The Lost Tube Line 

Sometimes RU-vid throws up some real gems.

I imagine to most Americans, talk about the underground sounds something like this "At pennywhistle station and watercress court down the old spannywaist has a pindlestiff at the brumley and Falstaff greengrocer. Tittertwat and piffle register for the jaunty morning waistcoat. Follow the balderdash and kindly mind the wainscoting!"

On my last visit to London a couple years ago, I stayed near the Highbury & Islington stop, and used this line quite a few times. I knew something felt "off" about it - a "National Rail" line, with full-size trains, but in a tube that looked like the Underground - and finally, this video has explained it!

Secret waterways under train tunnels. England is a honeycomb.

I take this train to school everyday

Went on this line once when I was like 3/4, (it was run by FCC back then) and being a smol kid I now know it forever as: Big creepy scary line

What I recall, from riding on this line as a child (late 1960s?) is how dimly lit the platforms in the tunnel stations were. I supposed, because British Railways lighting standards are based on lighting a station at night, and, the Underground's lighting standards are based on lighting a station in the daytime.

I have heard of Moorgate Protection. There are timers on the tracks on the approaches to terminal stations which require three reductions in speed and if a train goes through one before it should, the brakes on the train are engaged.

Another brilliant film ! Talking of the Moorgate disaster an " old hand" on the tube told me a strange thing about it when I was a kid . Drivers used to have a regular guard , when the train came to a stop he opened the doors and wasn't concerned that the front part of the train was in the tunnel ? Reason ? the same driver had overshot the platform several times before . Also the first emergency worker on the scene was a young PC who was on duty outside the station . Years later he was first on the scene of the Marshoness pleasure boat disaster .

I'm only occasionally in London (I don't live in Europe) so I think I would've gotten more out of this video if the location of this line was shown on a modern Tube map.

Got on at Essex Road during the first lockdown, was like something like a horror movie

As a resident of Crouch End, the abandonment of the extension plans is lamentable. But at least we have Harringay station nearby... and a nice lengthy greenway passing through the area.

It really is a bizarre line. We get it to the Ally Pally and the first time you’re there the 80s decor makes you feel like you’re in a different time. Then a mainline train rolls in - it is just so jarring because it defies expectation. Great video as always.

I would welcome learning more of the Moorgate Underground Disaster. A friend of mine died in it.

I used this link to Finsbury Park, on the night of the King's Cross Fire, instead of my more usual route ....

Would definitely like to see more about the Mooregate and what those in the know think led up to this disaster. My sympathies and condolences to the families and friends of those lost.

Old Street and Essex Road are both utterly haunting and charming at the same time. Even midweek they're almost deserted outside of rush hour. As a teenager in the mid 1980's I always took a ride on this line when I visited London on spotting trips. It was referred to as the "Great Northern Electrics" at this time. Much of Network SouthEast livery still remains in place.

I've used this line and it's true, being on that platform is eary especially with the large hulking tunnels

I used this line in the 70s as a way of getting Arsenal from East London on a Saturday. It was always a cinderella line and wasn't there at least one station that didn't have any filling in of the tunnel rings? I seem to recall it looked unfinished? The trains always seemed faster than other lines but I put that down to the extra noise of the larger tunnels. I was travelling back to Charing Cross from Kent when I found out about Moorgate. I don't think anyone expected it to be as horrendous as it was? I bought the Evening Standard (the jacker's journal) to read about it. The news that night was awful knowing what was at the end of that station tunnel. All very sad.

I remember travelling to Drayton Park several times when the line was under London Transport, and there was a distinctive smell, a sort of musty odour, and I never discovered why.

I remember staying at a mates flat in Highbury and going to work from there to Moorgate, fortunately for me, I was two trains in front of the one that crashed, it was shortly after I reached the surface all hell broke loose as the disaster unfolded

Thank you for another brilliantly idiosyncratic and thoroughly enjoyable video; your knowledge is amazing.

