Drop everything, London! Drop everything. It’s finally arrived: the new London rail map is here.
Okay, so technically, we’re still waiting for Transport for London (TfL) to officially publish the new map on its own website, so that we can get the whole thing up. In the mean time, courtesy of Ben Mathis on Twitter, here’s a photo of the printed verson.
Drumroll please – it’s what you’ve all been waiting for! pic.twitter.com/f5H05QMeZX
— Ben Mathis (@binny_uk) May 19, 2015
Okay, so, some things to notice.
1) TfL has taken over the line from Liverpool Street, heading east into Essex, and coloured it a sort of blue-y purple. For the next few years it’ll be run under the “TfL Rail” brand, a sort of stop-gap, until it’s ready to plug into the (not yet finished) Crossrail.
2) Meanwhile TfL’s existing rail brand, London Overground, has taken over a swathe of the lines from Liverpool Street out to north east London and Hertfordshire. That includes the branches to Enfield Town, Cheshunt and Chingford, all of which are now orange.
3) It’s also taken over the tiny branch line, right out at the eastern end of the map, connecting Romford and Upminster. That’s now orange too.
4) That’s left, by our count, least fivesix sets (yes, we miscounted) of entirely separate lines that are the same colour. (More, if you count all the branches.) This is a bit confusing, and possibly something someone might want to look at changing at some point, but hey, what do we know.
5) Since TfL is now running all these lines it’s finally seen fit to highlight pairs of stations – in Hackney, Walthamstow and Forest Gate – that are basically next door to each other, and so serve as connections. Look:
6) Brentwood station, at the far end of the TfL Rail branche is in zone 9. This seems crazy given it’s not that far from the official city limits, and so zone 7 might have seemed more appropriate. We can only guess it’s a way of not having to reduce fares in any revenue-endangering fashion.
More important news as it breaks.
