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Trivia: what are the two closest stations on the tube map, by foot?

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700007

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I was skim reading this, so may have easily missed it - But Euston to Euston Square to Warren Street to Great Portland Street to Regents Park?
si404 said:
Bank to Cannon Street thanks to the new Walbrook entrance. I think it's shorter than the Hammersmiths.

The Aldgates are the closest on different lines that don't form a valid out of station interchange.
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I find it quicker to go from Bank to Cannon Street rather than Bank to Monument thanks to the new entrance. Saves me a lot of time now especially if I am coming off the Central / Waterloo & City lines.
 
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My local Canary Wharf is a real mess. DLR to Jubilee Line is not at all apparent and involves a series of obscure turns, either through the shopping centre or via the street. Most of our visitors going between the two get lost. Normally recommended to use Heron Quays DLR instead, but the Stratford DLR line doesn't go there and the route from the Jubilee is likewise not readily apparent.

When Crossrail opens it will be worse, that is way over on the opposite side of the development and again there is no obvious walking route from the other two if you don't know it. It faces the Poplar DLR station footbridge with a short gap of about 100m across open ground, but which is fenced off. West India Quay DLR will be the closest walking.
 
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Canary Wharf Jubilee to both DLR stations is well signed. And if you leave the underground at the exit signed for the DLR, you emerge able to see both stations! I really don't see how a well signed route between locations that have line of sight between them is somehow not "readily apparent".

The links to the Crossrail station are not finished, nor have reason to be signed yet. I highly doubt that Liz<->DLR will not be signed very well to/from Poplar and Canary Wharf (and maybe WIQ).
 
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700007 said:
I was skim reading this, so may have easily missed it - But Euston to Euston Square to Warren Street to Great Portland Street to Regents Park?

I find it quicker to go from Bank to Cannon Street rather than Bank to Monument thanks to the new entrance. Saves me a lot of time now especially if I am coming off the Central / Waterloo & City lines.
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Great Portland Street to regents park is 3 minutes according to Google, much of which is probably waiting to cross the road
 
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Taunton said:
My local Canary Wharf is a real mess. DLR to Jubilee Line is not at all apparent and involves a series of obscure turns, either through the shopping centre or via the street. Most of our visitors going between the two get lost. Normally recommended to use Heron Quays DLR instead, but the Stratford DLR line doesn't go there and the route from the Jubilee is likewise not readily apparent.

When Crossrail opens it will be worse, that is way over on the opposite side of the development and again there is no obvious walking route from the other two if you don't know it. It faces the Poplar DLR station footbridge with a short gap of about 100m across open ground, but which is fenced off. West India Quay DLR will be the closest walking.
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The DLR stations in the area probably need a rename.

"Canary Wharf North (for Elizabeth line)"
"Canary Wharf Central (for Cabot Square shopping)"
"Canary Wharf South (for Jubilee line)"

That way, the Underground and Crossrail stations named "Canary Wharf" would at least be closest to a DLR station with "Canary Wharf" in its name. Westferry, Poplar, and South Quay would keep their existing names. Would be nice to see a link for Poplar too.
 
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Heron Quays already has "for the Jubilee line" on signs and announcements. And if you aren't coming from the south, using CW DLR station rather than Heron Quays is much of a muchness.

The area isn't called Canary Wharf (which is a brand name for the estate that dominates) - Heron Quays and West India Quay are their own places. That the Canary Wharf Group paid and got their name on the JLE and Crossrail stations doesn't mean they should get their name on all the stations in the area!
 
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si404 said:
The area isn't called Canary Wharf (which is a brand name for the estate that dominates) - Heron Quays and West India Quay are their own places. That the Canary Wharf Group paid and got their name on the JLE and Crossrail stations doesn't mean they should get their name on all the stations in the area!
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Whether you feel it's warranted or not, the fact remains that basically the entire northern half of the Isle of Dogs is referred to as "Canary Wharf" by the population at large. Anyone with an apartment near Crossharbour, for example, would say they lived "in Canary Wharf". Against that backdrop, making sure that the adjacent DLR stations match their heavy rail counterparts is an eminently sensible thing to do.
 