In 2015 I rode the tube from Tower Hill to Paddington. I do not know if we were on the Circle or District line. Because the tube was undergoing major construction, the train made what must have been an unscheduled stop and instructed anyone who was traveling to Paddington to get off the train, walk around and take the Hammersmith & City line. There were no escalators or lift. We had to walk under a huge air vent and climb a long spiral staircase, then walk through a high vaulted, dark, arched passageway where stuff was stored. There was only one dim light on the side wall. We could hardly see, but continued about 200 feet to two very large push doors to exit. We exited onto a back alley backed by a short fence and a row of low houses. The double doors had an old green light fixture over the doors. We walked to a quiet side street and turned left onto it. Across the street were several individual, tall red brick apartments in a grassy common area with a red phone booth. We walked along a large yellow brick warehouse like building 2 blocks to a main road. It was afternoon and we were terrified since no one was on either street except for one man. Across the street was a large empty field of grass and row of trees. To the left of the field was an abandoned red brick factory with a tall stack. We walked along the street past closed, Victorian, one-story brick store fronts with old painted signs in windows. No traffic, no cars, no buses, no bikes, no taxis. No modern buildings or high rises, nor people. We came upon the brightly lit rondel in this row. There was one or two turnstiles and no station attendant. The only way down to the platform was by a small elevator. No one was inside the station and we were the only ones on a small, unadorned platform with no bench, hoping to connect with Hammersmith & City line. After searching extensively, I do not find such an unpopulated neighborhood with old buildings. I want to know the name of the neighborhood and station with spiral stairs we climbed out of, and if it was an unused station with no cross over, and what is the station we entered? Thanks for any help. It's driving me crazy that I can't find it online. Eltee

Drayton Park was my local station back when I visited London on spring break. It was pretty neat regularly using this odd piece of history.

Great video, thanks. I remember first using this station way back in the early 90s when I lived at Highbury Islington and needed to get to work at Moorgate. This was my daily commute and I was quite aware back then on its unusual significance. I was really happy a few years ago to see that it was still in operation.

I was on the platform at Moorgate station a few minutes prior to the disaster, I am very lucky not to have been there to witness the tradegy in person.

This is brilliant, i have just suscribed, I never knew any about this line and me and my little brother would often travel on the tubes, and nearly every week atleast once we would past finsbury park. Thanks for the info on tubes! keep it up!

My grave site was disturbed when this was built, i can't rest now and still float around these tunnels in limbo

Your videos are really packed with information and I often have to watch them twice or more!

I used to use this line, quite handy as I lived on Essex Road near the station, allowing connections to the Underground at Moorgate. The weirdness is compounded by the lack of adverts that you would see at a proper Tube station, making the featureless corridors seem even longer, lonelier and more barren.

Thanks Jago for old memories of the NC line. I discovered it back in 1950s when I was a schoolkid in London and a tube nerd. It was then still the rogue fragment of the Northern line called the Finsbury Park branch. The line was incredibly spooky back then it was dimly lit an almost deserted outside rush hour. Because of the large bore tunnels and the elderly tube stock used then there was this eerie echoing rumble for ages before the train arrived The other really weird thing I haven't seen commented on was the nameboards. In those days they had not the standard LT roundels but these odd red diamonds which I think were the old Metropolitan style. The letter set was very old looking too. The whole effect was quite frighteningly creepy and one could imagine some tense thriller with the goodie and the baddie trying to push each other onto the track with that rising echoing rumble of an approaching train building up to a fearful climax.

I've been to London maybe 5 times in my 30 years of life, and Ion't have any train videos in my RU-vid history. So I'm unsure how this ended up in my recommendations but I'm now going to watch ' The Mystery of Moorgate'. You've piqued a curiosity I didn't know I had!

Just come across your page Fascinating stuff keep up the good work!

A line from my childhood! I went to school at Drayton park. Me and my dad decided to get it to the end of the line one weekend, for no reason at all, and went all the way out to welwyn garden city.

