ccityplanner12
Member
- Joined
- 17 Feb 2016
- Messages
- 136
I have been looking at this diagram of Euston Underground station (original here). Euston is quite possibly the worst station on the Underground, certainly in zone 1, to enter & exit. All passengers other than those changing between the Northern & Victoria lines have to pass through the same ticket hall, one which is fairly small for a station of such importance. It seems designed to cope with much lower levels of traffic, & in my experience gets about as crowded on Sundays as Waterloo's ticket hall gets on weekdays. I had previously thought this to be due to it having been built in an era of managed decline in the railways, to fulfil the minimum requirements with no consideration for the possibility of an increase in traffic in the future, but even then, it's still hard for me to imagine anyone designing a Zone 1 tube station to funnel all the traffic from what is effectively 3 lines at this point through a single exit.
But on this map I have noticed an intriguing detail. Note the ticket hall's irregular shape: it seems to bulge at the point marked by the red arrows, towards the ramp leading to [8-11], in a shape rather reminiscent of the human heart. I could definitely imagine this being a bricked-up wall. It would make a lot more sense were this to be where the passageway adjoins the tube station: all pedestrian movements would turn either left or right, & no routes would be shared by passengers coming from different origins & going to different destinations.
To the south thereof is another cavity, where it seems the passageway into the ticket hall has been narrowed to accommodate the gateline, which at this point encounters a kink & seems oversized for its surroundings. Were this section of passageway inclosed, the gateline would adjoin the south wall, being consequently straighter.
I am also aware that 1980s BR had a so-called "open stations" policy in which it removed gatelines where they existed, bringing our network closer to those on the continent, such as that of Sweden, where ticket barriers are not found anywhere except for the Stockholm underground. But the policy practised before this period may not have been the same as the current practice of implementing ticket barriers wherever there is a convenient place to install them & staff present to man them. Ticket barriers worldwide are far more common on urban lines than on ones going out to rural areas. In Russia, for instance, gatelines at the main railway termini of Moscow & St Petersburg only inclose the suburban platforms, not those serving intercity trains. This may once have been compounded by the difficulty of distributing to every station in the land tickets capable of operating barriers & equipment capable of writing to them: even the London Underground, during the early days of automatic ticket vending, had price-point ticket machines which sold tickets with the data already written to them.
So my hypothesis is that, when 60s Euston was built, it had a gateline on the ramp to platforms 8 to 11 arranged in a way so that the passageway to the Underground station was within-gateline. It makes sense to consider the DC lines as part of the Underground network anyway, given that the Bakerloo line shared them for almost all of their length at this time. Perhaps I am overestimating the logic of pre-Capitalcard fares policy in London, but it would make sense for someone who wanted to go from Old Street on the Northern line to Carpenders Park on the Bakerloo line to make a single change at Euston rather than a more complicated journey via Baker Street, & if these were not through tickets valid for such travel, would someone who bought a BR ticket from Stonebridge Park to Carpenders Park only to find that the next train to turn up was a little train with a blue stripe have to pass it up in favour of the next full-sized unit?
Were there an issue with having Underground & BR within the same gateline enabling passengers to use tube tickets to access trains going out of London, segregation at Euston would not solve this as they could just take the aforementioned Bakerloo line via Kilburn Park & join the train further out, & what says it to Richmond, or Barking, or Stratford, or any of the various other interchanges where tube adjoins National Rail & they do not have separate gatelines. It does rather annoy me that, at all the major terminals in London, I have to pass through a ticket barrier more than once. My train home from Waterloo only runs every half an hour, & I have to worry that my out-of-station interchange will time out before the platform comes up & I'll need to pay for two separate journeys. Paris's system is much more logical: the Metro, RER & Transilien trains all go from within the same gatelines, & there is only one gateline at a given station, for everything. The only exceptions that spring to mind are the Gare du Nord, where the Transilien platforms are ungated, & St-Lazare, where there is no way of unifying the gatelines due to the mainline station being on a high level.
I am also curious about all the corridors in the top of the image, partially redacted, which seem substantial, yet only adjoin the rest of the station through a single tiny doorway. I wonder if this could be a remnant of the concourse which served the City & South London platforms before today's concourse was constructed. However, it adjoins the station in a passageway connecting platforms 6 & 5 to platforms 4 & 3, which is a part of the station that didn't exist before the Victoria line was built.
