65 - Planned maintenance on the Northern Line

How the hell did they manage to make the London underground. How did they weave a tangled spaghetti network of train stations underneath an actual city without it all falling in on itself.

Sure there are delays and maintenance almost every weekend and it can get pretty confusing and the trains kick up smoke that makes your snot turn black (yuk), but it’s a pretty damn amazing feat of engineering.

There’s never a fear of getting lost in London, or having any part of the grand metropolis being out of bounds to you. As long as you follow the little coloured lines (or just search on the iPhone app), you can get from Marylebone to Camden and back again, in half an hour.

Anyway, here are some facts about the London Underground for no reason. Shamelessly stolen from the Wikipedia article, most are about throwing yourself in front of the train because I’m weird and such morbidity fascinates me.

With its first section opening in 1863, it was the first underground railway system in the world.

Despite the name, about 55% of the network is above ground.

The Underground has 270 stations and about 400 km (250 miles) of track, making it the longest metro system in the world by route length.

A trial of mobile phone coverage on the Waterloo & City line aims to determine whether coverage can be extended across the rest of the Underground network. (Hooray!)

There is one fatal accident for every 300 million journeys. Most fatalities on the network are suicides. Most platforms at deep tube stations have pits beneath the track - these pits are officially called “anti-suicide pits”

Delays resulting from a person jumping or falling in front of a train as it pulls into a station are announced as an “unfortunate delay”, “passenger action”, “customer incident” or “a person under a train”, and are referred to by staff as a “one under”.

London Underground has a specialist “Therapy Unit” to deal with drivers’ post-traumatic stress, resulting from someone jumping under their train.