The tour was only an hour long - but quite fascinating. And with that, the two main things I wanted to do regarding the tube have been ticked off!
London's Underground train system, "The Underground" or more commonly "The Tube" is rather vast, at times overcrowded and although lines like the District Line seem painfully slow, on average it must be the fastest way of getting around this sprawling city of 8 Million people. There have been two distinct things I have been wanting to do while in London regarding the Tube - one was to ride on one of the occasional steam excursions they have (of which there was no guarantee one would run while I was here - but I did that in September), and the other was to visit one of London's closed Underground stations, particularly Aldwych Station. To visit it legitimately is not easy - tours are run for only a week or two once a year, and tickets sell out like wildfire (like so many things in London). To visit illegitimately is possible, but risks running afoul of the law (and the risk of being kicked out of the country, as I'm on a temporary visa) or running down tube tunnels and hoping not to get zapped by the 600 Volts coursing through the tube tracks. A chance to visit Aldwych legitimately came up for January - at first I thought I'd missed out as the booking website was very slow, wouldn't let me go through with my booking and then after a bit said no tickets available. I tried later on in the day just to see, and suddenly the website was working properly and tickets were indeed available - so I managed to grab some. On January 28th, we made our visit to the Station. A very condensed history of Aldwych Station - it was conceived as the end of one tube line, but while the line was being constructed two lines were merged to become the Piccadilly Line and Aldwych (called the Strand back then) ended up on a dead-end branch line as a result, all by itself. The purpose of the station originally was to cater for Theatre traffic in the area, but in order to get a station location the company purchased and demolished one of the Theatre's the station was supposed to cater for! The company was cash strapped when they built Aldwych, so they built the bare minimum and only partially lined the two tube tunnel walls at the station platforms - leaving a lot of the structural elements on display when opened in 1907. No doubt the intention was to rectify that at a later stage, but traffic proved to be so light that they stopped using one of the two station platforms after a few years. The above photo shows that platform, which never got the extra lining, which found many uses over the years - particularly as a safe storage place for items from the British Museum during both World Wars (including the Elgin Marbles, i.e. the bits of the Parthenon the British took from the Greeks and refuse to give back). The track at the platform is the oldest section of Underground railway track still in place, but cannot be accessed by any trains. The other platform remained in use until the station closed in 1994, although there was a wall about halfway down the station's length as the full length was never used and the further half was left unlined and unfinished. Strangely enough, the second half was lined and finished, and the partitioning wall removed after the station was closed - because it is used as a location where Film and TV shows can shoot scenes on the Underground without disrupting the actual day to day tube services. For that reason too, a 1970's tube train that belongs to the Tube's museum collection (but of the same type used on the Bakerloo Line to this day!) calls Aldwych home, and is fully functional to allow arriving and departing scenes. In fact this train could be driven out elsewhere and any other tube train replace it, as the line from this platform still connects up to the Piccadilly Line. What might have you seen that has been filmed here? Superman iV, Patriot Games, V for Vendetta, 28 Weeks Later, Atonement, The Edge of Love, and Sherlock are a few. Not James Bond's Skyfall though - that was filmed at actual still-used stations on the District Line. Also, the station is used by Emergency services as a training ground - a practical venue to practice Tube evacuations and many other scenarios. The booking hall, spiral stairs and related tunnels are still intact, as are the huge elevators. There are no escalators - the station was built too early for them, and there was never a need to retrofit them. The lifts are huge though, and the photo on the right shows the inside of one such lift - with access doors either side, and an emergency transfer door in the middle where in the event of an emergency people could cross over from a broken down lift into the other good working lift. It was these lifts, which were in need of replacement which killed the station - only 450 people used the station each day, and the station was losing money already let alone able to justify expenditure on replacing the lifts. So now, the station is a museum piece and an interesting look at what the tube must have been like pre-Oyster card with its many barriers.
The tour was only an hour long - but quite fascinating. And with that, the two main things I wanted to do regarding the tube have been ticked off!
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A Kiwi out travelling in the UK and surrounding countries Archives
August 2019
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