Talk:Metropolitan line/Archive 1

Headings
What is this supposed to be? I see only headings -- where is the beef? --mav


 * See talk:Central Line. Looks like Fonzy is just puting in the headers to begin with. Fonzy, I really htink the East Lonodn line needs its own page. -- Tarquin


 * Agreed. It's now the ELL and it's both confusing and inaccurate to disclose it by any other name. -- Nairobiny


 * Look. On this kind of book where i am getting the info from. The line is cloured purple because it was part of the metropolitain line. You can defently nto argyue about thsi with the central line. As The central line was built as a service! RUNNING ON THE METROPOLITAIN and district railways tracks. So in a sence teh east london line is a service. - fonzy


 * Chill! The ELon line is a seperate line since the 1980s and a distinc colour to boot. Its history should be mentioned, but on a page to itself. -- Tarquin


 * OK how about both?


 * i think it should go in here for now. - fonzy


 * I am worried about all these branches do you want me to draw a you a diagram to show you the problem? - fonzy


 * ITS NOT IDF YOU INCLUDE ALL THE OLD STATIONS ETC. - FONZY


 * Nah, the Met is easy. It's:


 * Aldgate (peak hours only)
 * Baker Street (usual terminus)
 * Harrow on the hill
 * One branch to Uxbridge
 * rest through to Moor Park
 * branch to watford
 * Chalfont & Latimer
 * Chesham
 * terminus at Amersham


 * no! look i am doing a diagram. ok?


 * [[Image:Vroughmetro.png]]


 * pink old branches. purple still existing lines. grey that part or line was used for the jubilee line service. - fonzy


 * what's the little pink bit near Euston Square? Also, the grey bit went to Bakerloo before it went to Jubilee. -- Tarquin


 * your right about baekrloo thingy. the little pink bit was the end of the line. fARRINGDON STREET they then extended the line off the track further down. so it became a brancnh in a sence. then it closed when the replacement opened on the new line. :-s did that make secne.


 * Ah. Yup, I know what you mean. That piece of track is used by Thameslink now, right? -- Tarquin


 * ermm no. Well maybe thames link does use it maybe i will reowrd it. The station was known as Farringdon street. they decided to extended the line. they coudl not extended it from taht sattion so they extended the track furthurt down the line. Once it was finished they closed farringdon ste=reet and opened the sattion replacement on the new line. :_s

Circle Line
District was a rival company but AFAIK there came a point where their tracks joined and services intermingled. Circle Line may be just a "service" but on the map and to the average passenger it's a line. -- Tarquin


 * Well the pint about the circel line is that it has no tracks of its own. it just used the companies tracks. and it stopped at the cdomapny sations. - fonzy


 * But i am more worried about how to make this thing not look a mess.


 * But now they are all just lines in a network. I think it would be clearer to consider the lines as they are now, and mention history later. The Met and District intermingled at a point -- the East London branch has been served by trains fo both lines. If there is a lot of complicated history to cover, then maybe pages on the current lines should point to a page on the history of the Low-Level network as a whole. -- Tarquin


 * I dont know why you kee sying they intermengaled the district and metropolitain were completely seprate it was ajoint effort for just a part of the track and sattions and that was it. - fonzy


 * But As we are not doing this for tourists we would be doing it for someone who has intrest in the subject. It should cotain All stations that has come under that line. OK as i have suggetsed for the east london line. You can put it on a seprate page and put it on this page too. - fonzy

History
I can see no justification for the move from Metropolitan Railway (MetR) to Metropolitan Line insofar as the HISTORY is concerned. The present-day Line covers very little of the original Railway; and the complicated way in which it was built up then, which includes the fact that the MetrR and the Met District Railway were originally set up to complete the "Inner Circle", has not been shown. The two railways can only only be considered together; their history as separate concerns needs fuller consideration. There are then arguments right at the start with the GWR; the personality clash in the 1870s; use of steam until 1905; the electricification and the arguments that ensued; closures: all need proper telling as part of the history. I have moved the heading "History" to the beginning of the article, as can be seen, and have amended the opening sentences to make it more of a Wiki article. Peter Shearan 06:18, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

H & C
Although Hammersmith and City trains run over the original line, it is bizarre to suggest that the track somehow belongs (implicitly exclusively) to the H&C. The Metropolitan line continues to run over much of the 1863 line, though no longer over all of it.


