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How to walk underground from Liverpool Street to Farringdon
- ABS 4y ago
- jleyank 4y agoHow is it clickbait? The author stated what was possible and described how. Whether or not it's a worthwhile article is a separate matter - but there's a whole culture of spelunkers into this kind of stuff.
- ABS 4y agobecause TFA clearly states that in reality you need to take a train between Moorgate and Barbican: "Moorgate and Barbican stations are not connected by public passageway, only by train, but I'm going to argue that technically it's OK if you walk along that train while you're riding it."
- bombcar 4y agoExactly. I was hoping it was something cool connecting the stations, but it was just “enter one station from the far end and exit the next from the far end”. There’s got to be better.
- jdlshore 4y agoTrue or not, I found it an enjoyable read. I came to the comments to hear from other enthusiasts of urban exploration. Instead, I got a pedantic killjoy. So I guess we’re both disappointed.
- ABS 4y agothe read was fine and I read it exactly because I enjoy "urban exploration" which is why I was disappointed to discover it is in fact NOT possible to do what the title says. The title is clickbait as a matter of fact
- tialaramex 4y agoYeah, even though it's S-stock and so there's actually a reasonable walk inside the train of about a hundred metres (the S-stock are continuous inside, passengers can and do easily walk from one carriage to the next, the deeper Tube trains aren't yet like this although a future new stock for the deeper lines will also be continuous) this is cheating. If I say I walked from Waterloo to Clapham Junction in five minutes, that's astonishing, but if I "walked" inside a 12-car configuration of Desiro 450s (a four car multiple unit that is designed so that you can assemble two or three together into a single train, passengers can walk the entire length of the resulting train) then the claim to have "walked" was bullshit.
- Johnny555 4y agoYeah, I don't think that he technically did what he said he did since he took a train. I could walk up and down the aisles of a BART train and "walk" underground from Oakland to San Francisco.
- firecall 4y agoI like that page! Reminds of the old Internet :-)
- wrycoder 4y agoAs someone used to the Boston MA system, I'm impressed by the cleanliness and lack of homeless people and graffiti.
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- scoot 4y agoIt only opened a couple of days ago, so there's that, but I think you can expect it to remain in similar condition, notwithstanding wear-and tear for some considerable time. Graffiti is rare on the London underground, and is generally removed quickly. I believe London also has a significantly lower number of homeless people, although comparable statistics are hard to find.
- ngcazz 4y agoAnd here I was thinking London homelessness was pretty catastrophic as it was…
- wdfx 4y agoThere are homeless in London of course, but access to the underground is reasonably tightly controlled with barriers and the staff will very quickly deal with anyone that hasn't paid a fare or is trying to deface the environment
- voidfunc 4y agoYou ever been in Courthouse Station? It looks beautiful compared to the rest of the system. That said, I dont think of the T as particular grungy with graffiti its mostly just poorly maintained.
- hihihihi1234 4y agoThis is "Crossrail", aka the Elizabeth Line, the Tube's major new extension that opened this week (after years of delays.) So it hasn't had much chance to get dirty yet. Beggars and homeless people are common in London, but less common on the Tube since you can't get very far inside most stations without a ticket.
- loloquwowndueo 4y agoThe Montreal underground city connects (in its main section) a total of 7 metro stations via closed (mostly underground) passages. Wikipedia claims “32km” of interconnected tunnels. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_City,_Montreal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_City,_Montreal
- dheera 4y agoToronto has publicly usable underground tunnels that span multiple city blocks as well.
- theluketaylor 4y agoPATH is huge, with over 30 km of tunnels and more than 50 buildings https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(Toronto) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(Toronto)
- paulgb 4y agoAbout a decade ago I tried to make a map of PATH by gathering floor plans from each of the buildings and stitching them together. I couldn’t get floor plans for every building and eventually it fell by the wayside, but it was a fun project. I wonder if anyone else has done it since. As far as I could tell, there was no “official” map in much detail beyond an outline of the connected buildings’ footprints.
- _michaelll 4y agoWhere do you gather the floor plans for each building? I've had similar ambitions but didn't know where to start
- cperciva 4y agoI'd guess that a lot of buildings have publicly accessible floor plans either for directing customers (in the case of shopping malls) or firefighters.
- dontbenebby 4y agoThey're very functional as welll, have you been to Canada in winter? Lotta precipitation. (I took a short walk through because in summer they also had AC)
- chiph 4y agoWalking along the train from Moorgate to Barbican while you "ride" it seems a little like cheating, but if the trip time is short enough you could be perambulating the whole time - so fulfills the spirit of the quest. Finding that elevator/lift at Barbican looks challenging. But at least you didn't have to ignore a "Beware of the Leopard" sign.