That was a really interesting video. I'll have to take some time out to travel on the Northern City Line one day, hopefully soon. It's just one of those peculiarities on the tube map network that just stands out as an oddity, but which is so worth looking into. Thanks very much for this informative documentary. 👍🏾👏🏾

I visited Essex Road recently. It's the bleakest station I've ever been to with no advertising and no digital boards with times of the coming trains. I was the only person in the station. To add to the spooky feeling, the train terminated on the same platform at Moorgate as the tube disaster.

Love your videos. Keep up the magic!

The Tube never fails to fascinate. Great video.

went there a few months before the last 313's ... went to all the stations .. weekdays.. scared the willies out of me.. but was wonderful to be a time ship back to the 80s

Interesting. I used to use this line occasionally and remember being surprised on discovering it as an alternative to the underground for getting into the city. I was based for work at Finsbury Park at the time and would need to travel around from there to various locations and this line came in handy as a quick route to Moorgate, quicker than using the tube lines which involved a change. Never knew the background to this.

when i was a kid this line really did play on my mind. i almost resented it. when i was 11 i remember going on it after school, just had to. its very weird line. overhead trains underground 🤦🏾‍♂️ rip 🙏🏾to the crash victims. i didn't know that.

i use this line regularly as i live in welwyn garden city (the last stop) and it is quite weird all the underground stations, it seems abandoned in some ways

oo! this must be the line i take sometimes to get to old street from the north. i remember being strangely excited the first time i saw those deep level tube platforms covered with national rail signage. those tunnels at old street connecting the platforms to the tube station always have been particularly grimy.

Thank you! I often wondered why there was a mutant tube stop on Essex Road

I travelled on the line twice under LT ownership before the handover, when they were still using the 1938 Stock. They diverted the northbound line into a new tunnel and platform at Highbury & Islington, to provide same level interchange with the Victoria Line. The new tunnels for the Moorgate Line were built to the larger dimension also, so as not to pose a problem if and when larger stock was introduced. (This turned out to be about 10 years later).

so glad i found this. i was talking to my parents about the moorgate tube disaster and my mum (born and raised in north london) said that the tube at the time was the northern line, she used it to get to work. she also said that she recently had a disagreement with her boss (from hertfordshire 🤪) about it and her boss said it wasn’t part of the northern line, it was something completely different. i tried to fact check via wikipedia and there’s nothing as detailed as this, so i just assumed my mum had misremembered. I’m happy this video has vindicated my mum.

Excellent Video!!! Great narration. :)

In the 80s this line was called the Great Northern Electrics and the Tube map had the Moorgate to Finsbury Park section as a BR section (usually two thin black lines) labelled "G.N. Electrics". The signs remained well past privatisation; the name Great Northern was one of the sections of Network SouthEast (hence the station decor at Essex Road). Trains heading south were shown as going to "London Moorgate" (they may still be).

TfL are in talks with Great Northern on taking over the Moorgate branch to make it part of the Overground at the moment.

I actually work for great northern railways (part of the Govia Thameslink series) at Palmers Green Station. Been there for 2 years. So this vid is relatable. Your videos are an eye opener.

I travelled on the line a time or two in the mid-1970s. The main oddity I noticed about it then was that the running tunnels had lights all along them - you could stand on the platform and see them stretching a long way away into the dark. The Moorgate crash mightn't have been quite such a frightful mess if they hadn't been using Tube-size stock in tunnels built to main-line dimensions. It left more room for the carriages to override each other and get crushed every which way, instead of just suffering end-to-end compression.

Love stories of British rail and this is one of them. New subscriber here .

1:10 “Arguably it shouldn’t have been an underground line in the first place. It was never intended as such.” Explain please.

As someone who used to commute from HFN to Moorgate, I always found this section from Finsbury Park into central very strange, now I understand why. Really interesting to know this. I also enjoyed the map of the Northern line connecting up to Ally Pally.

