Aldgate
Aldgate is an area of Central London, within the City of London. Is located 2.3 miles east north-east of Charing Cross. It lies within the Historic County of Middlesex, it was the eastern-most gateway through the London Wall leading from the City of London to Whitechapel and the East End of London. It gives its name to a City ward bounded by White Kennet Street in the north and Crutched Friars in the south, taking in Leadenhall and Fenchurch Streets, which remain principal thoroughfares through the City, each splitting from the short street named Aldgate that connects to Aldgate High Street. John Cass's school, where a plaque records the former placement of London Wall, is sited on the north side of Aldgate; the etymology of the name "Aldgate" is disputed. It is first recorded in 1052 as Æst geat but had become Alegate by 1108. Writing in the 16th century, John Stow derived the name from "Old Gate". However, Henry Harben, writing in 1918, contended that this was wrong and that documents show that the "d" is missing in documents written before 1486–7.
Alternative meanings include "Ale Gate" in connection with a putative ale-house or "All Gate" meaning the gate was free to all. Other possibilities canvassed by Harben include reference to a Saxon named "Ealh," or reference to foreigners or oil or "awl". Gillian Bebbington, writing in 1972, suggests Alegate, Aelgate or Aeldgate" as viable alternatives whilst Weinreb and Hibbert, writing in 1983, revert to Stow's theory that the name means "Old Gate", it is thought that a gate at Aldgate spanned the road to Colchester in the Roman period, when London Wall was constructed. The gateway – which had two circular towers – stood at the corner of the modern Duke's Place, on the east side of the City, with a busy thoroughfare passing through it, it was rebuilt between 1108 and 1147, again in 1215, reconstructed between 1607 and 1609 “in a more classical and less functional style”. Like London's other gates, Aldgate was “fortified with porticullises and chained” in 1377 due to concerns about potential attacks by the French.
The gate was removed in 1761. Aldgate did have defensive functions, between its early 13th and early 17th-century reconstructions, was breached on only two occasions; the first occurred during the Great Rising in the summer of 1381 when thousands of insurgents from surrounding region, assisted by sympathizers within and without, entered the City through Aldgate. The second breach came in the summer of 1471 when troops led by the Bastard of Fauconberg forced open the gate. According to Chaucer scholar Paul Strohm, the assault was only successful “by the design of defenders”: after a number of Fauconberg's men were allowed to gain entry, the gate's "portcullis was lowered to trap them inside, where they were taken and slain"; the Augustinians priory of Holy Trinity Aldgate was founded by Matilda, the wife of King Henry I, in 1108, on ground just inside the gate. Within Aldgate ward, a short distance to the north of the gate, Jews settled from 1181, until their expulsion in 1290 by King Edward I.
The area became known as Old Jewry. Jews were welcomed back by Oliver Cromwell, once again they settled in the area, founding London's oldest synagogue at Bevis Marks in 1698. While he was a customs official, from 1374 until 1386, Geoffrey Chaucer occupied apartments above the gate, where he wrote some of his poems. London's aldermen had first conceived of renting unneeded space over the City gates earlier in the century. Although keenly sought after due to their location, the rooms “were built for military occupancy and remained rough-hewn nonprivate”. Chaucer occupied the single tower on the south end of the gate. A 1585 sketch of Aldgate's north tower reveals an interior room of 16' by 14'; the space would have been “cramped, rudimentary in its sanitary arrangements, ill lit at midday”. In about 1420 the Whitechapel Bell Foundry was founded in Aldgate, but it moved to nearby Whitechapel; the foundry continued to supply bells to churches in the City, including the rebuilt church of St Botolph without Aldgate in 1744.
During the late 16th-century, an immigrant from Antwerp named Jacob Jansen established a pottery producing English Delftware at Aldgate. In his Survey of London, John Stowe wrote that Aldgate, “hath had two pair of gates, though now but one. There hath been two portcullisses. At Aldgate's junction with Leadenhall Street and Fenchurch Street is the site of the old Aldgate Pump. From 1700 it was from this point that distances were measured into the counties of Essex and Middlesex; the original pump was taken down in 1876, a'faux' pump and drinking fountain was erected several yards to the west of the original. In ancient deeds, Alegate Well is mentioned, adjoining the City wall, this may have been the source for the original pump. A section of the remains of Holy Trinity Priory can be seen through a window in a nearby office block, on the north side. Aldgate was the centre of the sugar refining industry during the 18th century, it was carried out by German immigrants and their descendants. The oldest surviving German built church in the UK, the church of St. George, is located at 55 Alie street.
