The Sun says Rihanna's becoming "greasy haired trainspotting Anorak" & obsessed with the Tube

Apparently Rihanna has become obsessed with the London Underground since her recent visit. You've probably spotted pictures of her travelling inconspicuously around on the Tube last week, standing on the right side of escalators and using her travelcard (not sure why she hasn't got an Oyster card yet). The Sun gleefully reported that her "interest in the London Underground is one step away from turning her into a greasy-haired, trainspotting anorak." Why's that The Sun?


Photo from MTV
Well she's put a load of Tube furniture from London Transport Museum's shop on her wishlist - presumably for one of her many abodes. Her mates told her about BBC2's The Tube documentary, she watched a number of episodes, found many of the characters funny and after "necking a few glasses of wine" Googled the Tube and came across the furniture from the Museum's shop.

The Sun describe the store as selling "everything from a £3k patchwork sofa using all the retro-patterned seat fabric — known by anoraks as moquettes — to a Travelcard pillow. Just the trick if you are at a loss over what to get the missus for her next birthday."

 Photo from MTV

 This story amuses me on so many levels. The headlines "Tube gets a Jubi-Rih Line" & "Singer takes her Underground obsession Tube far" must have taken seconds to compose and are laughably lame.  Also the Rihanna travelling on the Tube part is possibly the least interesting part of the story for me.  She found she made the headlines last October when she was snapped by commuters inside a Tube carriage and posed quite naturally with a number of fans. 


 

Fast forward a few months and she now travels on the Tube somewhat more self consciously, striking poses by roundels and wearing hot pants. Yeah, yeah, this is all good stuff for the paparazzi to be all over and it makes her "one of the people".

Photo from The Sun What I find the most amusing is how The Sun have managed to get a Showbiz story out of this.  One of her mates told her some of her mates they'd been having some drinks together and watched The Tube on iPlayer. The "source" who could be several times removed from Rihanna said "Rihanna had sunk a few bevvies by the time they started looking through the Tube furniture. She thought it would be hilarious to bring some of it back home to LA with her. 

"She loves using the Underground because it means she can skip all of the traffic, but also because she reckons it brings her closer to the capital city."

I love how The Sun also think that liking or buying Tube furniture somehow turns you into a "greasy haired trainspotting anorak".  Nice! They will probably be laughing on the other side of their faces when Rihanna spots some of the Tube underwear and poses in a Mind The Gap thong or some Animals on the Underground knickers whilst seductively dancing around with her London Underground moquette umbrella ella, ella, ella, hey, hey, hey.  In the meantime us "anoraks" who already have such items will be smug in the knowledge we were ahead of the curve.

Come on The Sun surely you know that nerds and geeks are the new trendsetters. You only need to look at the number of oversized dark rimmed glasses the fashionistas are wearing to understand that.  Soon Rihanna will be hanging out with Gwyneth Paltrow and asking how she perfected her London accent when she was in Tube film Sliding Doors.

And one final thing The Sun - "retro-patterned seat fabric" isn't just "known by anoraks as moquettes".  That's its name and it's moquette without the "s", to say moquettes would be like saying sheeps.  If you're going to mock trainspotters at least get the terminology correct!

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Epping Ongar Steam Railway Service to be Resumed from May 2012

It's been 150 years since the Great Eastern Railway formed the Epping Ongar Railway. Now the longest heritage railway in Essex, will be resuming steam and heritage diesel hauled passenger trains on the branch. Volunteers have been working towards restoring on the track, signals, buildings and rolling stock on the former end of the London Underground Central Line. Starting with a special weekend from Friday 25th May 2012 the railway will be running services again.



The main locomotive by IanVisitsThen, regular services will run from every weekend and Bank Holidays (including the Jubilee bank holidays) until the summer, then daily during the Olympics at nearby Stratford.



Photo by IanVisits
The railway intends to operate steam hauled passenger services between Ongar and North Weald, a diesel shuttle from North Weald into Epping Forest, and a heritage bus service connecting to Epping LUL Station and High Street.


Poster showing Epping Ongar Line by Alan Perryman

The last Epping-Ongar service ran in 1994.  At the time when passenger services were suspended, the line was only carrying a mere 80 passengers a day. The train that ran the final London Underground service on the line, a three-car unit of 1960 stock, has been preserved by Cravens Heritage Trains.  After a variety of special opening days, at the end of 2007, the railway was sold to a new private owner who was committed to bring steam back to the line.  Thanks to the owner the hard work of volunteers this will now be taking place.

London Transport - Central line extension leaflet - 21 November 1948 by mikeyashworth

The photo above shows a leaflet issued by London Transport for when the Underground was originally extended on the Central line - west to West Ruislip and eastwards to Loughton on the way to Epping & Ongar.

Further details of timetables and gala opening weekend fares will be released. Tickets will be available shortly on this website or follow @eorailway on Twitter to keep up to date. Advanced booking for the first weekend is strongly recommended. Many thanks to Shell for telling me about this.

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Metrography - London Re-shaped & Visualised as The Tube Map

You've seen a lot of Tube Maps which attempt to show what they should look like if geographically accurate. However, students Benedikt Groß and Bertrand Clerc, from Royal College of Art in Kensington, have turned this on its head somewhat. They believe that Londoners now have the Tube Map ingrained in their heads so much that we actually think London looks like the London Underground map. Benedikt said "We're visualising the imaginary, mental map Tube users have of London." As we know Harry Beck's Tube map for many is "more useful than the actual geography."