 * I quite agree - have edited that sentence a bit to make it clearer. --Mpk 23:41, 23 August 2005 (UTC)

Swiss Cottage (Metropolitan Line) tube station
Gets no mention in the article. Could someone more knowledgable verify it and maybe include it? --Tagishsimon (talk)
 * Though the route goes past swiss cottage, it is not a stop on the met line, only the jubliee line. It should be removed from the map. However I don't know how to neatly remove it from the map. I suspect it's just there to indicate that's the point the track bends at Borgs8472 02:58, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Requested move
There is a proposal to move all the articles of the Transport of London tube lines, capitalizing the "L" of "line". Please see the centralized discussion at Talk:Victoria line. Ed Fitzgerald t / c 23:55, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Now closed. --DavidCane (talk) 22:42, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Comments re GA nomination
This is not a formal review, but: --DavidCane (talk) 23:50, 4 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Prose
 * "It is the fastest line on the London Underground network." The line itself is not the fastest - the trains may travel the fastest and it may have the highest speed limits.
 * "A major modernisation of the that arm of the network line took place by 1960."
 * Content
 * Really should mention the Metropolitan Railway in the lead.
 * The last sentence of the lead does not belong here and it isn't mentioned anywhere else in the article.
 * The history section is a bit scrappy. There is no mention of key people such as Sir John Fowler, Charles Pearson or Edward Watkin.
 * The connection between the Metropolitan line and the East London line is not via Aldgate East but via the St Mary's curve nearer to Whitechapel.
 * The mainline character section really should be rewritten as prose rather than a bullet list giving historic reasons for it having these characteristics, e.g. the ambitions of Edward Watkin.
 * A number of these characteristics are not cited
 * several don't really define it as mainline:
 * The Central line, District line, Piccadilly line and Bakerloo line all have significantly more track above ground than below.
 * A number of the items here are really just trivia:
 * non-contiguous zones
 * only single track country branch line (does not say where)
 * The Metropolitan line is not the only one for which a full timetable is published - see here.
 * Station tables and former stations sections are uncited. The large number of images makes the page very slow to download
 * References:
 * all references need to be fully formatted and have retrieval dates.
 * Some have retrieval dates in yyyy-mm-dd format and others in full.
 * A number of the sources are blogs or are self published sites (CULG and Tubeprune) and are likely to be challenged for reliability.
 * The Day and Reed source is given in full in ref 5 but only as authors and year in the following refs. They should all be cited the same with the full details in a bibliography section.
 * I really think that the failure to use Foxell's book or Mike Horne's The Metropolitan Line: An Illustrated History for the history section leaves the article deficient.
 * David, the link to the timetable above does not work. best, Sunil060902 (talk) 07:49, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Damn non-persistent web pages. Try clicking timetables here instead, to take you to the relevant page. Then, the tube line timetables are selected about half way down the page.--DavidCane (talk) 09:06, 5 February 2011 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your feedback. I'll make a start on some of your suggestions. Hugahoody (talk) 15:05, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
 * I think it may be wise to cancel this nomination while these edits are made to the article as it would be unfair to a reviewer to review an article that appears to be unready. Hugahoody (talk) 17:40, 6 February 2011 (UTC)
 * I have withdrawn the nomination of this article while the improvements suggested above are implemented. Hugahoody (talk) 18:38, 7 February 2011 (UTC)


