The Depot

Today, I went to the London Underground Depot Museum . It’s the overflow store room, for the museum in Covent Garden. I learnt about it by watching all the Secrets of the London Underground series. The Depot itself is not open much, it’s used for all sorts of other things, that preclude it being open as a regular museum probably. I used the latest tube service, that is the Elizabeth Line to get to Ealing Broadway, and then the District line to reach Acton Town  where the Depot is, a short walk away, from the tube station. It’s like a big warehouse, and a lot of the stuff they have isn’t actually on display, but hidden in boxes or stored in special cabinets, for example maps, drawings and other stuff. 

Originally the early tube tunnels were created by the cut and cover method. They would dig a huge trench, usually where a road was, brick up the sides put a top on and put back the earth and then the road. Later on the deeper tunnels were cut out of the London clay by hand. They had a clever device at the front of the tunnel where they were digging, and as they moved forward these cast iron rings were inserted and bolted together. These smaller bore tunnels were expanded years later.

The original stations had lifts and not escalators. A lot of the lifts were made by the Otis company. There was huge winding gear, and it must have felt like you are in a mine shaft. A lot of these shafts have been reused as ventilation shafts now. Of course the original tube was powered by steam engines ( with modifications ). This is some switchgear from the old lifts.

Like the UK railways, the tube lines were run by different companies and eventually they were merged into a single entity. I think this explains why some of the trains and the look of the older stations were different between lines. Everyone knows about the history of the modern day tube map, several of the originals were on display, this one looks very different from its modern day counterpart.

There was a lot of innovation on the tube, and everything was made to last. Some rolling stock survived decades, but was refurbished over its lifetime. Some were repurposed for other work, the railway on the Isle of Wight was old tube trains and a few were turned into ice and snow removal stock as quite a lot of the tube is actually not underground. There are loads of examples of the different types of trains that were used. A lot of them are awaiting restoration, this is an expensive and time consuming business. Innovations like the automatic doors, sped up the boarding process. A lot of care, not surprisingly was made to ensure safety standards were high. I think the Victoria line, was the first in the world where the trains drove themselves.

Managing the points and trackside communication was complicated to say the least. It’s one thing sitting in a signal box on a train line in the open, but underground, the signal box, might not have a view of any track. So they developed some very clever systems to manage the points and signals, they might look archaic now, and some of them survived until late in the last century. Some of these devices could still be shown working, but not on the actual tube, the curators had put in dummy tracks, I think they had even used a PC running windows to simulate a piece of track.

Of course London Transport wasn’t just about the tube, it runs all the buses both then and now, and before then trolley buses and before that horse pulled buses.  Examples of all those were here too.

It was a fascinating visit and I got a guidebook for the son of a friend, I will be seeing them both in May when I will hand the guidebook over to them. We are going to have a visit to the Houses of Parliament together. On the way back another piece of history rumbled through Ealing Broadway, an old Class 37 diesel train.