In 1773 Poems on Various Subjects and Moral by Phillis Wheatley, the first book by an African American was published in Aldgate after her owners could not
Aldgate tube station
Aldgate is a London Underground station in Portsoken and is within walking distance to Aldgate, located in the City of London, the station is on the Circle line between Tower Hill and Liverpool Street. It is the eastern terminus of the Metropolitan line and is in Travelcard Zone 1. Aldgate was opened in 1876 with its entrance on Aldgate High Street. A station named Aldgate East opened nearby eight years and is served today by the District and Hammersmith & City lines; the route first proposed ran south from Moorgate to Cannon Street, but this was soon amended to the present alignment to allow connection with three additional termini: Liverpool Street, Broad Street, Fenchurch Street. However, this change forced an awkward doubling-back at Aldgate, reducing the desirability of the line for local traffic and increasing the cost of construction due to high prices in the City of London. Construction was complicated because the station was on the site of a plague pit which contains an estimated 1,000 bodies.
Aldgate station was opened on 18 November 1876, with a southbound extension to Tower Hill opening on 25 September 1882, completing the Circle. Services from Aldgate ran further west than they do now, reaching as far as Richmond; the train shed of 1876 survives, hidden from the street by the station frontage building erected in 1926. This was designed by Charles Walter Clark the Metropolitan Railway's chief architect between 1911 and 1933; the station building has a six-bay façade clad in white faïence with original features including 1920s shopfronts with green marble and pink granite stallrisers, a half-hexagonal canopy of glass and metal suspended by elegant metal ties, leaded light first floor windows, dentil cornice, two ornamental lamp brackets and a frieze bearing moulded lettering and the Metropolitan Railway monogram. Aldgate became the terminus of the Metropolitan line in 1941. Before that, Metropolitan trains had continued on to the southern termini of the East London Line. In 2005, one of four suicide bombers involved in the 7 July terrorist attacks detonated a device on a C-stock Circle line train from Liverpool Street and was approaching Aldgate.
Seven passengers were killed in the bombing. Of the stations affected by the bombings, Aldgate was the first to be reopened, once police had handed back control of the site to London Underground following an extensive search for evidence. Once the damaged tunnel was repaired by Metronet engineers, the lines were reopened; this allowed the Metropolitan line to be restored, since the closure had meant all trains had to be terminated two stations early, at Moorgate. On the Circle line the typical off-peak service measured in trains per hour is: 6 tph clockwise to Edgware Road via Embankment. On the Metropolitan line the typical off-peak service in trains per hour is: 2 tph northbound to Amersham. During peak hours there are additional fast and semi-fast Metropolitan line services, with some following the route to and from Watford. London Buses routes 25, 40, 42, 67, 78, 100, 115, 135, 205 and 254, night routes N205, N253, N550 and N551 serve the station. Additionally, bus route 25 has a 24-hour bus service.
Aldgate station plays a role in the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans. In the story, the body of a junior clerk named Cadogan West is found on the tracks outside Aldgate, with a number of stolen plans for the Bruce-Partington submarine in his pocket, it seems clear enough that "the man, dead or alive, either fell or was precipitated from a train." But why, wonders Holmes, did the dead man not have a ticket? It turns out that the body was placed on top of a train carriage before it reached Aldgate, via a window in a house on a cutting overlooking the Metropolitan line. Holmes realises that the body fell off the carriage roof only when the train was jolted by the dense concentration of points at Aldgate. Aldgate is mentioned in John Creasey's 1955 detective novel Gideon's Day, it appears in the 1965 drama film Four in the Morning. London Transport Museum Photographs Collection View of Aldgate station, 1902 Aldgate East station before reconstruction, 1910
Metropolitan Railway
The Metropolitan Railway was a passenger and goods railway that served London from 1863 to 1933, its main line heading north-west from the capital's financial heart in the City to what were to become the Middlesex suburbs. Its first line connected the main-line railway termini at Paddington and King's Cross to the City; the first section was built beneath the New Road using the "cut-and-cover" method between Paddington and King's Cross and in tunnel and cuttings beside Farringdon Road from King's Cross to near Smithfield, near the City. It opened to the public on 10 January 1863 with gas-lit wooden carriages hauled by steam locomotives, the world's first passenger-carrying designated underground railway; the line was soon extended from both ends, northwards via a branch from Baker Street. Southern branches, directly served, reached Hammersmith in 1864, Richmond in 1877 and the original completed the Inner Circle in 1884, but the most important routes were those north-west into Middlesex countryside, stimulating the development of new suburbs.
