Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Great Londoners

Quote of the day for Monday 6 May, 1661 comes from the Diary of Samuel Pepys:

"I hear to-night that the Duke of York's son is this day dead, which I believe will please every body; and I hear that the Duke and his Lady themselves are not much troubled at it."

Please forgive me for this bad daytime television-style link, but another great London institution is the London Underground. There aren't that many really great websites about the world's oldest underground railway system out there, but some of them deserve high praise for keeping geeks like myself informed about how the hell the system actually works. (Or, sometimes, doesn't work - depressingly, as I write I've just got an RSS news ping about a Central Line train derailing outside White City. Nobody hurt, doesn't look like anything serious, but look forward to another round of scaremongering news stories about "how dangerous are our crisis-ridden railways?". Ho hum.)

First up is the granddaddy of them all, which at least to me seems to have been there almost since the Web was invented. Short on poncy design and pictures but long on pure information, Clive Feather's Underground Line Guides will supply just about all the hard facts that are available about the history and topology of the network. I can't recommend Clive's Guides highly enough as a concise, useful reference source - if you want to know the exact date that Clapham South station opened or how the Middle Circle used to operate, this is the place to look.

Secondly, Tubeprune (the Tube Professional's Rumour Network). This is much more of an insider's site, with comprehensive information on signalling, rolling stock and other operational aspects as well as quite a bit of comment on issues affecting the Underground today. If you want to find out why there are four rails instead of just two or three, or how a driver reacts to a "one under", this is the place to be.

Finally, a mention has to be made of one of the more mythical aspects of the Underground - closed stations. These "ghost stations" are a cause of eternal fascination to many people, including some with no other interest in the Tube at all. Alas, in this day and age of Health And Safety and lawsuit paranoia it's almost impossible to get to visit any of these closed stations (Aldwych is a notable exception), so it's just as well that other people have got to do so and put their photos on the web. I'd recommend starting at Hywel Williams' site for photographic accounts of visits to places like Down Street and Brompton Road.

That's my pick of Underground-related websites, but a couple of bits of printed matter are worth mentioning as well. London Under London is probably the definitive work on subterranean London, including sewers, the Underground and other bits of buried stuff. Douglas Rose's London Underground: A Diagrammatic History is a fantastic one-sheet historical map of the Underground. If you're just after a track map that's a bit more detailed than the standard Tube map, I can recommend the Quail Publishing London Railway Map or, for more detail, the relevant volume of their British Railway Track Diagrams series.

Posted by mpk at May 11, 2004 1:55 PM | TrackBack