They came close to having a revolt on their hands last night. The train was very full when we arrived home. I had spent the journey home sitting on the floor while others stood, so you can imagine how many people tumbled out of the doors when they opened up.

And then we discovered the main stairs down from the platform closed by a fallen body as a guy had slipped in the rain. It looked pretty nasty. So they held us back at the top of the stairs.

That wouldn’t be a problem if the back staircase was open, but it wasn’t: the council had dug up the road down at the bottom, and so the rail company’s insistence was that we should instead use the lift.

250 commuters. One lift. You can imagine how long it would take to get us all through that. Half of us would still be there by the time the next train arrived.

Things started to turn ugly and the poor guard at the top of the stairs could see things falling apart around him until, eventually, he gave in.

‘Let’s just kick all that shit out of the way,’ he said, and went to open the back doors, then stood in the rain at the bottom of the staircase, in the pouring rain, making sure none of us fell into the roadworks.

He deserves a medal.

‘Best station in the world’ is an accolade that would cheer any network, but when that station is British and the compliment came from the head of France’s SNCF, it’s high praise indeed. SNCF is considered by many to run the best railway service on the planet.

The station in question is the restored St Pancras which, as the Times rightly points out, shames the Eurostar waiting area at the furthest end of the Channel Tunnel link. Gare du Nord itself is a beautiful building, with a wonderful interior, but from the glimpses I’ve seen of St Pancras so far, largely from the edges of boarded off platforms, it doesn’t compare.

Comments like this prove that the restoration was a gamble that paid off, as it would otherwise be hard to justify the £5.8bn cost of the link and terminus on the back of a 20-minute shorter journey alone. That’s doubly true when a trip on the Eurostar is, for many, as much a part of the whole Parisian experience as whatever they get up to once they’ve arrived.

The Times’ coverage of the Queen’s grand ribbon snipping can be found here.

Technorati Tags:
train, eurostar, st pancras

Think of the Tube, and the first image that enters your mind is the red and blue circle and bar roundel. It’s used everywhere on the trains, the maps, the tickets, the walls…

But that’s just the start of it. Dig around the Transport for London web site and you’ll come across its excellent Station Products Guide PDF (via Diamond Geezer), which specifies everything from the platform-end fences that stop you getting electrocuted, to the channels screwed onto the station ceilings to keep the cables out of the way.

It’s a mine of useless information. How else would you know that the numbers on the Underground’s digital clocks are designed for legibility at a ratio of one metre per 2mm of height, so that 10cm digits can be seen from 50m away? Or that internal station barriers are round or oval and 45mm in section so as to discourage litter and suspicious packages? Or indeed that staff sitting behind little ticket windows can pick from only six different messages for the LED boards above their heads? They’re controlled by a switch on the rear of the unit.

It’s the station managers’ equivalent of an Argos catalogue, and a real eye-opener for anyone who travels on the tube or bus each day.

Technorati Tags:london, tube, london underground

The Guardian has published a very long piece about the new St Pancras station. Too long for the web, really, and flowery enough to leave you wondering why it wasn’t cut down before being posted online.

Writer Jonathan Glancey is bowled over by it. And so he should be. I’ve been in there myself since the renovation – admittedly not onto the Eurostar platforms – and it’s an impressive piece of re-engineering for a station that was almost demolished in 1966 because planers considered it an ‘eyesore’. Fortunately it’s now Grade 1 listed, like Westminster Abbey and so largely safe from the workman’s club hammer.

Glancey writes:

It is hard to believe that all this might not have existed, as you walk into St Pancras today through brand new gothic doors and enter the station’s previously unseen undercroft, the former storage basement with its 800 Victorian iron pillars, where the Eurostar ticket-machines, check-in points and security controls are today, before riding long, silent escalators up to the trains basking beneath Barlow and Ordish’s glorious roof. This, the most adventurous and biggest roof of its kind for decades after it was built, now painted a fetching sky blue and flooded with daylight? This station, with its quarter-mile, 300kph trains, a huge cocktail bar, a branch of Foyles stocked with 20,000 titles, a smart Searcy’s restaurant and brasserie, independent coffee bars, floors covered in timber and stone rather than sticky British airport-style carpet, new gothic carvings, newly cast gothic door handles, and a nine-metre-high sculpture of lovers meeting under the station clock? How could anyone ever have thought of denying us this engineering aria, this architectural hymn?

Yes, flowery.

Much of what he says in his 2,699 words is neatly summarised elsewhere on the Guardian site in a neat gallery of 17 pictures of St Pancras through the ages, here.

Technorati Tags:
eurostar, st pancras, london