How 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.
because 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."
True 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.
the 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.
Exactly. 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”.
Yeah, 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.
Yeah, 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.
It 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.
There 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
This 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.
The 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
About 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.
Walking 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.
Accommodating 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.
Because 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!
Paris 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.
High 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.
Travellators 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.
Toronto 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.
Isaac Asimov's Caves of Steel predicted banks of travelators running in parallel, where the one at the edge would go at a walking place and each successive one would go faster so you could travel many miles at 30mph or more.
>Paris has "grand correspondences" which means the lines link on the map, but in reality are a long way apart
So they're not marked with a different color or something? It just looks like two dots are equally distant, but one set is farther apart than the other?
Also is there a french word for "grand correspondences"?
I have an interest in urban planning, but I don't speak anything other than English fluently but I'm getting good at reading small bits of text like news articles or signs and translating what I won't know with software, but it's a slow and laborious process -- sorry for the barrage of questions :-)
It seems that a possible French term is "grandes correspondances", but "grandes" means "big" or "great" and some uses of this term seem to refer to important connections or major locations for connections, as opposed to physically distant ones. (Like if we referred to "the biggest tourist destinations", a common interpretation could be the ones that receive the most tourists, rather than the destinations that are themselves largest or most populous.)
"Correspondances" are what could be called "connections", "(inter)changes", or "transfers" in English (either locations for, acts of, or opportunities for switching from one transportation service to another). The word is also used for situations like air travel connections, not just subway connections.
I only speak a little French and mainly formed these conclusions from some brief web searching just now. :-)
This Tweet refers to "la plus grande correspondance souterraine possible sans prendre un seul train" (the largest [i.e., longest] possible underground connection without catching a single train). So, it can clearly refer to a physically "large" distance to travel for a connection.
Ithink the term 'grand correspondence' is perhaps less clear than saying an underground map is usually topological not geometric.
If you look for 'geometric map tube' (or similar) you can see how the actual positions of the London stations differ from their positions on the standard (topological) map.
There is another version of the standard tube map where the connections between stations are labelled with the walking distance between them.
> … near to Tokyo station. Longest at the moment … 2.7km.
I walked that route once, about twenty-five years ago. We had had an unusually heavy snow for Tokyo and I needed some exercise, so I took the subway to Otemachi and walked underground to Higashi Ginza and back.
The areas around Shinjuku and Osaka stations also offer vast, mazelike underground pedestrian networks. I used to pride myself on knowing the entire Shinjuku system, but it has expanded since and now I might get lost.
After many trips to Osaka, I feel I know all the nooks and crannies of the network there, but it has probably expanded in the past couple of years, too.
The underground transfer from Yamanote to Keio Line in Tokyo Station (how you get to Disneyland/Chiba/Makuhari Messe) is so long that it's actually faster to go to the next Yamanote station, go outside, and walk back to it.
Considering 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.
When 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.
What'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.
The 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.
Actually, 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.
That sounds awful (and unnecessary) to me. When I’m using the tube it’s because I want to get somewhere. Shoppers getting in the way would just be frustrating. It makes perfect sense in Montreal but eating/shopping underground just sounds miserable when our weather rarely goes below 0. Also a poor use of expensive space when, as I said, eating and shopping above ground is always comfortable.
It isn't that surprising. The original tube lines were built just below the surface and they had to go down the middle of the road partly because it was easier and partly to try and avoid damage to old buildings (and demolition although this did happen in places).
When you look at how densely populated London is along with many deep basements, you don't have a lot of options for having these underground malls.
When 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.
I 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.
Since 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.
It was a fun read for someone who used to live in London.
> It's taken 20 minutes to get here via seven escalators, two staircases, one ambulatory train ride and one lift. You may quibble that the train ride was a cheat and that a couple of bits weren't technically below ground, but you can't argue with the extraordinariness of such a long artificial subterranean connection.
Awesome. 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.
I 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.
> 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.
As 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.
The 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.
Thanks 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...
If 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.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] thread"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."
The title is clickbait as a matter of fact
There’s got to be better.
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.
Reminds of the old Internet :-)
I believe London also has a significantly lower number of homeless people, although comparable statistics are hard to find.
That said, I dont think of the T as particular grungy with graffiti its mostly just poorly maintained.
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.
(I took a short walk through because in summer they also had AC)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(Toronto)
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.
Finding that elevator/lift at Barbican looks challenging. But at least you didn't have to ignore a "Beware of the Leopard" sign.
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)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_on_the_Clapham_omnibus
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.
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
So they're not marked with a different color or something? It just looks like two dots are equally distant, but one set is farther apart than the other?
Also is there a french word for "grand correspondences"?
I have an interest in urban planning, but I don't speak anything other than English fluently but I'm getting good at reading small bits of text like news articles or signs and translating what I won't know with software, but it's a slow and laborious process -- sorry for the barrage of questions :-)
"Correspondances" are what could be called "connections", "(inter)changes", or "transfers" in English (either locations for, acts of, or opportunities for switching from one transportation service to another). The word is also used for situations like air travel connections, not just subway connections.
I only speak a little French and mainly formed these conclusions from some brief web searching just now. :-)
This Tweet refers to "la plus grande correspondance souterraine possible sans prendre un seul train" (the largest [i.e., longest] possible underground connection without catching a single train). So, it can clearly refer to a physically "large" distance to travel for a connection.
https://twitter.com/ElyssFr/status/1031511189325373440
Another use you will see on railway signage is "grandes lignes", which are the long-distance express services.
If you look for 'geometric map tube' (or similar) you can see how the actual positions of the London stations differ from their positions on the standard (topological) map.
There is another version of the standard tube map where the connections between stations are labelled with the walking distance between them.
I walked that route once, about twenty-five years ago. We had had an unusually heavy snow for Tokyo and I needed some exercise, so I took the subway to Otemachi and walked underground to Higashi Ginza and back.
The areas around Shinjuku and Osaka stations also offer vast, mazelike underground pedestrian networks. I used to pride myself on knowing the entire Shinjuku system, but it has expanded since and now I might get lost.
After many trips to Osaka, I feel I know all the nooks and crannies of the network there, but it has probably expanded in the past couple of years, too.
The smell of urine must be overwhelming.
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.
Personally I'm a very big fan of TfL's approach on this - the minimalism of the network is really quite nice.
When you look at how densely populated London is along with many deep basements, you don't have a lot of options for having these underground malls.
Probably because of the brutal cold you have around the Great Lakes.
[0]: https://minneapolis-2021.s3.amazonaws.com/images/hotels-minn...
https://www.sapporo.travel/en/spot/facility/sapporo_undergro...
> It's taken 20 minutes to get here via seven escalators, two staircases, one ambulatory train ride and one lift. You may quibble that the train ride was a cheat and that a couple of bits weren't technically below ground, but you can't argue with the extraordinariness of such a long artificial subterranean connection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mornington_Crescent_(game)
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.
https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2022/05/where-to-sit-on-c...
Enjoyed it anyhow, and I probably am not the target reader so it likely doesn’t matter.