- paranoidrobot 4y ago> seems a little like cheating, Yeah, IMO more like actually cheating. Otherwise any other two stations could be connected with you just walking really slowly. I can walk Heathrow to Clapham Common - entirely underground (except the parts where the underground is actually above ground)
- schoen 4y agoThen when you got there you could ask the man on the Clapham Omnibus to decide whether this counted as cheating or not. :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_on_the_Clapham_omnibus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_on_the_Clapham_omnibus
- cturner 4y agoAccommodating the cheat, the journey could have been more elaborate: enter at Monument, walk underground to Bank, short hop on central line to Liverpool Street, then the rest of the journey.
- tompagenet2 4y agoBecause the Elizabeth line trains are so long this trick would allow very long "underground walkways". I walked the entire length of the train yesterday in about the time it took me to get from Liverpool Street to Whitechapel. I'm not sure I'd argue they're now connected by foot underground!
- lotsofspots 4y agoParts of that section are open to the sky, too, so not really under the ground.
- Optimal_Persona 4y agoWorking as a law clerk in downtown Chicago in the '90s, these underground walkways made it a lot easier to safely traverse the paths between the various courthouses. https://www.chicago.gov/content/dam/city/depts/cdot/pedestrian/Pedway/PedwayMap2013.pdf https://www.chicago.gov/content/dam/city/depts/cdot/pedestri...
- softgrow 4y agoParis has "grand correspondences" which means the lines link on the map, but in reality are a long way apart. There are many travelators (think flat escalator), and even had a "high speed" one, which was fun, but I think now ordinary speed, injuries maybe. In Japan there are snow avoidance passages with shops in Sapporo and it seems an ever expanding underground links for the stations near to Tokyo station. Longest at the moment seems exit C2b of Otemachi station to the very South exit of Higashi Ginza station, 35 minutes, 2.7km.
- bobthepanda 4y agoHigh speed moving walkways are usually prone to falling, but also are usually bespoke machines with all the maintenance nightmare that entails. It‘s hard to upkeep lots of normal escalators let alone a specialized one.
- lmm 4y agoTravellators are surely fairly standard - most major airports have dozens. And the Paris metro has enough that I imagine they would reuse one or a handful of common designs across their network.
- bobthepanda 4y agoNormal travelators are very standard. They‘re very slow, though, operating at ~2 km/h What the grandparent is talking about was a high speed travelator that accelerates people to 9km/h to provide shorter journey times. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3001182.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3001182.stm
- tomatocracy 4y agoToronto airport also has (or at least had, it's about 5 years since I was last there) travelators which start slower to allow you to get on/off and then accelerate in the middle (they work by the individual segments getting "longer" and "shorter"). Not sure how fast they go but it definitely feels quite a bit faster than normal ones.
- morninglight 4y agoSomething wrong with the photos in this article. No armed guards? No graffiti on the walls? No trash on the floors? The smell of urine must be overwhelming.
- wdfx 4y agoNo actually the majority of London inner city underground once you are inside the barriers is remarkably clean.
- hihihihi1234 4y agoConsidering that this section of the London Underground opened to the public just three days ago, it would be quite the feat for it to be already covered in filth.
- saos 4y agoCameras every where and to be fair cleaners do an awesome job for trains
- jhbadger 4y agoWhen I lived in Montreal, I used to love the "Underground City" in winter (and in the height of summer). Basically the entire downtown area is connected by tunnels. I used to have a colleague who lived in an apartment building connected to it. He would often show up at work in short sleeves and no coat because he could walk the couple of miles from his building to work completely underground.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y agoWhat's interesting about London is how little of this it has compared to other cities. There are a few relatively short walkable tube links, but most of London is very definitely above ground. London doesn't have Montreal's fierce winters - occasionally it snows, but mostly it just rains a lot - but even so. The tube is treated exclusively as a serious and frivolity-free travel system. The idea that it could be more than that, with underground malls and food courts that would appeal to tourists and regulars, seems somehow unthinkable.
- Richtwarms 4y agoDoes it rain in London that much, vs other global cities... Or is it just a myth from old smoggy and rainy movies...? https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/climate/rain-much-london-well-not-much-really/ https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/climate/rain-much-london-...
- johnday 4y agoThe subway tunnel from London Bridge national rail station to the Underground has some of this, but I agree that it's astonishingly rare. Very few stations even have so much as a toilet, let alone a cafe or shops. Personally I'm a very big fan of TfL's approach on this - the minimalism of the network is really quite nice.
- evgen 4y agoActually, there is a _ton_ of London that is underground, it just happens to not be for pedestrians or the general public. You should take a look at some of the planning and tight clearances that are required for things like adding additional cooling/ventilation to the existing tube network. When they were adding a new exit to Victoria as a part of the changes to the station I remember reading about trying to navigate the digging of multi-meter diameter holes with clearances to other underground structures or voids that were 10cm or less.
