Euston Square concourse and lifts

I'd have to agree with you there, Euston Square really is skanky. The other really grim station that comes to mind in Zone 1 is Old Street which is mingsville both in terms of the station condition and architecture but also with the tramps and lowlife characters that hang around the place.

The Wellcome Trust have provided the 2 lifts and the rebuild of the Gower Street Exit/ entrance.

Metronet were then supposed to fit the new Station Supervisors Office - located opposite the lifts - and a new ticket office - which was supposed to to be between the 2 lifts at the ticket hall level. Then install a new gateline around the lifts/ new ticket office. The old ticket office and the old station supervisors were supposed to be demolished and new lifts to the Eastbound platforms built with the resulting space opened up to relieve the congestion at the Euston Road eit/ entrance.

There is no money for any of the Metronet works and at present the only "possible" is the gateline adjusted BUT that is a very low priority.

The lift that goes to the platform level, has an emergency exit only level which in the case of an fire panel evacuation goes to street level, via an emergency only exit straight onto the Euston Road.

I presume the grey & orange tiling around the staircase areas is from the 1920s Met Rly rebuild by H C Clark and is worthy of preservation (as was the surface building) but I guess the rest of the station is too far altered to warrant a 'heritage' reprieve from further work when funds allow.

Also of note is the section of 6" square "Victoria Line" tiling at the tailwall of the W/B platform where they have used 4 or 5 different shades of grey whilst trying to match the originals.

Yes - later replacement. But I would have thought not too difficult to match correctly.

Euston Square does have mis-matched wall tiling in various areas. The platform floor tiling is also very uneven - apart from some sections which appear to have been renewed fairly recently and are rather better.

railtechnician - that's really intersting to hear about Embankment. It's such a busy station and I feel it gets uncomfortably full on the narrow platforms. What a shame then that they could be widened but aren't.

I just think the place needs a good clean, brightening it up abit will help alot

Wasn't there supposed to be a "Euston Interchange Plan" to link Euston and Euston Square? Presumably that canned when Metronet went under?

I knew I'd heard that before somewhere. It'd be hugely useful to have mainline Euston connected properly to the H&C and Circle.

<says naïvely> It's only a short tunnel, I'll dig it if you want </naïve>

Such a connection has existed for years but it is only a cable route between the two stations AIUI. It's one of those things I have long been aware of but never got the opportunity to explore (though I explored many others in the course of my work) so I cannot say whether or not it is a tunnel or simply cable ducts. Euston itself and its various connections are an absolute warren on more than one level which I have explored in the course of various installation projects and maintenance activities during many years with LT.

Great Portland Street also had such a route to the old Osnaburgh Street LT offices on the other side of Euston Road. There are many such 'shortcut' connections on the system, for instance the two Hammersmith stations are similarly connected.

There is certainly a place, on the western end of the platforms at ES, where you can hear running water

Wow - the plans were more comprehensive than I realised! The plan to relocate the station supervisor's office and ticket office explains the generous space created at the south end of the concourse. I had no idea that the plan went a step further to introduce step free access to the eastbound platform.
It's interesting that the plans included a new ticket office. I am aware that other station rebuilds planned around the same period, such as Cannon Street, removed the ticket office.

You are not gullible! There most definitely are direct comms cables between Euston Square and Northern line, I have routed lines that way though it was years ago. The way the old LT telephone network was set up it was not always necessary to investigate/attend every cross connection point as cables were originally 'jumpered through' when installed and we could 'tap' new lines through several stations at once before having to make connections, thus I didn't always 'see' all the detail of the infrastructure. I can recall tapping lines off the Met/Circle through to Cobourg Street control complex.

I'm not sure about the NR/LT connection at GPS but I have no reason to doubt it, there are many such connections around the Circle line. The wooden doors beneath the stairs at the back end of Baker Street platform 6 have the NR main distribution frame (MDF) which connects to the Chiltern line from the NR ring that runs right around the Circle to link all the main London terminal stations. I installed the then new Chiltern line Train Radio landline cable from there to Amersham in the 1980s. At Kings Cross the NR connection is an old BR kiosk, trackside at the back of the toilets near the Met IMR, at Liverpool Street the connection is actually on the mainline station, in the NR CER nearest the Circle outer rail platform.

The NR copper ring cable was installed AFAIK sometime in the 1960s and carries/carried multiplex transmission systems (carrier/PCM) as well as plain telephone lines and miscellaneous circuits. However, there have been other organisations cables carried via LT tunnels since before WW2. The tradition continues, I surveyed the entire Circle Line some years ago to link all the London NR terminii by a 48 fibre, fibre optic cable, which was principally to carry NR CCTV. Some of the connection sites were quite hairy i.e. at Cannon Street routing from the Circle to NR which involved installing a long and very vertical trunking route up to street level from a room on the inner (IIRC) rail platform. At Moorgate a 20 fibre spur was run from the NR platforms 5/6 via the disused passageway past the old Northern Line lifts to platforms 7/8. Embankment was another difficult 'vertical' trunking route to Charing Cross NR via the bridge above.

Rebuilding plans at Victoria (don't know if they were followed through) had to take account of the London Hospital ring cable that connects the London hospitals via the Circle. These days you'll find other Telco fibre optic cables all over the system. I was involved in running a Mercury cable from Sheperd's Bush Central Line platform invert to Hammersmith H&C in the late 1980s, this was a continuous cable with no joints run via the disused Wood Lane platform and up onto the Met viaduct run in a single shift which took the whole of South Kensington signal installation staff and managers (the depot manager was pulling the cable off the lorry mounted drum himself) and my own comms team helping out to repay a favour.

Of course there is much to see behind the scenes at Embankment as the long disused susbstation beneath the District line eastbound platform and current street level substation is the 'conduit' that connects the District and Bakerloo lines via the notorious "Pages Walk" and via vertical cable shaft to the Northern line platform inverts.

Whilst I'm not a Mod on here it occurs to me we should sometimes not be too-specific when posting details of LU/NR Comms networks that may still be in use and would provide excellent targets for terrorists should they be able to ascertain which key points to take out.