VICTORIA'S SECRET

Tracks and tunnels There are 287 stations on the system, and 271 miles of track. Catering to 76.5 million passengers each year, Victoria is the busiest station. The least used is Upney.

During the Second World War, the eastern end of the Central Line was used as an aircraft parts factory, the tunnel being the perfect shape for a production line.

The deepest station on the system is no longer in use. North End, otherwise known as "Bull and Bush", is just north of Hampstead on the Northern Line, and is 221 feet below ground.

The only station name to include all five vowels is Mansion House.

The disused station at Aldwych is now used whenever a film company wants footage filmed on the Tube. Sequences filmed here range from the Underground scene in Superman 4 to the Prodigy's video for Firestarter (right).

At 60 metres long, Angel has the longest escalator in western Europe.

Bodies on the line Victoria and King's Cross record the highest number of Tube suicides each year, with Tooting Bec and Mile End coming a surprise third and fourth. Twenty-five per cent of all incidents occur on the Northern Line. The peak hour for suicides is 11am, and the worst time of year is early spring. Only 55 per cent of suicide attempts on the Underground succeed.

Crime Women are three times as likely as men to have their belongings stolen on the Underground; the Piccadilly Line is the worst.

The most violent part is the southern half of the Northern Line. While 93 per cent of the offenders are male, 79 per cent of the victims are also male.

Sexual assault is far less likely to happen on the Tube than in the city as a whole. The worst time is late afternoon.

The Tube as business Londoners pay more for using their metro system than the inhabitants of any other city in the world: on average 60 per cent more than New Yorkers, and almost twice as much as people in Tokyo. While overall investment in the Tube has risen over the past 10 years, most of this has been channelled into the Jubilee Line extension (from Westminster to Stratford, left). Investment in the rest of the Tube has fallen by 60 per cent.

Victoria, as the busiest station, makes the most money. In second place is the station at Heathrow Terminals One to Three.

Air The air in the Underground is on average 10C hotter than the air on the surface.

The original system was built without any ventilation, which in the age of steam trains meant vast amounts of smoke with nowhere to go. At the turn of the century, the Daily Mail ran a campaign to do something about the foulness of the air on the Central Line. The authorities responded by placing a gigantic fan at the tunnel mouth at Wood Lane to try to suck out all the stale air each night. Today, there are 127 such fans, operated centrally through a control room at Neasden.

Life Even after closing time, the Tube is a hive of activity. Engineers, maintenance workers and advertisers have only four hours to do their work before the system opens up to the two million passengers who use it daily.

But humans are not the only inhabitants. It is also home to an estimated half-a-million mice, and a species of rat that has become resistant to most poisons. Bats have been found nesting in the tunnels of the disused station at Highgate, and there is a type of mosquito in the deep tunnels that has been there so long that it has evolved into an entirely new subspecies. If you add to that the pigeons which, according to New Scientist magazine, regularly hitch rides on Tube trains, the Underground begins to look like something of a zoo ...

_ Tunnel Vision by Keith Lowe is published by Arrow at 5.99.

Copyright 2001
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