On Tue, 18 Dec 2012 07:42:11 -0800 (PST), allantracy
wrote:


The tube routes should never be confused with the earlier sub surface
lines. *Although I guess we should not be surprised that this is lost
on the bourgeois communists at the Guardian.


Well seeing as how TfL routinely use the term Tube to describe the
London Underground, all over their website (as in Tube map or Tube
engineering works), I think we can excuse all the bourgeois communists
this time.

I happened to be standing opposite one of those engineering works
posters yesterday and took this pic:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/recline...ream/lightbox/

I must admit that, even though I don't want to be pedantic on this,
the first, bald sentence does seem to go out of its way to rewrite
history:
"Built in 1863, the Tube was the first underground railway in the
world."
After all:
- Only a very tiny part of the current network was built by 1863.
Most of the system dates from much later than that.
- It may be normal to call the whole system "the Tube" today, but that
name wasn't coined until decades after the Met first opened, and the
name wasn't applied to the whole system, including the 1863 line,
until relatively recently.

But it's clear that TfL and the Mayor do definitively call the whole
system the Tube now, so let's not have any more pedantic debates about
which bits should be called what.

For example, on the journey where I took this pic, I started out from
an open air station but happened to be boarding what we here know to
be a true "tube" train. Most of the ride on that journey was in the
open, much of it on viaduct. After changing to a subsurface train, I
exited from a cut-and-cover station. Which of those would seem more
like a "tube train" to a normal?