Harrow was reached in 1880, from 1897 having achieved the early patronage of the Duke of Buckingham and owners of Waddesdon Manor services extended for many years to Verney Junction, beyond Aylesbury, in Buckinghamshire, as the crow flies 46 miles from Baker Street, still further from the City of London beyond. Electric traction was introduced in 1905 and by 1907 electric multiple units operated most of the services, though electrification of outlying sections did not occur until decades later. Unlike other railway companies in the London area, the Met developed land for housing, after World War I promoted housing estates near the railway using the "Metro-land" brand. On 1 July 1933, the Met was amalgamated with the Underground Electric Railways Company of London and the capital's tramway and bus operators to form the London Passenger Transport Board. Former Met tracks and stations are used by the London Underground's Metropolitan, District, Hammersmith & City, Piccadilly and Victoria lines, by Chiltern Railways and Great Northern.
In the first half of the 19th century the population and physical extent of London grew greatly. The increasing resident population and the development of a commuting population arriving by train each day led to a high level of traffic congestion with huge numbers of carts and omnibuses filling the roads and up to 200,000 people entering the City of London, the commercial heart, each day on foot. By 1850 there were seven railway termini around the urban centre of London: London Bridge and Waterloo to the south and Fenchurch Street to the east and King's Cross to the north, Paddington to the west. Only Fenchurch Street station was within the City; the congested streets and the distance to the City from the stations to the north and west prompted many attempts to get parliamentary approval to build new railway lines into the City. None were successful, the 1846 Royal Commission investigation into Metropolitan Railway Termini banned construction of new lines or stations in the built-up central area.
The concept of an underground railway linking the City with the mainline termini was first proposed in the 1830s. Charles Pearson, Solicitor to the City, was a leading promoter of several schemes and in 1846 proposed a central railway station to be used by multiple railway companies; the scheme was rejected by the 1846 commission, but Pearson returned to the idea in 1852 when he helped set up the City Terminus Company to build a railway from Farringdon to King's Cross. The plan was supported by the City, but the railway companies were not interested and the company struggled to proceed; the Bayswater and Holborn Bridge Railway Company was established to connect the Great Western Railway's Paddington station to Pearson's route at King's Cross. A bill was published in November 1852 and in January 1853 the directors held their first meeting and appointed John Fowler as its engineer. After successful lobbying, the company secured parliamentary approval under the name of the "North Metropolitan Railway" in mid-1853.
The bill submitted by the City Terminus Company was rejected by Parliament, which meant that the North Metropolitan Railway would not be able to reach the City: to overcome this obstacle, the company took over the City Terminus Company and submitted a new bill in November 1853. This dropped the City terminus and extended the route south from Farringdon to the General Post Office in St. Martin's Le Grand; the route at the western end was altered so that it connected more directly to the GWR station. Permission was sought to connect to the London and North Western Railway at Euston and to the Great Northern Railway at King's Cross, the latter by hoists and lifts; the company's name was to be changed again, to Metropolitan Railway. Royal assent was granted to the North Metropolitan Railway Act on 7 August 1854. Construction of the railway was estimated to cost £1 million. With the Crimean War under way, the Met found it hard to raise the capital. While it attempted to raise the funds it presented new bills to Parliament seeking an extension of time to carry out the works.
In July 1855, an Act to make a direct connection to the GNR at King's Cross received royal assent. The plan was modified in 1856 by the Metropolitan Act and in 1860 by the Great Northern & Metropolitan Junction Railway Act; the GWR agreed to contribute £175,000 and a similar sum was promised by the GNR, but sufficient funds to make a start on construction had not been raised by the end of 1857. Costs were reduced by cutting back part of the route at the western end so that it did not connect directly to the GWR station, by dropping the line south of Fa
Circle line (London Underground)
The Circle line is a London Underground line in a spiralling shape, running from Hammersmith in the west to Edgware Road and looping around central London back to Edgware Road. The railway is on the loop east of Paddington. Unlike London's deep-level lines, the Circle line tunnels are just below the surface and are of similar size to those on British main lines. Coloured yellow on the Tube map, the 17-mile line serves 36 stations, including most of London's main line termini. Most of the route and all of the stations are shared with one or more of the three other sub-surface lines, namely the District, Hammersmith & City and Metropolitan lines. On the Circle and Hammersmith & City lines combined, over 114 million passenger journeys were recorded in 2011/12; the first section became operational in 1863 when the Metropolitan Railway opened the world's first underground line between Paddington and Farringdon with wooden carriages and steam locomotives. The same year a select committee report recommended an "inner circle" of lines connecting the London railway termini, the Metropolitan District Railway was formed to build the southern portion of the line.