 * An even more glaring absence than the two books David mentions above, is the complete absence of Simpson's A History of the Metropolitan Railway, which (with all due respect to Clive Foxell) is the definitive work on the Met. That means the article, as it stands, doesn't refer to any of the significant works on the MR. Christian Wolmar is a housing analyst and his railway books are written as a hobbyist and are often laughably inaccurate (I never cite them, except as a "more easily accessible" cite for something that's already cited to something obscure-but-reliable); Day & Reed is a history of LT as a whole which skims over much of the MR's history; the TfL website is by definition unreliable in a Wikipedia context except for a very few things such as usage statistics; squarewheels.org.uk is a fansite and this is an extremely dubious looking blog. That means that although the article looks impressively sourced, virtually none of the references are actually legitimate in Wikipedia terms. Couple that with the stylistic problems David mentions above, and the glaring gaps, and this article has serious problems and would be quickfailed at any of the assessment processes. (For what a Wikipedia article on the history of a tube line ought to look like, see Brill Tramway or Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway.) – iridescent 2  23:11, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Map
The route map seems upside down to me with south at the top of the map. I would be willing to do the work to invert it, though I don't want to wast my time if I'm the only one. I think the same of Metropolitan railway. --Dkbottomley (talk) 12:18, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

Timetable?
Hi, all. I know the guideline that Wikipedia is not a Q&A forum; I've only ever gone against it once in more than ten years here (a few other Wikipedians were great and helped me solve a mystery). Now, I seek your help again: what are your best recommendations for where online to find a scan, photo, or transcript of the Metropolitan Line timetable(s) as it/they stood in 1996–1998? My own search so far has been fruitless. Thanks for all your suggestions! — President Lethe (talk) 20:46, 21 May 2015 (UTC)


 * The London Transport Museum Library is your friend. (In the unlikely event they can't help, the London Railway Record is the journal-of-record for the real hardcore obssessives, and a letter to them will almost certainly find you someone with a yellowing collection of old timetables.) – iridescent  10:20, 23 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Thanks, iridescent! Looking forward to seeing what they can provide. — President Lethe (talk) 19:50, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

Was it the first ever underground railway line in the world?
If so, surely this should be much more prominently stated in the first couple of sentences? I know ownership changes, but does a substantial part of this railway have continuity from that first railway in terms of actual tunnels and stations? Peteinterpol (talk) 16:28, 4 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Define "underground railway". It was (obviously) not the first passenger railway to go through a tunnel (that was the Liverpool-Manchester railway). The Metropolitan was the first line recognisable as a modern rapid-transit system, with trains so frequent one didn't need to worry about a timetable; the initial Baker Street—Farringdon stretch was also the first passenger railway line to operate primarily underground rather than just going through the occasional tunnel. (This was only the case for a very short time; virtually all of the line other than the 1860s core is above-ground.) Regarding continuity, the original line is still in place between Baker Street and Kings Cross, and all the stations on that stretch other than Kings Cross are still at their original locations, so there's certainly continuity, although this only forms a tiny segment of the current line. &#8209; Iridescent 16:59, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

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Skip-stop Tube Lines
The article says Metropolitan is the only line that skips stops. But Piccadilly also skips four stations that District calls. Should be corrected? Elmo Allen (talk) 16:05, 3 September 2012 (UTC)
 * But they're different lines – catch a Piccadilly train and it will not stop. (Except of course, it may stop at Turnham Green...) Edgepedia (talk) 16:51, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

The map of the Piccadilly line does not show those stops that the District calls at, except for Turnham Green with the time-of-day restriction. The fact that the Pic map shows Turnham Green, but does not always stop there should be sufficient to negate the statement that the Met is the only line that skips stop. As a separate note, along this four-track section used by the Pic and the District, those working on the signalling system refer to the outer tracks as "fast" and the inner as "slow" just like with the four-track sections of the Met. (Calvinhc - 26 Jan 2018) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Calvinhc (talk • contribs) 20:09, 26 January 2018 (UTC)

ATO or ATC
The reference in the article for automatic train control is written by the Programme Director for the sub-surface upgrade; I would have thought this was a reliable source. I have found on the internet, that refers to ATC when talking about the SSR (page 30), but ATO when talking about the tube railways (page 23), , referring to ATC and , that refers to ATC, ATP when Piccadilly line trains are running over lines shared with the SSR. I have found and  that refer to ATO on the Central line.