Geography vs London Tube Map - Benedikt Groß and Bertrand Clerc He continued "Similar to the process of my MapMap Vauxhall project, all real world geographical locations of stations, railway tracks and Thames riverbanks have been matched with the corresponding positions on the London Tube Map. In the image above this process is demonstrated, you can see the mapping of the River Thames, Victoria Line and stations."  The black dots are from the Tube map - the red dots are the real locations.

In a project called Metrography, they have taken 1,865,565 data points from OpenStreetMap & merged them with TfL's Tube map. The latitude and longitude of each point is then recalculated, keeping the positions of the Thames and stations as fixed references to produce a rather beautiful map below



Metrography - topology of London reshaped according to the Tube Map - Benedikt Groß and Bertrand Clerc

Metrography wasn't designed for navigation, but Benedikt and Betrand think that maps like this could become popular. "In future an accurate map might be less important than an abstract map," says Bertrand. "And maybe we've started that process."  Hat tip to Wired who published this in their May 2012 issue. 

What do you think?  Is the quest to find or design a geographically accurate Tube Map actually quite redundant and pointless now?  If so many of us see London as the Tube Map, would a geographically accurate one be more of a hindrance than a help?  Or should the real Tube Map make more efforts to show that distances that look far away from each other are actually quite close?  Is this something that could encourage more of us to walk between stations (probably quite useful given the levels of Tube overcrowding predicted for the Olympic Games)?

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Olympic Tube Map Renames Stations with names of Sporting Celebrities

"Depart at Daley Thompson for the Lost Property Office".  "Next stop Cassius Clay". "Calling at Fanny Blankers-Koen and all stations to Richmond" Some of the phrases you might hear if drivers were to follow a new Tube map. With more than a large nod to The Great Bear where Turner Prize winning artist Simon Patterson changed Tube station names on the London Underground Map to celebrities, TfL are going to be doing a similar version for the London Olympics. Stratford International station on the Docklands Light Railway will be re-named Cassius Clay, boxing legend Muhammad Ali's original name when he won the light heavyweight gold at the 1960 Rome Olympics.



Brits Daley Thompson & Steve Redgrave, American athletes Jesse Owens and Carl Lewis, Australian swimming legends Murray Rose and Dawn Fraser and basketball great Magic Johnson are amongst other athletes who will have a London underground station named after them on a special map during the London Games later this year.

The Underground Olympic Legends Map was designed by Alex Trickett and David Brooks who said: "We love sport, we love lists and we love London, so what better challenge than to select 361 of the greatest athletes the world has ever seen and to fit them on to our iconic Tube map.

"There were heated debates and a few late changes of heart, but we are happy with the result: dozens of nations represented, all 2012 Olympic sports accounted for, and Ali and Phelps, two of the greatest Olympians of all time, guarding the Stratford gateways to the Games." 

"These things always divide opinion, so we are happy to discuss (and defend!) any of our choices"



Baker Street is renamed Daley Thompson for the two-time decathlon gold medallist, while Leicester Square is LeBron James and Knightsbridge is Steve Redgrave.

Track stars make up a good part of the map, running from west to east and all around the centre of London. Swimmers take up most of the Central Line. Basketball and tennis players run from north to south, with stops Magic Johnson and Sheryl Swoopes being followed by Roger Federer, The Woodies Mark Woodforde and Todd Woodbridge, and The Williams sisters Serena and Venus.

Ian Thorpe is the new name for the Oxford Circus station. Piccadilly Circus is renamed Mia Hamm after the USA's gold-medal winning football player.

A watermarked sample of the full map is on TfL's site and a poster can be purchased for £4.99

Update - Fanny Blankers-Koen, a Dutchwoman who was one of the biggest stars of the 1948 London Olympics, was originally left off a new map of the London Underground dedicated to past Olympians, prompting criticism from the Netherlands.

On 4th April 2012 , the track star known as the ''FlyingHousewife'' was added to the list for future prints.
''We apologise if any offence has been caused by the omission of Fanny Blankers-Koen, who was clearly a remarkable athlete,'' TfL marketing director Chris Macleod said in a statement. ''We are speaking to the publisher to ensure that she features in the next reprint of the map.''  I had never heard of her until she was mentioned in the comments, but am delighted that Fanny will be on the Olympic Tube map.  If only they were real stations, I would pay good money to hear drivers announcing that the next train will be stopping at Fanny!


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London Overground Stations to get WiFi in time for Olympics

After the announcement that Virgin Media won the contract to provide wi-fi to the London Underground, now it's been announced that London’s Overground train passengers will be able to access 60 minutes of free wi-fi per day with the introduction of hotspots at 56 stations. The Next Web report that the hotspots will be managed by The Cloud which is owned by BSkyB and users will need to register once to access the service.


Shadwell London Overground station by Mr. Grossman
The contract will give travellers one hour of free online access every day, at any station on the network.  Some of the major London stations to get the service in time for the stations in time for the London 2012 Olympics this summer will be Dalston, Forest Hill, Hackney Central, Kensington Olympia, New Cross Gate, Norwood Junction, Shepherd’s Bush, Surrey Quays, Wapping, West Croydon, West Hampstead and Willesden Junction.  The rollout to all London Overground stations is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

“Access to the internet is no longer limited solely to home or to the workplace, and people’s expectation is to be able to work and communicate effectively and seamlessly while they’re on the move so we’re delighted to support this initiative which will bring reliable, free WiFi to London Overground’s customers,” said Steve Murphy, Managing Director of London Overground Rail Operations.

Virgin Media is building the wi-fi network on the London Underground from a total capital expenditure budget of about £640m for 2012.  There will be a period of free access during the Olympics, and then only Virgin Media's broadband & mobile customers will get continued access as part of their subscriptions. Other non-paying users will be limited to a site showing online travel information.

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