Time Out Tube Special

This week's Time Out has a gloriously psychedelic and slightly Ann Summers-like front cover heralding its 11 page celebration of the London Underground.

From the lead editorial "As you struggle grim-faced up yet another broken escalator, indulge not the old gripes about the grime and crime. Succumb instead to Underground love....Think too of the men in stovepipe hats who died so that you could make it to work without mounting a Penny Farthing bike". They kindly acknowledge this blog, Geoff's mashed-up Tube maps and Hywel Williams' classic ghost station site amongst Tube websites to bookmark.

Highlights for me, from this "celebration" are an interview with Tim O'Toole LU's managing director who claims to have "the best job in London by far", despite his stomach clenching "every time we have a signal failure or a train is down". He must take a lot of Rennies then.

Diamond Geezer tackling the Tube's shortest journey - Leicester Square to Covent Garden - 50 per cent longer by Tube than at ground level. "But it had been the down and up which had devoured my time and not the 45 second Tube ride".

I was disappointed to learn that Bumper Harris the one legged escalator tester at Earl's Court was a myth ("The London Transport Museuem has no evidence to back this up") - although I'm still not convinced by this.

There's a look at how the Tube measures up to subways in Tokyo, Paris, New York, Moscow, Berlin and er Glasgow. Sadly of the five, Glasgow's has never featured in a film, although it is part of a pub crawl in Iain Banks' novel Espedair Street, where characters have a whisky and half of Heavy at every stop.

The "Old Tube trains never die" feature is fun. I knew old carriages put out to rest had made it over to the Isle of Wight and even as office space in Shoreditch. But didn't know that a Jubilee carriage would become Great Ormond Street Hospital's new radio studio.


There's a 150 old history of the Tube, a photographic flavour of the ends of Tube Lines and and of course a homage to Harry Beck creator of the iconic London Underground Map.

Not included in the "Tube Love" fest (but a good antidote) was Micheal Hodges' Slice of Life feature on drinking to get through a Tube journey. He believes that not only do we stop acting like British people "when we sink down below the city streets, we stop smelling like British people... We have to get drun, it's the only part of our humanity left to us, the one thing that cows and rats can't do and we can".