I have not found any reference that the system being installed on the SSR is referred to as ATO; although the older systems on the tube lines are. The reference that was given is discussing all London Underground lines and refers to Automatic Train Operation/Protection (ATO/P) systems. Edgepedia (talk) 12:15, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Automatic Train Control (ATC) is a term to describe a system of signalling and train control. Automatic Train Operation (ATO) and Automatic Train Protection (ATP) are modes of operation that an ATC system can be operated in. With ATO, the ATC system controls all train movement - starting and stopping. With ATP, the ATC system does not operate the train itself, unless necessary. Instead, an operator is responsible for the train operation, but the ATC system provides ATP by essentially looking over the shoulder of the operator to ensure that speed restrictions are adhered to and signals are not passed at danger. If the operator does not adhere to any restrictions, ATP causes the ATC system to (usually) first warn the operator before stepping in and taking action (i.e. applying brakes) to bring the train back into compliance with the restrictions that were not followed. (Calvinhc - 26 Jan 2018) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Calvinhc (talk • contribs) 19:42, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
 * It'll be Thales CTBC anyway, an upgraded version of the TBTC used on the Jubilee and Northern lines, which will subsequently be upgraded to match. -mattbuck (Talk) 22:02, 26 January 2018 (UTC)

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Last paragraph of "Railway line" section is totally wrong
The last paragraph, which starts "The fast lines north of Harrow and all lines north of Rickmansworth...", has it entirely the wrong way round. It is in fact Network Rail signalling utilising 3- and 4-aspect LUL signal heads. The signalling is BR-style Multiple-Aspect Signalling (a mixture of 4-aspect signalling, which includes double-yellows, and 3-aspect signalling which doesn't).

The difference is quite stark: LU signalling has a stop-signal at the entry to each section, and repeaters to give sufficient sighting & braking distance; BR signalling has a stop-signal at the entry to each section, and the signal(s) in rear of it show cautionary aspect(s) to give sufficient warning.

What has been described in this section as written (apart from the first sentence) is in fact an accurate description of typical conventional LU signalling as found on all lines still so equipped, including the remainder of the Metropolitan Line.

I'm flagging this up here as I don't have a reference to hand for it and don't want to destroy the page with my hopeless attempts at editing.

– Met Line Instructor Operator. 165.120.114.125 (talk) 19:04, 25 June 2016 (UTC)
 * What Met Line Instructor Operator states is correct. The section is describing conventional LU signalling. The Chiltern interworking area currently has Network Rail type four-aspect signals that display red for danger, yellow for approach, double yellow for advanced approach, and green for clear. When the new CBTC system being installed under the 4LM project is complete this will be an underlay area where the CBTC system will control five-aspect signals. The fifth aspect will be a blue "ATC" aspect that will be illuminated when a train under CBTC control is approaching. (Calvinhc - 26 Jan 2018) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Calvinhc (talk • contribs) 19:52, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
 * I use the Metropolitain line quite regularly, and there is indeed something wrong here. It is true that when the trains pass through Harrow on the Hill, that they pass onto the Chiltern main line, which would almost certainly not use LUL format signalling. Only the trains destined for Uxbridge would remain on LUL exclusive lines where a stopping service runs.
 * Observation reveals that the line between Finchley Road and Wembley park has a mixture of 4 aspect heads and dual two aspect heads. The non stopping lines between Wembley Park and Harrow on the Hill are mostly four aspect heads. They also seem to operate on the method described in the text (i.e. the top two aspects being a normal LUL signal and the bottom two being a regular LUL repeater (there are many other examples of collocated stop/repeater signal on other lines, though these are invariably a pair of two aspect signals).
 * None of this original research can be used so I got a couple of likely looking books out of the library. Chapter 8 of British Railway Signalling discusses systems that depart from the Main line norm and (among some really esoteric systems) discusses the four tracking of the Metropolitan line between Wembley and Harrow in the 1960's. The signals installed on this section are indeed four aspect signal heads worked as pairs of stop/repeater. Page 72 even has an illustration of the three aspects presented to the driver. The signalling was apparently devised for a line speed of 70 mph with headways between the signals to match that speed. Since the book specifically mentions Wembley to Harrow, I have amended the section in the article to suit. I have not mentioned the Finchley Road to Wembley section as this book does not specifically discuss it. TheVicarsCat (talk) 18:07, 16 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Turns out that the book I found is already used as a supporting reference, so I have changed the paragraph to state what the reference actually does say. TheVicarsCat (talk) 18:13, 16 February 2018 (UTC)