How many underground stations are there

The station building is just about visible if you peer off Brompton Road down Cottage Place, right by the London Oratory. For a long time, the building was owned and used by the Ministry of Defence, and thus very much not available for occasional dalliances down to the old platforms.

But in they sold it to private investors who converted the site into very fancy residential flats, because London. More intriguingly, the station was put to good use even after it closed on 21 May Dinky little offices cramped laterally along disused platforms. Tiny staircases. Sleeping quarters on platforms above those offices.

All very make-do-and-mend. Like Brompton Road, it was used during the war, and most of the surface building is still visible on — as you might have guessed — Down Street, just off Piccadilly. It is one of the few abandoned stations that could come back into use. Back in , TfL started taking proposals for commercial use of the station building, disused lift shaft, and underground passages. Aldwych Sticking with the Piccadilly line, we come to one of the more pointless central London stations.

For a long time, Holborn was the starting point for a branch line of the Piccadilly running just one station south, to Aldwych station. For the first eight years of its life, from to , it was actually known as Strand. While this offers an interesting lesson about the barmy, disjointed, tangled mess that was the early development of the London Underground under the hodge-podge of private rail investors, it was not a particularly fruitful bit of infrastructure.

Actually rather beautiful. It closed on 30 September , which is really frightfully late, and still sits there on the south side of the Strand. The Aldwych line also saw action in the Second World War: the branch line platform at Holborn that they never quite figured out how to use properly was used as wartime offices. British Museum This one lay on the Central line, slightly to the west of what is now Holborn, and served the area around the goliath British Museum.

But this was slightly annoying, because it meant that anyone trying to change from the Central to Piccadilly lines had to get out and walk the yds between them at street level. British Museum finally closed on 24 September , replaced by a newly expanded Holbon.

This is a road, people. The two platforms that formed the terminus of the Jubilee line closed their gates to passengers after the extension through to Westminster, Canary Wharf, and Stratford was opened. South Kentish Town Getting more niche, now.

And then at the last minute the constructors changed their minds so they had to change all the tiles on the platforms, which was jolly clever of them. In a similarly clever move, the station was closed just 17 years after opening, on 5 June , due to low passenger use. Converting your tube station into cash. The station building is still there, on Kentish Town Road at the intersection with Royal College Street, and looks a little underloved.

The tangle of lines connecting the eastern terminus of the District Railway at Mansion House with the eastern terminus of the Metropolitan Railway at Aldgate — a saga of power playing and corporate politics that deserves an entire book of its own — resulted in a number of new stations. Recognisable names like Cannon Street, Monument, and Aldgate East were added to the list of tube stations, along with weird extras like St.

If London had a Chamber of Secrets this would be it. It closed on 4 February , and was replaced by Tower Hill just next door. Tower of London Tower of London was a really stupid station that closed just two years after it opened, replaced by the aforementioned Mark Lane in The last bits of the Tower of London tube station were demolished in when Tower Hill station was built, which is roughly on the same site.

Everything old is new again. It closed on 1 May , when Aldgate East station was moved slightly to the east, rendering St. The station building itself was damaged by a bomb during the Second World War, then demolished totally shortly after. The curve was used to transfer rolling stock from one line to another when necessary, but since becoming part of the London Overground in , the East London line no longer shares any rolling stock with the Metropolitan Line.

And so St. Hounslow Town and around Once upon a time the District line extended as far as Hounslow, to a now closed station called Hounslow Town, which was not far from the modern Hounslow East. And today, t hat bit of the network is a bit of a corpse trail. A helpful map. Click to expand. That one opened in May as part of this District Railway line to Hounslow Town, and then closed on March 25th, They basically just moved it and changed the name, and its hard to find a particularly good reason why.

I wonder how many books about trains they have. The old station building is still there, and is now a very charming bookshop — but you can still see the whole station as you go past on a Piccadilly line train to or from Heathrow. Basically this was so that the station could be connected to the newly-built and eternally horrifying A40 trunk road, built in the s. But still: why bother? Image: CartoMetro. This is a screenshot from this amazing map, which shows all the lines, stations, and platforms — past, present and ocassionally future — on the entire London rail and tube network.

But what it does show is that this bit of West London is a total mess. Just north of White City, the eastbound Central Line trains pass under the westbound trains to travel on the right hand side. As many people have since pointed out on social media, this happens in several places. The writer responsible has been disciplined. Anyway, back to the article: Anyway. To run through the corpses here. At one point, it had had two platforms either side of a single track, which would be in use simultaneously.

It was like a freaking rollercoaster ride or something. Here's 25 of the most interesting facts The network of tunnels extends to miles.

For comparison, it's only miles from Hull to London. The network became known as the Tube in the early part of the twentieth century. This is an abbreviation of the nickname The Twopenny Tube, which was given to the Central Line because all fares cost tuppence. The designer of the iconic Underground map, Harry Beck, based his design on an electrical circuit diagram.

The average speed on the Underground is On the Metropolitan line, trains can reach over 60 mph. Photo by Tomas Anton Escobar on Unsplash The shortest distance between two adjacent stations on the network is only metres and the longest is 6. The tunnels on the Central line twist and turn because they follow the curves of London's medieval street plan.

The Underground was funded entirely by private companies until the 's. Alcohol was banned on the Tube and all London Transport from June During the three-hour morning peak, the busiest Tube station is Waterloo, with around 57, people entering.

Every week, Underground escalators travel the equivalent distance of going twice around the world. Penalty fares were only introduced in The Jubilee Line is the only one to connect with all the other Underground Lines. Over 1, bodies lie beneath Aldgate station, which is built over a plague pit from The London Underground has a staggering stations.

The longest possible single journey on one train is 34 miles, between West Ruislip and Epping on the Central Line. On the columns at Temple station, there are small temple-shaped emblems at the bases.

The shape of north and west London was largely defined by the extension of the underground railway network. A team of railway enthusiasts spent 26 years researching six miles of vintage wall tiling on 94 station platforms for a book.

Black arches are hidden in the green and cream tiling pattern at Archway station.