08:00 A thing should be happening later.
09:00 The thing is happening soon.
10:00 The thing may now have happened.
11:00 The thing has happened.
12:00 I have experienced the thing.
13:00 Here is the thing.
These are the new moving walkways at Bank station which opened this morning. They're numbered 3 and 4 because Bank already has two travolators leading to the Waterloo & City line. This new pair connect the Northern line to the Central line, and follow on from a new DLR connection added just two weeks ago. The Bank/Monument station complex has suddenly become a streamlined interchange, not a clogged labyrinthine timewaster.
They're very long. If you step on and allow the travolator to glide you along it takes 2 minutes and 7 seconds to reach the other end. But the idea is that you walk and obviously that's a lot quicker, taking just 45 seconds to whisk you all the way. It's like stepping into a shiny silver future.
From the Central line you first slip into a bright new concourse between the platforms, then ride a short bank of escalators down to travolator level. Turn left at the bottom, pass through a blue slot and voila - the moving walkways stretch out ahead of you. And at the far end if you carry straight on you reach the new escalators down to the DLR, so there's no need to take the old screechy ones via the existing route. It's a massive capacity upgrade which gifts Bank a new subterranean spine.
But where's the evil deceptive signage, you may be asking. Well it's not the arrows this time, it's the Next Train Indicator at the Northern end of the moving walkway. This displays the times of the next services on the Central line... or at least it pretends to, because only trains that are 4 or more minutes away are shown. As soon as the time reaches 3 minutes the display refreshes and the train disappears, even though it's still perfectly possible to catch it. I timed the walk to the Central line platform and was stepping onto a train 1 minute 30 seconds later, so the 3 minute cut-off is ludicrous. But TfL don't want you spotting an Epping train, thinking you'll never get there in time and running to catch it, and so they invoke this deceitful censorship which renders the function of the Next Train Indicator meaningless.
There's one last project to be completed at Bank, a new step-free exit onto Cannon Street which is due to be opened before the end of the year. It's been an astonishingly impressive transformation all told, shifting Bank/Monument from an interchange best avoided to an efficient modern station. The 40% addition in capacity would be even more beneficial if financial workers were still pouring into the City rather than working from home, but they'll really notice the difference next time they're here. Blimey, Bond Street on Monday and Bank on Friday, it's been quite the infrastructural week.