In 1871 services commenced between Mansion House and Moorgate via Paddington, jointly operated by the two companies. Due to conflict between the two companies it was not until October 1884 that the inner circle was completed; the line was electrified in 1905, in 1933 the companies were amalgamated into the London Passenger Transport Board. In 1949 the Circle line appeared as a separate line for the first time on the Tube map. In 2009 the closed loop around the centre of London on the north side of the River Thames was broken at Edgware Road and extended west to become a spiral to Hammersmith; the signalling system is being upgraded and the C Stock trains have been replaced by new seven-car S Stock trains, in a programme completed in 2015. In 1863 the Metropolitan Railway, the world's first underground railway, opened in London between Paddington and Farringdon, connecting the Great Western Railway's remote terminus at Paddington with Euston and King's Cross stations and the City, London's financial heart.
In the same year a select committee report recommended an'inner circle' of railway lines connecting the London termini, built or under construction. In the next year the Metropolitan District Railway was formed to build and operate a railway from South Kensington to Tower Hill; the Metropolitan western extension opened in 1868 from a new station at Paddington to South Kensington. By May 1870 the District railway had opened its line from West Brompton to Blackfriars via Gloucester Road and South Kensington, services being operated at first by the Metropolitan. In 1871 the District had built a terminus at Mansion House, on 18 November 1876 the Met opened its terminus at Aldgate. Due to conflict between the two companies it took an Act of Parliament before further work was done on the inner circle. In 1882 the Metropolitan extended its line from Aldgate to a temporary station at Tower Hill and the District completed its line to Whitechapel. On 6 October 1884 the temporary station was replaced with a joint station and the inner circle was complete.
The Metropolitan provided the clockwise or'outer rail' trains, the District the'inner rail' or anti-clockwise. Many breakdowns occurred, due to the unbalanced wear and tear inflicted upon the train and carriages caused by travelling in one direction which were hard to remove. Services were further disrupted due to petty squabbles between the two rivals including an incident whereby the Metropolitan Railway forcibly removed the District Railway's parked carriages, chained to the track. There has been difficulty in relaying the direction of travel a train is headed in a clear message, variations such as "eastbound/westbound", "clockwise/counterclockwise" have caused ambiguity. TfL considered stopping such announcements due to passengers becoming more accustomed to digital devices and now uses key stations along the route e.g. "via. High Street Kensington" As well as the inner circle, other routes circumnavigated London, although these were not complete loops. From 1872 the L&NWR began an "outer circle" service from Broad Street to Mansion House via Willesden Junction and Earl's Court, diverting an earlier service that had run to Victoria.
Both of these routes were cut back to Earl's Court: the "middle circle" in 1900 and the "outer circle" in 1909. The GWR service survived as a shuttle service from the Hammersmith & City line to Addison Road, now Kensington, until 1940; the Midland Railway ran a "super outer circle" from St Pancras to Earl's Court from 1878 to 1880. Today London Overground runs services between Clapham Junction, Willesden Junction and Dalston Junction and between Dalston Junction and Clapham Junction. Wooden carriages were hauled by steam locomotives leading to smoke-filled stations and carriages, unpopular with passengers. At the start of the 20th century the District and Metropolitan were seeing increased competition in central London from the new electric underground tube lines and trams, conversion to electric traction was seen as the way forward. Experiments were carried out on the Earl's Court to High Street Kensington section, a jointly-owned six-carriage train began passenger service in 1900. Following this an AC system was suggested, this was accepted by both parties.
