Eat your heart out if you haven't got a similar system!

Congratulations to The London Underground on reaching 160 years old yesterday.  It really is the only fast way to get around the Metropolis.  The world's first underground railway, The Metropolitan Railway, opened in 1863, and ran between Paddington and Farringdon with six intermediate stations.  Only today I was travelling on the Bakerloo Line, the first part of which was opened in 1906.  It uses the oldest trains currently in use in Britain (built 1972).  I believe that the line runs in some of the deepest tunnels on the Underground system, evidenced by the fact that you have to ride upwards on two escalators to get to the surface.

And no thread would be complete without a picture…

Nice one, Terry.

I should add a pic or two of my models to celebrate as well.

I don't know what happened, but I posted a reply and clicked the link… gone.

Anyway, as I said before happy Birthday LU.

The deepest tube station is Hampstead on the Northern Line although this is not the same as the station at the lowest "altitude".

The platforms at Hampstead are 58.5 metres (around 170 feet) below surface level and, should the need arise, there are 320 stairs to or from them.  But the surface is at 108m above sea level meaning the platforms, although far below the streets , are still some 50m above sea level.

The deepest in absolute terms is theJubilee Line at Waterloo lying some 26m below sea level and 30m beneath the surface.  Several other locations are more than 20m below sea level.  No point can be deeper than the base of the London Clay through which tube tunnels are bored; to go deeper would be to breach the cap of the aquifer lying beneath in the softer sedimentary rocks.

The deepest point on the Bakerloo Line is Charing Cross at 24m below sea level and 32m below surface.  Holborn has the longest escalators on the system in order to access the Piccadilly Line platforms which are only 18m below sea level but 41m beneath the surface.  

The highest point on the system is Amersham station at 145m above sea level plus the 4m it stands above the ground.  The highest point on the TfL-owned system is slightly beyond, at Mantles Wood, where the TfL / NR boundary lies high in the Chiltern Hills beyond the point where any Underground train has ventured since they ceased to serve Aylesbury in 1961.

The number of escalators at a station is a factor of access and traffic levels.  It is also a factor of being able to provide shafts for them.  Typically a shaft contains two escalators and central emergency stairs but the busiest stations have three (and at Holborn four) escalators in one shaft and some (such as Liverpool Street) have multiple shafts with just one each.  Emergency stairs are always available though in many cases are spiral staircases tucked away out of sight.  

Happy Birthday London Underground.  I'm very glad I don't have to live with the disruption caused by digging up entire streets and demolishing swathes of buildings in order to build new routes these days.  The original 1863 route caused massive upheaval to Victorian London but the result was worth waiting for.

I should have added this link to the post above.  There's plenty of information there for when you have nothing better to do!  
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/557c6289e4b00367523544bb/t/5b2d415370a6ad6635ac9a01/1529692560124/London+Underground+Depth+Diagrams.pdf

Not quite 160 years old but still "minding the doors" ……….. :roll: :roll:

[user=6]Petermac[/user] wrote:

Not quite 160 years old but still "minding the doors" ……….. :roll: :roll:

Now there’s a memory. 

What a good shot.

Lovely attention to detail Peter.  :thumbs
Terry