TS/C or D: Piccadilly vs Jubilee vs Central vs Victoria etc Lines

D: The Bakerloo, which is just a bit pants really.

d: district obviously, the 253 as tube. victoria again --- too hot!

i'm sentimental, though, about the metropolitan line, which i sometimes took out to hillingdon to catch the oxford tube. lovely big carriages :-(

Classic: the Glasgow Subway!

Dud: the low-level

Dud: shutting at six o'clock on Hogmanay.

Classic: the lovely fast Vicoria line. The northern line, because you get the most interesting people on there. You can also guess exactly which stop someone is going to get off on the bank branch just by what they're wearing. So:

Mullet, parka, distressed denim - Old Street
Expensive suit, look of stress - Bank
Ministry of Sound record bag, Ministry of Sound other promotional clothing, Ministry of Sound look of stress - Elephant and Castle.
Text books, UCAS forms, where-the-hell-am-I-going look - Angel

Classic - Victoria Line as has no drivers and makes banshee howl as goes very fast.

Classic - Jubilee Line for da Architecture

Classic - Northern Line for having the word Northern in it and taking me to London Bridge on my way home every day. (PS - Anna - what do people getting off at Moorgate look like? (insert joke about who cares, as they are all suffering from eye problems and have little concern for fashion))

Dud - Piccadilly. Boring snoring. Almost redeemed by Ghost stations, but not enough in my book. Rubbish cars.

Dud - Edgware Road (Circle line etc) as you always get held up there and they don't advise you which train is going to be going through the junction ahead first (unlike Earls Court, where the board helps you work that out).

Dud - Awful noise made by East London Line and Met Line trains as they appear to recharge their compressors. V grating.

* Picadilly Line between Hammersmith and Osterley. Espacially the section up to Acton Town, you get to whizz past the District Line stations, and sunset over Chiswick is just so beautiful.
* Hammersmith and City Line between Hammersmith and Ladbroke Grove, you get to see Goldhawk Road, Sheps B, TV Centre, warehouses, the north circular, gritty urban skylines.

Dud =

* All the underground bits, as I hate it when the train stops in a tunnel, and have been close to panic attack status a few times lately. I start playing snake on my mobile, which seems to calm me down, and have this immense feeling of relief when the train starts moving again.

D: Central - always seems crowded, very noisy running, unbearable in hot weather.

Dave B: you're so OTM about the rattling noise of the Met trains. When I lived in Rayners Lane I used to despise the way it would render my walkman-listening efforts completely hopeless, particularly as it was always a 'good bit' that it would deluge.

And the ghost stations bit ..hhmmm.... I could start a thread just about that itself. Piccadilly line- yay ! Down St (btwn Hyde Park Corner and Green Park), Brompton Rd (btewn Knightsbridge and S Kensington) and York Rd (btwn King's X and Cally Rd) are all visible after over 75 years of disuse .. (kind of)living museums ahoy !

Jel mentioned being stuck inside a tunnel (cf: aztec camera !). The 'feeling of relief' he described is so palpable across the entire carriage, you can almost feel a giant swell of breath being taken in. It can be overwhelming !

D:Not a line,but a station.Kings Cross,as it has the most uptight,miserable staff I have ever encountered on the many day and night shifts I have worked on the network.The pompous twats wouldn't even let us use the staff bogs.So I pissed in their tea urn.

And did you know that the big,chunky rubber door seals on the new tube trains are not,as you may think,there to protect you from injury if the doors close on you,but are in fact designed to fuse together in the case of a train fire,sealing the flames inside the carriage and preventing any damage to Big Ken's lovely tube network.Bit of insider info for ya!

D: as anna says the silverlink is evil, because it only runs every 20mins and (mostly) because i (when sober!) left my hat and lovely sheepskin gloves on there last week and have been even closer to freezing to death ever since.

also the circle line is astonishingly bad - from the map you'd think that gloucester rd - edgware rd would be easy, but in practice it's almost always quicker to walk.

i'd like a South London equivalent really, something to connect Richmond, Brixton and Lewisham would be tip of the top.

if only they could build an Elevated Monorail in London...

not if you've lived here all your life and consider the tube map one of the greatest works of design art of the 20th century...as i do, hehe

Dud = the Central Line from White City to Shepherds Bush - just one stop and about 12 minutes walk but i swear it does a loop da loop three times given the way the train crawls round an extreme curve for what seems like 5 minutes...it just doesnt add up

Tell me about it, I was working late one Sunday, got on the tube and it terminated in f*cking Govan, had to get a bus home from Govan, it was creepy - I had the ph34r!