As a young boy in the fifties I occasionally went on this line when it still went to Finsbury Park. It was very creepy and dark, especially that long passage at Old Street. And I seem to remember spiral staircases at Finsbury Park, if anyone can confirm.

Northern heights, plus future plans for this odd line.

Born in 72, London, i remember a lot of the old maps and im sure i remember this line 🙂

This is awesome. Never knew this. Many thanks!

One of my uncles was a firefighter who attended Moorgate. 12 years later he was at Kings Cross. He never talks much about either disaster, other than to say "the underground is the worst place to be called to a shout".

I remember reading of and seeing the TV films of the Moorgate train disaster of 1975. In 1988 the book “Moorgate, the anatomy of a railway disaster” by Sally Holloway was published. A book that I took out from my local library and read, from cover to cover. It revealed all of, at the time, the horrific details of this tragedy, of those on the train and of the horrific conditions that the rescue services endured on the train and in the tunnel. I will never forget what I read and the pictures and the thought of that little tube type train with its passengers, running, with the power still applied to its traction motors as it passed through the station platform and into the short dead-end tunnel. 💔😢

A while back I remember watching a vid about this line that was quite good and worth watching, at least i think it had something to do with it as i remember the station name Bushy Heath...Its called, "The Unfinished Northern Line" by Jay Foreman......Worth a watch and its not too long...

Yes please to those other video. It would be great to watch. x

back in the early 1980's, all stations had small sections of platform that still had posters from 1975 e.g "The Towering Inferno" movie etc.... B R were so cheap that it took them years to upgrade some of the walls and they had the old posters until around 1995!

the moorgate to finsbury park line was also closed alot on the weekends during the 80's/90's and also used for fire training during the 80's at essex road on the weekends -- essex road has always had a spooky feeling about the station and even the platforms at highbury have that same sort of feeling about them -- this part of the line run's under where i used to live and we could feel the trains shaking the house has they passed ( essex rd to old street ) -- it seems this line has swap hands so many times that it feels no one wants it and it has been on and off the tube maps / london connections maps over the years

Yaaay! I'm so happy, this line is my line! My station is Essex Rd. Ha solid little vid lol rad history 👏

Northern Heights special - definitely, just up the road from me and a local fascination!

Another fascinating look at London Transport history. Re your earlier item on what lies hidden underneath - there was a long article about this in The Daily Telegraph recently. It was tied in with a new exhibition "Hidden London" at the Transport Museum, starting 11 October. One to visit! There's a book, too: "Hidden London" which is a joint effort, but it's quite pricey, £25. I wasn't aware that TfL actually run guided tours of some of these places.

great story. thanks for sharing it.

Nice work 😎

Very interesting. I noticed that there was one photo of an overbridge at East Finchley station, advertising the new UndergrounD service about to take over the steam service. That was my first home, in the 1950s. I think it regrettable that the Finsbury Park - Alexandra Palace line ( part of the 1935 Northern Heights plan) was never made into a Northern Line service. It meant that a very large suburban area of north London was then left with no passenger railway.

Borehamwood library had a model of the northern heights line recently not sure if it’s still on looking forward to seeing your video on it anyway

I parked my car on front of that Strand station some years ago, when I went from the continent to London

Excellent stuff! It must be weird to take a full size ‘outdoor’ train into a tube line...

Great video. One detail slightly incorrect is the "mystery cause". It was determined in the driver's autopsy that he died of a seizure, which exonerated him from blame for the tragedy at the hearing. The one thing learned from his death was the implementation of the Dead Man's Handle, which, if it had been installed before the crash, would have saved the passengers from injury and death.

That “Network South East” sign was right out of the 1980’s.

Una lástima ver todo ese sistema abandonado .muy buen video, haz más.

I used to go to The Garage only a few doors down from that station entrance

Hello I get the Great Northern train sometimes from Finsbury Park to Moorgate and it always goes through an abandoned platform just before we get to King's Cross. I have had a look at some signage on the tunnel and it says Clerkenwell. Was there a station there that was supposed to be part of the NC line you talk about in this video?