However, the District was looking for a way to raise the finance needed and in 1901 found an investor, the Amer
Richmond station (London)
Richmond known as Richmond, is a National Rail station in Richmond, Greater London on the Waterloo to Reading and North London Lines. South Western Railway services on the Waterloo to Reading Line are routed through Richmond, between North Sheen and St. Margarets stations, 9 miles 57 chains down the line from London Waterloo. For London Overground and London Underground services, the next station is Kew Gardens; the station building, designed by James Robb Scott in Portland stone and dating from 1937, is in Art Deco style and its facade includes a square clock. The area in front of the station main entrance was pedestrianised in 2013 and includes a war memorial to soldier Bernard Freyberg, born in Richmond; the Richmond and West End Railway opened the first station at Richmond on 27 July 1846, as the terminus of its line from Clapham Junction, on a site to the south of the present through platforms, which became a goods yard and where a multi-storey car park now stands. The Windsor and South Western Railway extended the line westward, resiting the station to the west side of The Quadrant, on the extended tracks and west of the present through platforms.
Both the R&WER and WS&SWR were subsidiary companies of the South Western Railway. On 1 January 1869, the L&SWR opened a line to Richmond from north of Addison Road station on the West London Joint Railway; this line ran through Hammersmith station, since closed, Turnham Green and had connection with the North & South Western Junction Railway near Gunnersbury. Most of this line is now part of the London Underground District line. Before this line was built, services north from Richmond ran somewhat circuitously via chords at Kew Bridge and Barnes; the Great Western Railway ran a service from Paddington to Richmond via the Hammersmith & City Railway tracks to Grove Road and over the L&SWR tracks through Turnham Green. On 1 June 1877, the District Railway linked its terminus at Hammersmith to the nearby L&SWR tracks east of the present Ravenscourt Park station; the DR began running trains over the L&SWR tracks to Richmond. On 1 October 1877, the Metropolitan Railway restarted the former GWR service to Richmond via Grove Road station.
The DR route from Richmond to central London via Hammersmith was more direct than those of the NLR via Willesden Junction, of the L&SWR and the MR via Grove Road station and of the L&SWR via Clapham Junction to Waterloo. From 1 January 1894, the GWR began sharing the MR Richmond service, resulting in Gunnersbury having the services of five operators. After electrifying its tracks north of Acton Town in 1903, the DR funded the electrification, completed on 1 August 1905, from Gunnersbury to Richmond; the DR ran electric trains on the branch, while the L&SWR, NLR, GWR and MR services continued to be steam hauled. MR services ceased on 31 December 1906 and those of the GWR on 31 December 1910, leaving operations northwards through Kew Gardens and Gunnersbury to the DR, the NLR and L&SWR. On 3 June 1916, the L&SWR withdrew its service from Richmond to Addison Road through Hammersmith due to competition from the District line, leaving the District as the sole operator over that route and the NLR providing main line services via Willesden Junction.
Under the grouping of 1923, the L&SWR became part of the Southern Railway and the NLR became part of the London and Scottish Railway. On 1 August 1937, the SR opened its rebuilt station with the station building and the through platforms moved east to be next to the terminal platforms. At around the same time, the SR moved the goods yard from the site of the original terminus to a new location north-east of the station. On 18 September 1987, an accident occurred at Richmond when a westbound District line hit the buffers of platform 6 and broke the glass/perspex panels behind. No passengers were injured. A Crossrail branch to Kingston upon Thames via Richmond was proposed in 2003, but was dropped in 2004 due to a combination of local opposition, complex choices and engineering at the start of the route and insufficient return on investment, it could have run either overland or via a tunnel to Turnham Green and on the existing track through Gunnersbury to Richmond and thence to Kingston. The station has seven platforms numbered from south to north: Platforms 1 and 2 are through platforms for South Western Railway services.
Platforms 3 to 7 are terminating platforms used by: London Overground North London line services London Underground District line services. As of September 2011, work was under way to extend platforms 2 to accept 10-car trains; the bulk of the lengthening was to be at the west end. As part of these works, the platform canopies were being refurbished; the wide gap between platforms 3 and 4 had a third, run-around track for steam locomotives. Eight retail units are at the station: four eatery-cafés on alternate sides of the barriers two kiosks, the upper one being a hot drinks kiosk through
Wimbledon station
Wimbledon is a National Rail, London Underground, Tramlink station located on Wimbledon Bridge, Wimbledon in London, is the only London station that provides an interchange between main line rail and Tramlink. The station serves as a junction for services from the Underground's District line and National Rail operators, as well as Tramlink services; some early morning services on the Thameslink route are provided by Southern. The station is in Travelcard Zone 3, it is 7 miles 19 chains from London Waterloo on the South Western main line. The station has 11 platforms. Platforms 1–4 are for London Underground, platforms 5 and 8 are for inner suburban services, platform 9 is for Thameslink and platforms 10a and 10b for Tramlink. Platforms 6 and 7 are adjacent to the fast tracks intended for express and outer suburban services, but most of these services only call at Wimbledon during the lawn tennis championships; because long distance trains rarely make scheduled stops at the station, access to these platforms is via sliding gates through safety fencing installed in 2014.
