sometimes it can take 15 minutes or more changing from one tube line to another; walking endless tunnels and up and down staircases (for no obvious reason and that always reminds me of Basil Fawlty's establishment). london should invest in a new network of tunnels, below the one we have now, in order that travellors can descend one short escalator, travel from line to line on another network of trains (smaller and possibly seatless) which will take you to another short escalator up to the correct platform of the new line.-- po, Feb 09 2013 Alternative Tube Map http://www.london-tubemap.com/ [mitxela, Feb 09 2013] Finsbury Circus http://c1038.r38.cf...circus_wa261108.jpg [not_morrison_rm, Feb 09 2013] some airports have conveyors for people http://25.media.tum...Z31rxs8byo1_500.jpg [xandram, Feb 11 2013] yo dawg... I put a train in your train and got you a shake-weight, so you can train while you train while you train.-- sninctown, Feb 09 2013 quite possibly!-- po, Feb 09 2013 I'd sooner see the taxpayers' money spent on creating undergrounds for those many towns which lack them but have outgrown their road network. Lousy though public transport is in the UK, London already has the best of it. Or are you suggesting that Londoners fund this themselves? I'm guessing at least ten billion quid, which puts it at about a grand per person.
In Cambridge and Oxford, a good start could be made by knocking through between the wine vaults of the colleges. As a bonus, wine bars could be set up in the stations.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Feb 09 2013 we funded a major proportion of the olympics so why not? councils are making huge savings by mutilating our hospital, police and fire services. not sure little villages like oxford and cambridge need a tube system - they have bikes after all.-- po, Feb 09 2013 Your contribution toward the many Olympic venues here in Cambridge is greatly appreciated.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Feb 09 2013 Given the rip off cost of using the tube, which must be the most expensive underground system in the world, I'm always surprised that there are not individual sedan chairs, being carried by high speed sprinters, running up and down the tunnels. The tube is such a dismal system, that it's not even air conditioned in the summer; doesn't operate after 11.45 each night, and is constantly packed to overflowing.... All of this for about £50 a week to use. Give me Tokyo or New York, or Berlin, or Paris any day. I've used them all, and London's, for all Boris's crowing about it, is the worst, and definitely the most expensive by a mile. My advice? Flood the whole system and use it for canoes.-- xenzag, Feb 09 2013 There aren't?? When did they discontinue that service?-- MaxwellBuchanan, Feb 09 2013 Alternatively look at the A-Z, rather than the Tube map.
Changing from the Northern Line to the Central Line option 1) Bank Station, walk for miles underground, very boring. A look at the A-Z reveals option 2)Moorgate to Liverpool St, same distance but above ground with fetching views of some fairly pretty buildings and a park.
Picadilly Circus to Leicester Sq it's only 400 metres, so just walk it.-- not_morrison_rm, Feb 09 2013 flood it - great idea [xenzag]-- po, Feb 09 2013 But there are travelators at Bank! Although I say this as someone who prefers to take the stairs to the escalators.
I recently discovered an alternative tube map, that while still symbolic (i.e. distances are stretched in places) manages to correspond to the geographic map much better. I think it's excellent, barring the possible confusion around oxford circus.-- mitxela, Feb 09 2013 //But there are travelators at Bank
Off the top of my head, those are for the Waterloo and City line, not yer actual Central Line ->Northern Line...which is the full 500 foot +
Ok, you can look at the inside of a tunnel on travelator or Finsbury Circus, sealink.-- not_morrison_rm, Feb 09 2013 // for no obvious reason //
What you don't realise is that Spacetime under London is rather badly crumpled, and that the Underground map is a complete fiction concocted by H. G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle and King George V, later revised by Aleister Crowley with the assistance of Ernest Rutherford. This is a result of the unfortunate premature detonation of the Higgs-Newton Dimensional Compression Bomb on the 31st of June 1645 on the Circle Line between Green Park and Knightsbridge, as Sir Guy Fawkes was transporting the prototype unit to be explained to King Richard IV, resulting in the network convoluting into a 7-space spherical tesseract, making it possible to run trains to Kensington (Olympia) only when the station actually exists, and destroying the original manuscript of the rules of Mornington Crescent which Sir Guy had carelessly used to wrap his portion of fish and chips in.
In ordinary five-dimensional space, the entire Tube network occupies a space no bigger than an average Ostrich egg, and for safety reasons is currently stored inside the Orb which forms a vital component of the British Crown Jewels.
However, this means that it is not possible to present all the different Tube lines on the same apparent level to users, since in fact they all occupy the same extremely small (and at the same time very large) space.
Any attempt to reverse the damage might well just make things worse. After the last time it was tried (admittedly as a desperate defensive measure in 1940), Sir Winston forbade any further attempts, on the reasonable grounds that although the British public could tolerate having thousands of kilos of high explosive dropped on them every night, if a third Charles De Gaulle were to be created then the only available course of action would be immediate unconditional surrender.-- 8th of 7, Feb 09 2013 Considering that was posted at UK peak I'm-just-back-from-the-pub time, it's remarkably well written, and not a single "you're my besht pal, you are".
