Category: London Transport

  • BR & LT decimalisation

    This weekend fifty years ago both British Railways and London Transport began a major task in their ticket offices and ticket machines to embrace the pending national conversion from pounds, shillings, pennies, to the new decimal coinage of pounds and pence. The change was effected on 14 February with the rest of the country following…

  • From the 1990s to the present day. Pair of 115 DMUs at the station. 1990 possibly. Source: London Reconnections A Class 165 in the early days of its use with a pressed steel DMU visible in the old diesel depot. Source: Twitter. (Note: Tweet is suspended, deleted or made private thus an archived image is…

  • From the 1950s to the end of the eighties. BR 45292 at Marylebone in April 1948, on what is possibly a Manchester express. Note the lower quadrant signal midway on the platform! It can also be seen in the picture featuring the women porters. Source: PicClick (The page in question has now been deleted and…

  • ‘The Deep’ apparently was the nickname for the Southwark deep level bomb shelter sited within the City and South London Railway’s former tunnels between Borough and London Bridge. The other end of this section at King William Street too was a bomb shelter however it was totally unconnected to Southwark’s thus the section of the…

  • Historical knowledge of rail vibrations London Underground has known for decades there is a problem with tube trains making noises. There have been complaints since the first trains ran underground in 1863. However that is probably something that was largely accepted in those days (just as there was soot, steam, heavy machinery continuously at work…

  • Briefly, this is an overview of the problems of tube trains running beneath the Barbican Estate in the City of London, and the huge noise nuisance that’s generated as a result. My post looks at the history of the estate’s tunnels’ construction and how things look today. It also looks at the noise blight which…

  • Its seventy years since the Liverpool Street – Shenfield electrification first began. The scheme was officially opened on 20th September 1949 and cost £8 million. This scheme was tied in a fair bit with the Manchester Sheffield Wath scheme and indeed the electric locomotives for that scheme were first tested on the Liverpool Street lines.…

  • Remember the popular post Central Line: Beyond Caxton Road published more than two years ago? This is a follow up and its based around several old photographs of the area plus some of the latest developments at Westfield. The DIMCO buildings, which some will know were once part of the coal fired power station that…

  • A special post about the 1956 tube stock. Piccadilly Circus station staff sent a tweet (one of their earliest ones) in February of this year asking for information on a picture of a train at the station itself. Its a photograph I have seen before – but not in colour and certainly not at such…

  • Piccadilly Circus tube station, one of the busiest on the tube, certainly in terms of tourism, is also a station where the unusual happens all the time. I have written about the staff once before. They have indeed been doing something very unusual. This is their learning some sign language (BSL), no doubt because its…