The first railway station in Wimbledon was opened on 21 May 1838, when the London and South Western Railway opened its line from its terminus at Nine Elms in Battersea to Woking. The original station was to the south of the current station on the opposite side of the Wimbledon Bridge. On 22 October 1855, the Wimbledon and Croydon Railway opened the West Croydon to Wimbledon Line to West Croydon via Mitcham and on 1 October 1868 the Tooting and Wimbledon Railway opened a line to Streatham via Tooting Junction. On 3 June 1889, the District Railway opened the extension of its line from Putney Bridge, making Wimbledon station the new terminus of that branch and providing Wimbledon with a direct connection to the developing London Underground system; the station was rebuilt on its current site for the opening of this service. District line steam-hauled services were replaced by electric services from 27 August 1905. Main line suburban services were replaced by electric rolling stock either side of World War I although long distance journeys continued to use steam traction until 1967.
The station was rebuilt again with its current Portland stone entrance building by the Southern Railway in the late 1920s as part of the SR's construction of the line to Sutton. Parliamentary approval for this line had been obtained by the Wimbledon and Sutton Railway in 1910 but work had been delayed by World War I. From the W&SR's inception, the DR was a shareholder of the company and had rights to run trains over the line when built. In the 1920s, the London Electric Railway planned, through its ownership of the DR, to use part of the route for an extension of the City and South London Railway to Sutton; the SR objected and an agreement was reached that enabled the C&SLR to extend as far as Morden in exchange for the LER giving up its rights over the W&SR route. The SR subsequently built one of the last to be built in the London area, it opened on 7 July 1929 to South Merton and to Sutton on 5 January 1930. On 2 June 1997, the West Croydon to Wimbledon Line was closed by Railtrack for conversion to operation as part of the Tramlink tram operations.
Part of platform 10 was used for the single track terminus of Tramlink and rail tracks and infrastructure were replaced with those for the tram system. The new service opened on 30 May 2000; the other part of platform 10 was used as a terminus for Thameslink services. In 2015 platform 10 was split into two tram platforms, 10a and 10b, to allow higher frequency service on Tramlink. Wimbledon Station was the haunt of a'Railway Collection Dog'. Airedale Terrier "Laddie" was born in September 1948 and started work on Wimbledon Station in 1949, collecting donations on behalf of the Southern Railwaymen's Homes at Woking, via a box strapped to his back, he retired in 1956 having collected over £5,000 and spent the rest of his days with the residents at the Home. On his death in 1960 he was returned to Wimbledon Station, he continued to collect for the Homes, in a glass case situated on Platform 5, until 1990 when he retired once more and became part of the National Railway Collection. To increase the number of Tramlink services, a second platform was built in place of the former Thameslink bay platform track.
In order for the work to be carried out, the service was suspended between Dundonald Road and Wimbledon until Sunday 1 November 2015. The new platform is called'10b' and opened in November 2015; as a result, tram frequency increased from 8 per hour to 12 per hour from April 2016. On 12 October 1972, a freight train ran into the rear of an electric multiple unit, standing at platform 10. Twelve people were injured; the accident was due to inattentiveness by the driver of the freight train. On 6 November 2017, a passenger train formed of two Class 450 electric multiple units derailed near Wimbledon. Four people were injured. Wimbledon station presents an unusual procedure with the Oyster card pay as you go electronic ticketing system. Ordinarily, London Underground and National Rail passengers with Oyster cards must "touch in" at the start of their journey and "touch out" at the end. However, Tramlink passengers starting a journey at Wimbledon, after passing through the entry gates, will not be able to "touch out" at the end of their tram journey, since tram stops provide no facility to do so.