(wonders if one Borg gets pissed, do they all get the hangover...)-- not_morrison_rm, Feb 10 2013 [8th] applause.
just asking but does any of this have anything to do with Richard III ending up under a carpark?-- po, Feb 10 2013 Aye, it's one law for the rich...five centuries for nowt in a car park, and 'e never got clamped the once...-- not_morrison_rm, Feb 10 2013 Richard III made it on to Saturday Night Live last night. Rather funny. Had his friends on.-- blissmiss, Feb 10 2013 When I saw this idea's title I assumed it would be a carriage on an underground train in which there would be a model underground railway layout and in which one could play with model trains in a knowing, ironic, recursive way whilst simultaneously travelling on a real underground train.
Anyway, regarding the idea - you can't put tunnels under the existing tunnels because there are probably already tunnels there for something else, like the Post Office's private underground railway, or Crossrail.-- hippo, Feb 10 2013 only under the stations - bags of room. aren't they getting rid of the post office line for crossrail?-- po, Feb 10 2013 // the tube, which must be the most expensive underground system in the world //
It isn't; Boston's T costs more per trip if not per distance travelled, and I'm told by my brother-in-law that some West Coast subway systems are outrageously expensive in comparison to that.-- Alterother, Feb 10 2013 //Ever been to LAX? Friggin' airport has its own tube system just to get from terminal to terminal. //
Actually, [21Q], LAX currently uses above-ground shuttle busses for inter-terminal travel (although very expensive plans for an APM retrofit get floated every so often). In the US, you might be thinking of Washington's Dulles International, or Dallas' DFW, or Chicago's O'Hare, or Houston's IAH, or Atlanta's ATL, or New York's JFK, or San Francisco's SFO airport, all of which have underground automated people-mover systems for inter-terminal connections. Sorry for the correction.-- jurist, Feb 10 2013 // the tube, which must be the most expensive underground system in the world // - depends what journey you take and whether you have an Oyster card and whether you travel off-peak. If you travel between two stations which are very close to one another and buy a peak single ticket, you could pay a lot. E.g. a peak single ticket between Leicester Square and Covent Garden will cost £4.50 - equivalent to £18/km (US$28.40) as the stations are only 250m apart. On the other hand, travelling off-peak with an Oyster card you can get from St John's Wood to Chesham for only £2.70, a journey of an impressive 49km - equivalent to £0.05/km."St John's Wood", as everyone knows, is the only station on the London tube network to have no letters in common with the word "mackerel".-- hippo, Feb 11 2013 Zurich Airport also has an underground railway. At least I assume it's underground as it's a long windowless tunnel. They also play farmyard noises at you in the carriage.-- TomP, Feb 11 2013 //Ever been to LAX? Friggin' airport has its own tube system just to get from terminal to terminal.//
Stansted Airport in the UK has trains for this purpose too, though they don't go underground.
I've sometimes thought that if it gets much bigger you'll have to start catching internal flights to get to your real flight.-- Wrongfellow, Feb 11 2013 //Zurich Airport also has an underground railway. At least I assume it's underground as it's a long windowless tunnel....
How do you know they just aren't pretending? The carriage doesn't move, except a bit of bumping around, and the tunnel is wheels and pushed by midget bears or something?
//Give me Tokyo...any day.
Yes but, when is the train full in Japan? The answer is, it's never full. Sure you can get another 20 people into the carriage, and then another 40...I got bored of people sleeping on my shoulders.-- not_morrison_rm, Feb 11 2013 From the title, I thought I was back on the "Double Idea" thing :P-- phundug, Feb 11 2013 ATL's subway is free, but it shouldn't be, because they seriously need to raise some funds to repair it. If those cars were running on main line tracks you wouldn't be able to see out the windows for all of the bad order labels they'd collect.
Detroit's airport, on the other hand, has the nicest airport shuttle I've ever seen. It's like something out of Star Trek TNG, all clean lines and rounded corners, brushed stainless and indirect lighting, and it moves like a maglev. Maybe it is a maglev. Jenny and I spent the better part of a nine- hour layover riding it back and forth simply because it had the most comfortable seats in the whole airport.-- Alterother, Feb 11 2013 [hippo] did you know the answer to my question?-- po, Feb 13 2013 [po] - no, sorry - plenty of useless trivia and analysis of cost-per-km for mass transit systems though...
[bigsleep] - not sure if I'll regret asking this, but what else did "mackerel" mean?-- hippo, Feb 13 2013 //use of the term mackerel. It meant something very different back in the day
Well OS X, it has a mackernel, if that's what you are referring to..-- not_morrison_rm, Feb 13 2013 random, halfbakery