Saturday 10 January 2015

10th January: London Underground

The London Underground railway was opened by Prime Minister Gladstone on this date in 1863. The first route of the Metropolitan Railway went from Paddington to Farringdon Street stopping at seven stations. The trains ran every 15 minutes; the full journey took 33 minutes. It carried 30,000 passengers on its first day, in spite of Punch magazine’s assessment of it as “the sewer railway” and a preacher who said that it was “a road down into Hell to meet the Devil”.



1. "Underground" is a bit of a misnomer because 60% of the stations are above ground.
2. Only 29 of the 287 stations are south of the River Thames. That's less than 10%.
3. American talk show host Jerry Springer was born at East Finchley station during the Second World War after his mother took shelter from an air raid.
4. In cockney rhyming slang, the London Underground is known as the Oxo (Cube/ Tube).
5. The Tube's logo is known as “the roundel” (a red circle crossed by a horizontal blue bar).
6. The "Mind the gap" recording dates back to 1968. The voice is that of Peter Lodge, who had a recording company in Bayswater. His voice is still in use at many stations, but some lines use recordings by a Manchester voice artist called Emma Clarke. On the Piccadilly Line the recording is the voice of Tim Bentinck, who plays David Archer in The Archers.
7. Amersham is also the highest station at 150 meters above sea level. The deepest station is Hampstead on the Northern Line, which runs down to 58.5 meters.
8. The shortest distance between two adjacent stations is 260 metres between Leicester Square and Covent Garden on the Piccadilly Line, which takes only about 20 seconds. The longest distance between stations is on the Metropolitan line from Chesham to Chalfont and Latimer: 3.89 miles.
9. Most people know that tube stations were used as air raid shelters in the second world war. A lesser known fact, which was an official secret until the 1980s, was that the Central Line was converted into a fighter aircraft factory that stretched for over two miles, with its own railway system.
10. The air in the underground is on average 10 degrees celcius hotter than the air on the surface.


*****


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