Going Underground

The journey of the first Tube train took place on 9 January 1863 and the  first Tube line built and financed by a private company was the Metropolitan Railway. The Tube’s first escalator was installed at Earl’s Court in 1911, featuring a diagonal finish to the stairway, meaning the right foot reached the top moments before the left and in 1907 a spiral escalator opened at Holloway Road.

The “Tube” became a proper name for the first time in the early 1900s, after the Central London Railway (now the Central Line) was nicknamed the “Twopenny Tube”. The “Twopenny Tube” nickname was conceived by the Daily Mail, five days after it opened. When the Circle Line opened in 1884, the experience of riding it was described in The Times as “a form of mild torture”. 

The longest escalator on the Underground is at Angel station. It is 60 meters long and has a vertical rise of 90ft (27.5 meters). The shortest is at Stratford with a vertical rise of just 4.1m.

The US talk show host Jerry Springer is the most famous person to have come into the world in a London underground station. He was born at Highgate station on 13 February 1944, where his mother had taken shelter from a Luftwaffe bombing raid.

The original trains had three different classes, costing three, four and six pence for a single journey. A single cash journey in Zone 1 now costs £4.50. If you paid a full cash fare between Covent Garden and Leicester Square (0.16 miles) it works out at over £28-a-mile. 

On 31st December 1945 two Metropolitan line trains collided in heavy fog on an open-air section of the tube near Northwood. The impact was not fatal, but electrical arcing led to a fire in the rear two coaches of one of the trains, and three passengers suffocated in the smoke.

The classic Underground map was designed by Harry Beck and first produced in 1933. It was inspired by electrical circuit diagrams. The map was originally offered to the Underground by Beck in 1931, but it was rejected as it was considered too radical for the public. He was paid 10 guineas, or £10.50, for his Tube map design.

sources:

150 facts for 150 years of the London Tube

The London Underground in facts and figures

Kef Facts - Transport for London