Quote:
Originally Posted by tdawg
London's transit network is simply amazing.
|
Despite the cock-ups with the franchise setup, there have been some great advancements in terms of safety and modern rolling stock, but there is still a lot more that could be done (not necessarily requiring massive infrastructure projects) to drastically improve the entire experience and get more people onto trains, but that is for another discussion.
Pre-privatisation the British rail network was divided into regions, Network South East (“NSE”, which existed from 1986-1994) covered the non-Underground heavy rail network in and around London, a network of 3,781km and 930 stations. Factoring in various extensions and new lines since NSE (HS1, Crossrail, ELLE, Evergreen 3…), and station openings (another: Barking Riverside is due to open on Monday), the network (excluding Underground and DLR) is likely now
3,900km - 4,000km and circa
950 stations
Ridership is a harder to pin down because of the franchising setup (e.g. South Western Railway provide ‘metro’ commuter, longer distance commuter, intercity and rural services), but going by ORR statistics of train use in the London, the South East and East of England regions, the pre-pandemic annual figure comes to 1.4bn journeys per annum, circa
3.8mn journeys every day, with more naturally on weekdays.
There have been attempts to try and show the London Underground and London’s commuter rail network on a single map, but it tends to get pretty messy and overwhelming, hence t
Over the past few decades the London rail network has been split across two maps: inside London (
London’s Rail & Tube Map) and around London (
London & South East Map) – as posed by
muppet earlier – as there are simply too many lines and stations. Attempts have been made by some to try and show everything on a single map (including across the entire UK) but it becomes pretty messy and overwhelming.
Images sourced from National Rail: https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/stati...rail-maps.aspx
A common issue with official and unofficial London rail maps is that they typically bundle routes by franchise operator which is not exactly helpful when an operator could serve multiple routes, then again, I’m not sure how you could display a GO Transit style map without hundreds of routes being shown.