Hammersmith & City line
The Hammersmith & City line is a London Underground line that runs between Hammersmith in west London and Barking in east London. Coloured pink on the Tube map, it serves 29 stations over 15.8 miles. Between Farringdon and Aldgate East it skirts the City of London, the capital's financial heart, hence the line's name, its tunnels are a similar size to those on British main lines. Most of the track and all stations are shared with either the District, Circle or Metropolitan lines, the other parts of London Underground's sub-surface railway, over 114 million passenger journeys are made each year on the Hammersmith & City and Circle lines. In 1863, the Metropolitan Railway began the world's first underground railway service between Paddington and Farringdon with wooden carriages and steam locomotives; the following year, a railway west from Paddington to Hammersmith was opened and this soon became operated and owned jointly by the Metropolitan and Great Western Railway companies. The line was extended to the east, in stages, reaching the East London Railway in 1884.
The line was electrified in 1906, and, in 1936, after the Metropolitan Railway had been absorbed by the London Passenger Transport Board, some Hammersmith & City line trains were extended over the former District Railway line to Barking. The Hammersmith & City route was shown on the Tube map as part of the Metropolitan line until 1990, since when it has appeared as a separate line; the track and signalling systems are being upgraded, the old six-car C Stock trains have been replaced by new seven-car S Stock trains in a programme to increase capacity by 65 per cent by 2019. The line runs parallel to the Great Western Main Line between Paddington and Westbourne Park, parallel to the London and Southend Railway between West Ham and Barking; the first line built by the Metropolitan Railway was from Paddington to near Smithfield, near London's financial heart in the City. The line was built under the New Road using the "cut-and-cover" method between Paddington and King's Cross and in tunnel and cuttings beside Farringdon Road.
Supported by the Met and the Great Western Railway, the Hammersmith & City Railway was built from the GWR's main line a mile west of Paddington station to the developing suburbs of Shepherd's Bush and Hammersmith. Built on viaduct across open fields, the line opened on 13 June 1864 with a GWR service from Farringdon to Hammersmith, services to Addison Road on the West London Railway via a link at Latimer Road starting a few weeks later. From 1865 the Met ran trains to the GWR trains to Addison Road. In 1867 the line became jointly owned by the two companies. In 1871 two additional tracks parallel to the GWR between Westbourne Park and Paddington were brought into use for the H&CR, in 1878 the flat crossing at Westbourne Park was replaced by a dive-under. A year earlier some services had been extended via London & South Western Railway's Hammersmith railway station and their line to Richmond; the railway was extended east of Farringdon and a terminus opened at Aldgate on 18 November 1876. The Met wished to access the South Eastern Railway via the East London Railway and jointly with the District Railway built lines from their Mansion House station to the Met's Aldgate station and east from Aldgate to reach the ELR at Whitechapel.
In October 1884 the Met extended some Hammersmith services over the ELR to New Cross. In 1902 the Whitechapel & Bow Railway was opened, linking the District Railway at Whitechapel to the London and Southend Railway at an above-ground junction at Bow, to the west of Bromley-by-Bow station, some District services were extended from Whitechapel to East Ham; when the line was electrified in 1906 services to Richmond were withdrawn and the western termini became Hammersmith and Kensington, to the east services were diverted from the ELR to Whitechapel, until the ELR was electrified in 1914 and services ran from Hammersmith to New Cross and New Cross. The 6-car electric multiple units were jointly owned by the Met and GWR until 1923 when the GWR sold theirs to the Met. On 1 July 1933 the Metropolitan Railway was amalgamated with other Underground railways, tramway companies and bus operators to form the London Passenger Transport Board. To relieve congestion on the District line east of Whitechapel from 1936 some trains from Hammersmith were diverted from the East London line to Barking.
Through trains to New Cross and New Cross Gate were withdrawn in November 1939, the Hammersmith & City line trains terminating at Whitechapel while the longer 8-car Uxbridge line trains ran to Barking. However, this caused operational problems and from 1941 Barking was again served by trains from Hammersmith. From 1937 new steel O stock trains, with doors remotely operated by the guard, replaced the wooden-bodied trains dating from 1906, it had been intended to operate the new trains with four or six cars, but after initial problems with the traction current only six-car formations were used. Services to Kensington via the curve at Latimer Road were suspended in 1940 after bomb damage to the West London line and not restarted after the war; when the similar trains running on the Circle line were lengthened to six cars in 1959 and 1960, the stock of the two lines was integrated with maintenance at Hammersmith depot. Aluminium C Stock trains, with public address systems and unpainted, replaced these trains from 1970.
One person operation was proposed in 1972, but due to conflict with the trade unions was not introduced until 1984. The route be
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