- sbuccini 4y agoSince everyone is posting their favorite underground pedestrian walkways, I’ll share the ones from Sapporo which blew my mind: https://www.sapporo.travel/en/spot/facility/sapporo_underground_shopping_malls/ https://www.sapporo.travel/en/spot/facility/sapporo_undergro...
- dkarp 4y agoI spent a day in Sapporo once and was initially confused at where all the people were. Streets were almost devoid of life. Then I found out about these underground tunnels and it clicked, that’s where everyone was, walking underground.
- lbriner 4y agoWhen I visited Hakata, there were many of these places underground too. The lack of light made it feel like it would be annoying if you worked there but the lack of noise and traffic made it a nice way of walking across the centre of Fukuoka.
- op00to 4y agoI used to love walking in the concourse beneath center city Philly, but it is now a campground of sorts, and pretty unsafe.
- windows2020 4y agoThe Philly concourse is huge. I couldn't believe my eyes when I encountered the Broad St. part--it appeared to go on forever.
- notorandit 4y agoRiding a train is not reaching by walk. You insensitive liar!
- basicallydan 4y agoThe author lost me when they took a train from Moorgate to Barbican. Clearly doesn’t count as walking underground!
- boudin 4y agoSince it's a train in which you can walk from the last to the first carriage, he counted it as walking by walking the train while the train was going between Moorgate and Barbican. I guess technically it is walking and being underground.
- carnitine 4y agoI can walk from Paddington to Canary Wharf underground if I’m allowed to pace up and down the train.
- petercooper 4y agoI could walk from London to New York if the stewards weren't so touchy during take offs and landing.
- LadyCailin 4y agoYou could still do it if you define walking as “moving your feet constantly”, who cares about word definitions anymore.
- simonh 4y agoApparently that’s ok, but using a lift is resorting to mechanical means. Riiiight.
- flakyfilibuster 4y agowatch me drive over the atlantic ocean while doing donuts on this ship...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- imgabe 4y agoAwesome. In Hong Kong I've found I can walk from Sheung Wan to at least Admiralty via a series of malls and elevated, covered walkways. Looking forward to finding more routes.
- nemoniac 4y agoMornington Crescent! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mornington_Crescent_(game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mornington_Crescent_(game)
- animal531 4y agoI find the underground escalators interesting, not only for their length but for the horizontal part on the top and bottom, which seems as if it'll make it easier to get on and off while carrying baggage.
- Toutouxc 4y agoIsn't that the usual design? If you type "escalator" into Google Image search, all of them seem to have that horizontal portion.
- danpalmer 4y ago> This passageway has become a point of conflict since Tuesday as the one-way system at the top of the Central line escalators has not been adjusted to take account of passengers surging up from Down Below This has been such a pain this week! They really need to figure out the crown control in the Liverpool Street tube concourse, it's never been good and now they've just rammed another route through the middle.
- acjohnson55 4y agoAs someone working in the Financial District in Manhattan, I think it's cool that I can get from Brookfield Place in Battery Park City over to pretty close to the heart of old FiDi, at the southernmost Fulton St exit.
- twic 4y agoThe Moorgate - Liverpool Street link is actually potentially useful for me, as i live on a line which runs into Moorgate and occasionally travel to the frontiers of civilisation from Liverpool Street, so now i can change trains without having to catch the tube or leave and re-enter the stations. Although whether the deep route is actually any quicker than the route through the streets is yet to be determined.
- lbriner 4y agoOP mentions in the article that the surface route was 3 minutes slower but maybe he was walking slower!
- 2b3a51 4y agoThanks for posting this, it was interesting although I agree that including a trans-train ambulation was cheeky. The author's subsequent post strikes me as extremely valuable given the advent of 205 metre long trains... https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2022/05/where-to-sit-on-crossrail-train.html https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2022/05/where-to-sit-on-c...
- Xen0byte 4y agoIf I "walk along the train while riding it", as the author suggests, I can get from any station to any other station. Taking the tube from Moorgate to Barbican is not the same thing as walking underground, so this article is somewhat misleading.
- zabzonk 4y agoSomewhat related: there used to be a bar on the platform of Sloane Square tube station: https://www.mylondon.news/news/nostalgia/london-underground-platform-bar-drink-21047256 https://www.mylondon.news/news/nostalgia/london-underground-... now closed, unfortunately!
- bin_bash 4y agoThere are so many British colloquialisms in here I had a hard time following—and my wife is from England. Enjoyed it anyhow, and I probably am not the target reader so it likely doesn’t matter.