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rebmcr said:
Whether you feel it's warranted or not, the fact remains that basically the entire northern half of the Isle of Dogs is referred to as "Canary Wharf" by the population at large. Anyone with an apartment near Crossharbour, for example, would say they lived "in Canary Wharf".
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Indeed we do :) .

By the way, I looked a few hours ago at the "good" signing from the Jubilee station. Up to the concourse level, fine, but it uses electronic variable signs and the one at the foot of the big escalators to the surface was blank. Up those anyway, and on coming out there's not a single sign to the DLR in any direction.
 
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I seem to recall there are fixed printed signs above the main escalators (top or bottom I'm not sure) which list:

↖ DLR Heron Quays 250m | Canary Wharf DLR 350m ↗
 
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You are right - I forgot they put hire bikes in the sightline and didn't move the signs or add another, making the route to the stations that you can still see despite the bikes that tiny bit harder to find. ;)

But the original notion I was responding to was the idea that renaming Heron Quays station as Canary Wharf South would somehow make the apparently woeful and unsigned interchange better as if it was a magic wand. Not heard any explanation of how that would help!
 
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james60059 said:
Would Leicester Square to Covent Garden on the Piccadilly Line be worthy?.
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yes. It's the winner for this with two stations on the same line (though IIRC, if you risk life and walk at track level, South Ealing to Northfields is shorter, but the entrances are at opposite ends, so legally and safely they aren't that close).

Though I think we worked out that Bank and Cannon Street wins for any two stations entrance to entrance.
 
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If you move on from just the Underground then Forest Gate and Wanstead Park stations (Crossrail/Overground) are about 2 minutes walk apart (about 250m according to google maps)
South Tottenham and Seven Sisters are about 500m/5 minutes walk apart.
Bethnal Green (LU) is about 500m from both Bethnal Green and Cambridge Heath Overground stations - the latter is the easier and very slightly shorter route.
 
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Dr_Paul said:
I agree here: Hammersmith for me is the District and Piccadilly station; the H+C station is quite separate, and I've always called it the 'Hammersmith and City Line station' or, more colloquially, the 'Hot and Cold Line station' when needing to refer to it. With Edgware Road, I've always thought of it as the District/Circle/H+C Lines station. In fact I didn't even know there was a Bakerloo Line station of that name until fairly recently. With both Hammersmith and Edgware Road, there's no connection between the two stations, it's a couple of hundred yards' walk across a very busy road junction in both cases.
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Having often used one of the Hammersmiths in childhood, and from time to time since, then - although my usage of the "other" Hammersmith (the H&C as now is - once a branch of the Met of course) was quite rare - I always considered them effectively one station with different entrances for different platforms; various relatives in the area talked of them in that way - as one station - too. After all they are just across the road from one another - or at least were more obviously so before the shopping centre, and when I was young the traffic there wasn't so manic either. Also, it is a relevant interchange for many journeys. So - just a slightly clunky interchange in my head. (Yes, I know that LU consider them as separate stations - but then, last I saw, LU consider their two lines next to one another at Ealing Broadway as separate stations [administratively at least] too! And that's an obvious nonsense.)

The two Edgware Roads on the other hand - in all my many decades as a Londoner it's never once occurred to me to consider them as one station - they always felt miles apart, and there's never any reason to interchange there. I understood them to be simply two station which someone had carelessly used the same name for..
 
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rebmcr said:
Their three lines, now!
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Aha - yes!! Though from my understanding of the situation - from some time back now - LT as was considered the Central Line platforms there to be part of the BR station, but the District was an administratively separate station. (If you ever asked how many Underground stations there were, the official answer was calculated on the basis that there were two EBs.) So if the Central and "BR" bits are still "one station" in some bureaucratic sense, then it'll still be 2 not 3.

NB - when did it stop being possible for trains to move between the District and Central there? I'm sure it was the case in my youth. Though I don't remember any LT-BR link even then, though I know there was one once upon a time. (I was the sort of kid who revelled in track layouts - hence going through Acton Town regularly as a toddler, on the way to see my granny, was sheer heaven.)
 