Also in the old days (and still to some extent today) its a fare evaders paradise.

haha Pete is otm re: fare dodging on the Norf London Line(not that I ever did any!)

and I used to live only 3 minutes from Acton Central! I'm getting all nostalgic now. The NLL runs behind my old house, but I think they have put overhead cables up since we moved.

Isn't that outdoors and above the tube station itself? I think it was used by Finsbury Park - Alexandra Palace trains in the dim and distant past.

Dud = the Central Line from White City to Shepherds Bush - just one stop and about 12 minutes walk but i swear it does a loop da loop three times given the way the train crawls round an extreme curve for what seems like 5 minutes...it just doesnt add up

This bit has a rather bizarre layout because before the line ran west of Shepherds Bush the trains ran round in a loop instead of reversing. A bit like at Heathrow, but on a very tight bend. You might not have noticed, but by the time you reach White City the two lines have crossed over each other so the trains are running on the right-hand track. They cross back over again near Wormwood Scrubs.

Ahem.

He let us up there, and seemed glad, as it enabled him to have a fag. Was ded ded gud. The tunnels are sealed at the Northern end now, and have lots of rare bats in them, and look like the batcave seeing how lots of ivy hangsover the gates.

We went out, and got into those tunnels. It was raining, and was by now 6pm and thus very dark. I got scared - wondering why one gate was locked with a big fuck off padlock, and the other was open, and started to feel like I was in Scooby Doo. I was not displeased to repair to the nearest boozer to warm up.

(I've never understood why a popular pub would advertise it was Under New Management, Its like saying, that decent landlord has left, so don't bother).

As for Highgate - there used to be an overland line running from Finsbury Park to Alexandra Palace via Highgate which was due to be incorporated into the Northern Line after WW2 (it can be seen in tube maps of the time) but was shelved what with rationing and all that. The line was eventually removed in 1954 (?) and is now the Parkland Walk between FP and Highgate.

D: The vague confusion of the overlapping Circle/Hammersmith/Metropolitan. Central in town. Victoria in summer.

earls court is indeed the hellmouth. proof: it is the hole in the ground from which people from putney emerge

Most definitely dud. And why don't all victoria line trains go to Walthamstow?! I'm sick of having to cram into a carriage at Kings cross, to have to do it all again, but most times even more crowded, at Seven sisters. Or hang around the platform at KX for up to 9 mins waiting for a through train to arrive that I can fit on.

As I've said before, the view from the Central line platform at Greenford is a corker.

Destroy the Distrct line, it's pants. The Met line is great if all is working fine, but if you're going a long way on it and there are problems, it can be hellish, Harrow on the Hill station is really really cold. And the staff there are useless too, they pointed me to the wrong train this morning and I nearly ended up in Chesham. And missed and Uxbridge train into the bargain.

Eugene - ever seen this?

Dud Central line particularly between Liverpool St and Oxford circus on a weekday morning.

From my office now though I can look to the left and watch the constanmt stream oof planes flying off into the sunset, it's very pretty.

Ed, I get the Met line every day and haven't seen one, not in a long time.

I understand your feelings but it actually suits me well. On my rare journeys south from Seven Sisters in peak hours I always wait for one of the empty trains that turns around there.

"One of the most interesting sites on London Underground is on the Central Line between Shepherds Bush and East Acton in west London.   The lines through White City station are the wrong way round for a British railway - being right hand running instead of left hand running.   There is a story behind this anomaly which concerns the stabling yard there called White City Depot and the two running tunnels of the Central Line which weave their way round this area.  This page looks at this area and tells of the unusual routes and the reasons for them."

http://www.trainweb.org/tubeprune/eatosb.gif