Cutaway drawings of Camden Town Tube Station

I see that, like some other drawings (including some issued by the Underground), the tunnels south of the junction are wrongly labelled. It was always tempting to think that the eastern set of tunnels went to the City branch.

I don't know about platform tunnels and passageways but the LT Museum poster collection has a couple of very good pictures of the complex running tunnel layout. These tunnels were all built, by hand, between 70 to 90 feet underground when the City & South London Railway was connected to the Charing Cross & Euston Railway.

www.ltmcollection.org/posters/poster/poster.html?_IXSR_=8CpR4Lu47Os&_IXMAXHITS_=1&IXinv=1983/4/1647&IXsummary=results/results&IXsearch=camden%20town&_IXFIRST_=1

Don't forget that link should be all in one line in your browser search bar although it should be 'clickable' in this post.

Camden town was also the home of one of the deep level shelters. These were 2 x 25 foot platform tunnels. (No running tunnels were ever built). Access to them if via a closed off subway from the ordinary platforms. They were used by the military and by the museums during the war. The deep level shelters exist under most of the Northern Line tunnels from Stockwell up to Belsize Park via CX.

At the time I have no doubt that they had their reasons slugabed. I expect there was a lot of in house, political pressure to try to maintain the individual lines own personalities as much as possible. Your reasoning could equally be applied at Kennington but overall it seems that they were keen to make just one line with a joint service to all destinations. Circumstances and perspective would have been very different then. Ignoring all of that Camden Town junction was a marvellous bit of engineering.

As a matter of historical interest if you go south from the Hampstead branch as you leave the platform the line divides in a step plate junction. City branch to the left, Charing Cross branch straight on. Above each of the two tunnels there was, when I was a driver, a sign which confused me for a long time. The one over the City line tunnel said “City Line Southbound”, while the one over the Charing Cross branch said “Hampstead Southbound”. It was not until I started looking at the history of the line that I realised why the CX sign didn't make immediate sense.

Well Hampstead refers to Hampstead tube which must have been known as Hampstead Line, and I understand the C&SLR was already being referred to the City Line by the late 20's. I guess calling the city route Bank branch was to avoid confusion. Or did it increase it?

I would expect that before the City branch was plumbed in there were already two southbound platform tunnels at Camden Town - that seemed to be the standard arrangement at convergences: so that trains waiting for the junction to clear could do so in the platform (look at South Ken which would have had two w/b and one e/b, and also Baker Street when there were two Bakerloo branches). What was already a complex tunnelling job would have been more so if they had rearranged it for separate City and CX platforms southbound.

I think it has been shelved indefinitely, until someone comes up with another idea... I think the Northern Line can already be split up - theoretically, not physically. (there's also the safety edge, and the King's Cross loop saving money on stock deliveries from West Ruislip - <first Central reverser> - EBR - KX loop)

Could it be from "Handling London's underground traffic " by JP Thomas? From memory that had a few nice diagrams in it.

Hehe, sorry! Good read though; it should be something considered just as relevant today as back then. I'm suprised it hasn't been scanned online yet... 1928 is it?