On Thu, 26 Feb 2004, Paul Corfield wrote:

In London you have several aids to help you get about

1. Line colour - this is repeated consistently throughout the system for
whatever line you want. District is always Green, Circle is always
Yellow, Central is always Red etc.

Except that the Metropolitan sometimes likes to be brown. Perhaps that's
only on rather old maps; i liked it, because it meant that from Liverpool
Street to Baker Street, the northern half of the circle could be called
the Neapolitan line (bugger, i haven't had neapolitan ice cream in ages -
i really want some now!). Also, beware of old maps in some stations -
Barbican still shows the East London line as an adjunct of the
Metropolitan, i think, and somewhere central on the Piccadilly still has
Aldwych.

2. Each line has a name - instead of a number or even series of numbers
over the same tracks.

Even if the name is sometimes misleading - the tube line which goes
furthest south is the Northern line, and the line which goes furthest out
is the Central line.

3. Signage refers to a geographical direction for the way that the
train is running - so eastbound, northbound, westbound or southbound. As
the Tube Map is diagrammatically represented in this way it is usually
very easy - provided you hold the Tube Map the right way up.

Finally you get the display on the platform which will show the end of a
line - e.g Brixton or Walthamstow on the Victoria Line. The Circle just
says Circle Line on the front but the displays will show you major
station around the loop the train goes via (e.g. Baker St, Kings Cross,
Victoria etc).

Note that these indicators don't tell you what line the train is on, which
means that at platforms serving several lines (such as Liverpool Street),
you'll have to know which lines the named stations are on if you want to
figure out which line the train is on. For example, if you wanted to go
from Liverpool Street to Finchley Road, on the Metropolitan line, you'd
have to know that the Metropolitan's termini are Amersham, Watford, and
Uxbridge (and sometimes Chesham). You soon get used to this, but you may
still be foxed by weird destinations (i think i once saw a train bound for
Westbourne Park or something, and had to look at a map to figure out what
it was).

And, while we're at it, if you are going beyond Finchley Road on the
Metropolitan line, you need to know that, unlike every on other line, not
all Metropolitan trains stop at every station they go past; see
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/7069/metserv.html for an
explanation. It won't matter if you never go beyond Finchley Road, though!

A quick way to work out how long a journey will take is to count the
gaps between the stations and multiply by 2 minutes.

I was taught 3 minutes.

tom

--
Come with me, and we'll go dreaming.