The mildly obsessive fascination I have for Goodge Street Station
made me wonder if you have favourite stations or lines, stories to tell,
any musings on the London Underground.

Alison.

Even 20 years on, I still get nervous at Kings Cross underground station since the fire in 1987. I was there, and my train left the station no more than one minute before the fire started. (I know, becuse I remember looking at my watch as the train pulled out.)

I used to use Warren Street station quite a bit, and I remember saying at the time that there always seemed to a dodgy characters hanging around the entrance.  Several years later it emerged that it was a regular rendezvous point for spies

That reminds me of another moment on the Underground...  in November 1990 on the Northern Line, on a train standing stationary between Camden Town and Mornington Crescent...  we suddenly got an announcement "This is the driver speaking... I've just been informed by the Control Room at Camden Town that Mrs Thatcher has resigned"...  The burst of cheering on board was as though the Armistice had been signed

Reiner, that`s a wonderful story. I wish I`d been there!  On the other hand I absolutely hate using the tube and will, literally, go out of my way to avoid it. I`m convinced that making people travel underground in dark cramped conditions brings out the worst in them and makes them aggressive. I also get ridiculously spooked when people stand right on the edge of the platform, in case they either jump or get pushed onto the rails. Camden Town is notorious for `jumpers` and I can`t get out of North London without changing trains there. If you see someone pressed up againt the platform wall with an anxious expression on their face, that`ll be me!

Martle, I know what you mean about Kings Cross. I always get twitchy there. The last Meet Up involved having to use that station and I twitched my way up the escalator and out of the exit. Brrr.  Hmm, perhaps this should be on the Phobia thread ..... 

I'm an authentic child of Metroland, so I grew up with the underground - I used to travel four stops to and from school every day (admittedly on the overground bit of the Metropolitan line - child return fare in the early 70s was around 10p IIRC) and used to use it all the time to see friends locally as well as to get to London. The underground I remember is therefore mainly overground is a leafy service through old and slightly rickety stations (some of the long-replaced wooden platforms on the Watford/Amersham line used to be amazingly warped, and at some stations - North Harrow or Queensbury - the gaps between the planks would not be tolerated in these health and safety conscious days), changing at Finchley Road or Baker Street for occasional forays into the deep tunnels.

However, not having lived in London for about twenty years (although travelling into the centre every day to work), I tend to avoid the tube when possible - I find the heat and the crush pretty intolerable and the bus is a much better way to get around central London in particular (especially since the congestion charge has freed up the traffic a bit).

I always assumed that the reason Mornington Crescent was the station of choice for the ISIHAC game was its slightly idiosyncratic location on the network, in that the stations on either side of it are on both branches of the central section but MC is only on one...

I still say I love buses.  Besides anything else, they provide a tourist's eye view of the city.  I have lived in tourist locations most of my life (Durham and York, before London) and I find that when you've lived there a long time you become blasé about the views and the history and all the things that tourists marvel at.  Since I moved to Camberwell I often find myself of a night-time coming south over Westminster Bridge on the 12 or the 148, or over Waterloo Bridge on the 171, and the spectacular views remind me howe lucky I am to live in this wonderful place

A couple of topographical curios about the Underground that I rather like:

1) take the northbound Victoria Line from Euston, one stop to King's Cross. Alight and, still heading northbound, take the Northern Line one stop. Where do you end up? Back where you started...

2) This one's hard to explain without physically being there, but take the southbound Victoria and change at Oxford Circus for the northbound Bakerloo. Note which way you cross the bridge over the two lines at Oxford Circus. Now do the same journeyback again and - boom! - rather than retracing your steps in reverse, you cross the bridge in the same direction as before.