines the platforms are built to a compromise height so that there is a step down into a tube train and a step up into a ‘surface’ train.

My preferred method of getting to Loughton, unless I was starting from a Central line station, would be to get on to either the Hammersmith and City or District lines first, and change at Mile End, which is an interchange that is unique – it is a cross-platform interchange between ‘surface’ and ‘tube’ lines that is in tunnel (the Central line rises to the surface at the it’s next station eastwards, Stratford).

I first visited Loughton for a Geography project at school, studying the Loughton Brook. In spite of this introduction I subsequently returned of my own volition more than once – it is very scenic, both north towards the sources of the brook and south to where the brook flows in to the river Roding.

To finish this post I have a few map pictures for you…

This map has got a bit damp stained over the years, but it does reveal how much the central area of the network is expanded in the schematic diagrams that are usually shown at stations.
This map has got a bit damp stained over the years, but it does reveal how much the central area of the network is expanded in the schematic diagrams that are usually shown at stations.

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This map shows what the London Underground system looked like in 1950, just after the Central line had started serving the stations out to the then terminus at Ongar.
This map shows what the London Underground system looked like in 1950, just after the Central line had started serving the stations out to the then terminus at Ongar.