150 years of the Tube: London Underground facts

Here are 20 facts about the London Underground train network, which marks its 150th anniversary this week:

– There are 270 stations. Just 29 are south of the River Thames.

– The network is 402 kilometres (250 miles) long. Some 1.1 billion passenger journeys are made per year and the Tube employs 19,000 staff.

– The shortest journey between stations is Leicester Square to Covent Garden – 300 metres (328 yards). The cash fare ( £4.50, $7.22, 5.52 euros) costs more per kilometre than the Orient Express.

– The longest possible journey without changing lines is 54.9 kilometres (34.1 miles) on the Central Line between West Ruislip and Epping.

– Angel station has the longest escalator in western Europe at 60 metres (197 feet), with a vertical rise of 27.5 metres. Stratford has the smallest, rising 4.1 metres.

– 55 percent of the Underground runs overground.

– The deepest point below ground is 68.8 metres (221 feet). The Underground’s highest point overground is 18 metres (59 feet).

– London Underground’s trains do the equivalent of 90 trips to the Moon and back per year.

– 177,500 Londoners slept in Tube stations on September 27, 1940 to escape the World War II Blitz bombardment.

– The Tube’s “roundel” logo (a red circle crossed by a horizontal blue bar) first appeared in 1908. Harry Beck’s famous diagrammatic Tube map was first issued in 1933.

– Trains run at an average 33 kilometres (13.7 miles) per hour, including station stops.

– Waterloo is the busiest station, with 82 million people entering each year and 57,000 during the daily three-hour morning peak.

– The District Line has the most stops, serving 60 stations. The Waterloo and City line has the fewest at just two.

– The Circle Line stopped being a circular route in 2009.

– 19th-century prime minister William Gladstone’s coffin was transported by Tube to his funeral.

– An estimated half a million mice live in the Underground network.

– Park is the most common word on the Underground map, appearing 31 times, ahead of Road (24), West (15), Hill and Street (13).

– The only stations with all five vowels are Mansion House and South Ealing.

– St John’s Wood is the only station which contains none of the letters of the word ‘mackerel’.

– There are dozens of closed “ghost” stations. Some are now used for film and television.