An interesting vid. But the line was never under Northern Line control, it stayed part of the Met until the end of LT operations. The 38's had heavy maintainence carried out at Neasden and the crews at Drayton Park Depot were part of the Met Line East Section (which included New Cross and Barking Met). A friend of mine was an SM (Station manager (running), a train crew supervisor) at Barking and remembers Leslie Newson (Moorgate crash driver) well, he spent time there until transfered to Drayton Park, i believe a promotional move to Motorman. His goal was to get back to New Cross depot and be near home again as when he was a guard.

Loved it!!

As a northern line enthusiast It would be really cool to reinstate the northern city line as part of the northern line and get tfl to review the northern heights project.

They really should just add it to the W+C and extend down to those platforms at bank.

I discovered its platforms at Moorgate by accident, and it was such a eerie experience that I though I entered into the Matrix or some kind of parallel universes

Yes, vids on The Northern Heights & the 28th Feb 1975 Disaster too please. (I did a Human Factors Safety Project on the latter for LUL 15 years ago).

Having walked the Northern Heights routes on a couple of occasions where it has been converted to a Green Walk, I would be very interested in seeing any period footage of any parts of the line preferably under steam haulage. I believe this would be LNER who probably ran the various routes up to the pre-war years including Alexander Palace where the station still exists.

It looks like the line is being somewhat... maintained.

Bang on the money Jago, you don't probably (with respect) realise that those who know our geography of North London/Suburbs rather than Sat Nav dependence, instinctively appreciate the difference between the Stevenage branch lines of Oakleigh Pk vs Chase Side, each station, each location on both, firmly filed in our visual sub-conscious - it's not in your face, you either know it and appreciate, or you don't, either way it adds a deeper meaning to your videos - crack on "Bro"

Another 'mishap' (albeit not fatal but still potentially serious) happened on the approaches to Moorgate a few years ago. A driver approaching the terminus saw water cascading from the tunnel roof. Network Rail sent some engineers to investigate who found broken auger bits lying on the track. So they went 'up top' to find out what was going on and discovered a building site where engineers drilling for foundations were wondering where their auger bits had got to.... Apparently the engineers had asked TfL if any underground lines ran under the site, but TfL hadn't told them about the NCL as it wasn't anything to do with them any more....

I used to travel from Moorgate to Hertford a few times a week.

brillant stuff, london has so many hidden gems, im sure there is more hidden stuff underground that public dont know.

Rest In Peace Port Authority bus terminals lower level platform(abandoned in the 50s and then demolished when the 7 train in the U.S was extended). Along with the old City Hall station(1904-1945 in service). Alot of stations/lines here in America were abandoned. Along my territory(Metro North’s Hudson Line), most original stations were abandoned and demolished(155th and 125th streets along the west side line were taken down)

Hi. Love your videos. How can you visit the line? I couldn't find any info. Cheers!

Really cool video

Used it on occassions to get to events at Alexandra Palace - walk up the hill from the station.

Seen "Episode nine" Realized that these are regular videos on the tube and not just one Subscribed

I like highbury corner as my brother used to get off there when he lived dalston junction that flat was so loud

Very interresting video.

Didnt Drayton Park (or was it Essex Road) close at Weekends ? It is worth re-exploring the entire line of route on foot, some interesting buildings, churches, roads, canals. pubs. Plus the old station at Highbury and Islington (compare with the old original entrance for the Northern Line at Angel too.

On use to live at essex road and you can really feel the need for another tube line. Crazy traffic and crazy amount of buses. Like when a bus comes every 30sec it probably means a metro would have been better. So frustrating for it to not be part of the underground specially connected to the waterloo and city line would have been crazy useful.

I was working for London Transport in 1975 as a signals technician in the New Works division when the Morgate Disaster occurred. I am a little surprised that the cause of the disaster has not been determined yet some 45 years later