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AlbertBeale said:
NB - when did it stop being possible for trains to move between the District and Central there?
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In the late '00s if memory serves. The work to remove that link wasn't properly documented, and that led to a misunderstanding and a RAIB report when station staff operated only one end of a set of points (whose other end were now shared in a double slip).
 
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AlbertBeale said:
Aha - yes!! Though from my understanding of the situation - from some time back now - LT as was considered the Central Line platforms there to be part of the BR station, but the District was an administratively separate station. (If you ever asked how many Underground stations there were, the official answer was calculated on the basis that there were two EBs.) So if the Central and "BR" bits are still "one station" in some bureaucratic sense, then it'll still be 2 not 3.

NB - when did it stop being possible for trains to move between the District and Central there? I'm sure it was the case in my youth. Though I don't remember any LT-BR link even then, though I know there was one once upon a time. (I was the sort of kid who revelled in track layouts - hence going through Acton Town regularly as a toddler, on the way to see my granny, was sheer heaven.)
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AlbertBeale said:
Aha - yes!! Though from my understanding of the situation - from some time back now - LT as was considered the Central Line platforms there to be part of the BR station, but the District was an administratively separate station. (If you ever asked how many Underground stations there were, the official answer was calculated on the basis that there were two EBs.) So if the Central and "BR" bits are still "one station" in some bureaucratic sense, then it'll still be 2 not 3.

NB - when did it stop being possible for trains to move between the District and Central there? I'm sure it was the case in my youth. Though I don't remember any LT-BR link even then, though I know there was one once upon a time. (I was the sort of kid who revelled in track layouts - hence going through Acton Town regularly as a toddler, on the way to see my granny, was sheer heaven.)
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There was for a long time a discrepancy of one according to which 'official' source you used for verification of how many Underground stations there were. I have to admit I always thought it was because Elephant and Castle was treated as two separate stations, which indeed they were, by one source but only as one station by another, but maybe Ealing Broadway provides the answer to the conundrum.
 
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Busaholic said:
There was for a long time a discrepancy of one according to which 'official' source you used for verification of how many Underground stations there were. I have to admit I always thought it was because Elephant and Castle was treated as two separate stations, which indeed they were, by one source but only as one station by another, but maybe Ealing Broadway provides the answer to the conundrum.
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Blimey - it never occurred to me to think of E&C as two stations (were they really counted as 2 by LT?) - especially because you can interchange from one line to the other easily underground. And unlike some other examples discussed here, they're always shown as just one station on maps, unlike - eg - Hammersmith. I'd always considered them as one station where the choice of the well-separated entrances, for people arriving to catch a train there, was simply based on the fact that each entrance was the better one for one line (and hence it was reasonable for the two station buildings to each be labelled with just one line primarily) But even then, I've sometimes used the first entrance I've come to. With the current road system there, if you're on a bus which goes along London Road, and wanting the Northern, I find it quicker to go in "the Bakerloo entrance" and switch downstairs, rather than wait to get to the other station entrance.
 
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I think the discrepancy is more likely to be whether Bank and Monument are counted as 1 or 2 stations.
 
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Chris M said:
I think the discrepancy is more likely to be whether Bank and Monument are counted as 1 or 2 stations.
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Surely always officially two, despite one end of the Northern being 30 seconds (*) from the Circle/District... (* - OK, slight exaggeration...).
 
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I think there is one entrance to Charing Cross Underground that is only few hundred metres from Embankment.

Excluding the central area, North Ealing and West Acton are fairly close (2-3 minutes walk)
 
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Snow1964 said:
Excluding the central area, North Ealing and West Acton are fairly close (2-3 minutes walk)
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I believe these two are the closest that don't form a valid Out-of-Station Interchange outside of Central London. Google is saying a bit longer to do the 0.4 miles than 3 minutes though!

It would be quite a handy OSI - a similar length, but more pleasant, walk than the Park Royal <-> Hanger Lane OSI that performs a similar function to what this would.
 
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