Transport for London – all colours of the rainbow

As I mentioned before we have a terrific transport system for getting around London, and with Transport for London’s live travel news & journey planner you can get yourself from A to B with the minimum of fuss; albeit not always without delay!   Unfortunately things do go wrong from time to time like signal failures, or trains breaking down, people falling off the platform, there is always the planned engineering works to contend with (usually done over weekends to minimise commuter delays getting to work) and sometimes there are even people who sadly use the trains as means of suicide, which is of course incredibly tragic.

But not to get to depressed, lets talk about the Tube map and the colours of the tube lines.

There are tube maps available at all tube stations, and they are called: London Underground Tube Maps

The different lines are colour coded and make a very pretty picture indeed!

London Underground tube map

In March 2006, viewers of BBC2′s The Culture Show and visitors to London’s Design Museum voted Harry Beck’s Tube map as their second-favourite British design of the 20th century in the Great British Design Quest. The winner was Concorde.

There are 11 different colours/lines, as well as 2 overland train lines.

Bakerloo – brown

Central – red

Circle – yellow (my favourite colour) but not necessarily my favourite line!!

District – bottle green

Hammersmith & City – pink

Jubilee – silver

Metropolitan – maroon

Northern – black

Piccadilly – royal blue

Victoria – light blue

Waterloo & City – aqua

and then

Overland – orange

DLR (Docklands Light Railway) - lighter green

The entrance/exit to the underground stations in Central London are characterised by a large sign that is unmissable:

entrance to London Underground at Bank Station

History of the London Underground:

The London Underground is a rapid transit system serving a large part of Greater London and neighbouring areas of Essex, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire in the UK. With its first section opening in 1863, it was the first underground railway system in the world.

In 1890 it became the first to operate electric trains and despite the name, about 55% of the network is above ground. It is usually referred to officially as ‘the Underground’ and colloquially as the Tube, although the latter term originally applied only to the deep-level bored lines. More recently this distinction has been lost and the whole system is now referred to as ‘the Tube’, even in recent years by its operator in official publicity.

The Underground has 270 stations and around 400 kilometres (250 miles) of track, making it the second longest metro system in the world by route length after the Shanghai Metro. It also has one of the highest number of stations. In 2007, more than one billion passenger journeys were recorded, making it the third busiest metro system in Europe after Paris and Moscow.

The modern stylised Tube map evolved from a design by electrical engineer Harry Beck in 1933. It is characterized by a schematic non-geographical layout (thought to have been based on circuit diagrams) and the use of colour coding for lines.

The map is now considered a design classic; virtually every major urban rail system in the world now has a similar map, and many bus companies have also adopted the concept.

Londoner’s tend to take this marvellous transport system for granted and bemoan the delays and the overcrowding, and now that I am a Londoner….I do the same    But……there is much that is to be enjoyed about the underground system and the benefits are numerous.  Some people have turned travelling on the underground into an art form and this is one the best blogs I have yet to see about ‘life on the underground’.   I hope you enjoy it; click here.

If you enjoyed this post please retweet it and then click here to join the growing community of London lovers on facebook! If you do join the page, feel free to post your most memorable experience on the London Underground on the wall. I look forward to seeing you there.