Today's question is "Which tube line interchanges with the most Overground lines?"
And before we answer that the easy way, let's revisit one reason why Overground line names were so necessary.
This is part of the car line diagram displayed in Victoria line trains.
It shows that the Victoria line interchanges with the Overground on four occasions between Walthamstow Central and Highbury & Islington, but all four interchanges are identically labelled. It's a lot less useful than it could be, but this is because it's an old diagram and the lines hadn't been given names when it was printed.
TfL had hoped to have new car line diagrams ready to display on the tube last year when the new lines launched but funds were insufficient so they had to wait. In good news they may be months late but the new diagrams have started to appear, indeed on some lines the changeover is complete.
Here's the new car line diagram for the Victoria line, and as you can see it's much clearer.
At Walthamstow Central the interchange is with the Weaver line.
At Blackhorse Road the interchange is with the Suffragette line.
At Seven Sisters the interchange is with the Weaver line.
At Highbury and Islington the interchange is with the Mildmay and Windrush lines.
If I hadn't chopped the map there, you'd have seen an additional interchange at Euston with the Lioness line.
That's five Overground line interchanges altogether.
So can the Victoria line be beaten?
It would help if all the new car line diagrams were available to peruse, and the good news is they are. An FoI request last month revealed the lot, indeed several requests have, so you can now download all the diagrams for all the lines in a convenient zip file, simply by clicking here.
You'll see they're a lovely collection of pristine pdfs.
You'll see they're dated January 2025, but they've taken their time to be rolled out.
You'll see that the Zone strip along the bottom is now grey rather than blue, this because TfL have decided zones don't need to be quite so in-your-face as they used to be.
You'll also find that these haven't found their way onto all tube trains yet, indeed the Victoria line is well behind the curve.
Here's the inner London end of the Metropolitan line.
Three Overground lines get a mention, the Mildmay line, Lioness line and Weaver line.
Two of these aren't proper interchanges, they involve exiting the station and walking down the road.
The Mildmay line is a 450m walk from Finchley Road to Finchley Road & Frognal.
And the Lioness line is 340m walk from Euston Square to Euston.
I'm counting all of these as interchanges, so the Metropolitan line ends up with three.
You can do the same thing with all the tube lines.
And then you get this table.
And we discover this...
• Yes, the Victoria line interchanges with the most Overground lines, 5 of them
• Next come the District, Hammersmith & City and Northern lines with 4 each
• The Central, Jubilee and Metropolitan lines interchange with 3 Overground lines
• The Bakerloo, Circle and Piccadilly lines interchange with only 2 lines
• The Waterloo & City is the only tube line not to interchange with the Overground
• The Piccadilly line's only Overground interchanges involve a 600m walk at street level, none actually share the same station (they're Manor House ↔ Harringay Green Lanes and Caledonian Road ↔ Caledonian Road and Barnsbury).
• 10 Bakerloo line stations are also Overground stations (shadowing the Lioness line)
• 8 District line stations are also Overground stations (mostly on the Mildmay line)
• The Mildmay line interchanges with the most tube lines - 8 in total
• The Lioness line is second, interchanging with 7 tube lines
• The Liberty line only interchanges with 1 tube line (the District out at Upminster)
And if we overanalyse all this Overground interchange stuff we get...
» The Elizabeth line interchanges with every Overground line except the Lioness line (well done Liz)
» The DLR interchanges with only two Overground lines (at Shadwell and Stratford)
» You'd expect Thameslink to interchange with more than two Overground lines but it doesn't (only at West Hampstead and Norwood Junction)
» The trams only interchange with the Overground at West Croydon
» There are only two Overground/River interchanges (at Imperial Wharf and Barking Riverside)
» The cablecar is bloody useless
» There are only six places where the Superloop stops at an Overground station (Silver Street SL1, Walthamstow Central SL1/SL2, Barking SL2, West Croydon SL6/SL7, Shepherd's Bush SL8, Kenton SL10), this because the Superloop is generally further out than the Overground
» The Liberty line is the only Overground line not to interchange with the Superloop (it will next year)
tl:dr summary
• The Victoria line interchanges with the most Overground lines
• The Mildmay line is the interchangiest Overground line
Other websites do rail newsroundups on Fridays but I'm going to do a clickbait roundup instead.
Don't click during the week because on Fridays I'll reveal what they kept hidden!
Short version
» In 1986 an American pop artist designed a famous advert for a global vodka brand.
» The global vodka brand has launched a limited edition bottle referencing his advert.
» The artist's name was Keith Haring.
» Hence the two-day bolxfest at (C)haring Cross.
You wouldn't know anything was amiss down on the platforms or lower passageways. No renaming has taken place because TfL don't dare risk that any more after Burberry Street got so much negative publicity. Only at the foot of the escalator would you start to notice that all the digital adverts had been taken over by a singular brand of vodka. And only at the top in the ticket hall might you start to put all the pieces together.
They've slapped a lot of extra roundels everywhere - on the walls and on the floors - each with the C of CHARING replaced by one of Keith Haring's dancing people. Nobody can complain about accessibility if you amend roundels that weren't originally there. The roundels also include a Haring-designed bottle of vodka, because if you're going to spend hundreds of thousands on a branding activation you need to get the product in somewhere. It's all quite in-your-face, but unless you were familiar with the artist (or had read the press release) the rationale could have remained a total mystery.
In the ticket hall, inside the gateline, a number of branded staff stood beside branded adverts behind a branded logo. On the wall was a pad of reproduction posters from the original 1986 campaign for people to tear off and take away, which on the face of it was a generous art giveaway but more truthfully just an advert for some vodka. The attendant staff made no attempt to lure commuters over, not while I was passing, nor was the display suitably-angled either for those going out or coming in. I did see one lady wandering off with a scrolled-up sheet later but I bet most of those using the station missed the opportunity.
Part 2 of the takeover is outside the gateline in an empty retail unit. This has been transformed into a mini-art gallery with two of Haring's original vodka artworks in pride of place. They've not been on show in London before so this is arguably the good bit. Inevitably between the two pictures was a branded vodka bottle in a glass case purporting to be a third work of art, but looking instead like a large sample bottle after a really long wee. Alas the barrier outside anticipating queues proved unnecessary, even during the morning rush hour, and I was vastly outnumbered by branded staff keen to ask me what I thought. "It's an advert," I said, and they just grinned.
<bolx>The Artist-Edition bottle’s design pulses with energy: a debossed rhythm of dancing figures brought to life in his signature blaze of reds and yellows, cut sharply against Absolut’s distinctive blue. Signed off with Haring’s unmistakable signature on the shrink sleeve, the result is a piece of 3D kinetic art that transforms the original painting into something you can hold, admire and toast with.</bolx>
A lot of creative people had clearly expended a lot of effort to devise, construct and staff the two-day activation pop-up, which won't have come cheap. Arguably they tried too hard and made too little impact on those passing through the station, merely to promote a special edition bottle that's currently only available at duty-free shops. But if the whole point was to garnerpublicity across the media they clearly succeeded, because nothing sounds so interesting as a tube station pop-up you never saw, thereby avoiding the underwhelm of seeing it in person.
