Question regarding tunnels between Drayton Park & Moorgate

The answer is yes, more or less. Of course, there's now the facility for overhead current pick up North of Drayton Park and all the old LUL signage has gone. The tunnels were always mainline size going back to the years when it was operated by the Metropolitan Railway. When you surface at Drayton Park there's a section of waste ground to the West where there used to be a small depot for the tube trains. The old tunnel apertures to and from Finsbury Park are long gone now.

This short film in colour shows the station in the sixties when the Finsbury Park subsurface section was still operational.

It's probably because it's easier to leave the 4th rail there rather than removing it. However, the rail is no longer connected to the power, and it has been lowered to track level. The Moorgate accident happened in platform 9.

I think LU were glad to get rid of it - isolated from any other line as it was.

The line was originally independent, but was taken over by the Met c1913. Until 1940 it used a unique 4-rail electrification system (+ve one side of the track, -ve on the other, no centre rail)
I believe the track bed was raised in the stations between 1940 and 1975 to allow the lower-floored tube stock to be level with the platforms.

The original tunnels are in use except at Highbury & Islington where one of them is used for the Victoria Line to allow cross platform interchange, and north of Drayton Park where they are again used by the Vic at Finsbury Park - the Northern City using the connection to the GN main line that was there from the start but not used regularly until 1975.

If London Underground took it back then you need to rebuild Finsbury Park to separate it from Thameslink services. If your going to Highgate and beyond on a new line then it would be worth it but if your taking it to Gordon Hill then you may as well hand the line to London Overground which would not need separation from Thameslink trains.

You can see a similar arrangement north of Harrow and Wealdstone when the 4th rail was dropped to sleeper level after the Bakerloo stopped running to Watford Junction in 1982. I think it wasn't disconnected until 1984 / 5 when they were definitely sure that the tube trains weren't going past Harrow.

According to CULG the depot was always at Drayton Park. Remember that until 1940, and despite ownership by the Met from 1913, the line ran a unique electrification system so the trains were unable to leave the line under their own power. Even after conversion to LT standards, there was no electrified connection to the rest of the LT system - trains were hauled to Golders Green for major overhaul by battery locos via the unelectrified connection to Finsbury Park and the Highgate branch and, after that closed, by way of the Widened Lines (reverse at Moorgate) to and from Neasden, as seen here www.flickr.com/photos/63255278@N08/6128502626
www.flickr.com/photos/63255278@N08/5849125152.

Interesting on the video further upthread that Drayton Park still sported Metropolitan "diamond" nameboards instead of LER/LT roundels, thirty years after it became part of LT. But then, although it's nearly eighteen years (Jan 1997) since WAGN (Prism Rail) took over, and Prism was bought by National Express in 2000, and the line has subsequently also been worked by First Group (from 2006) and now Govia (from last month), Network South East branding still predominates in many places!

The  London Underground roundels must have been used at Drayton Park  at some point after  the  footage in the above video, as in the Mangapps Museum , the guy has stored an old station roundel that says Drayton  Park on it beside the 1959 stock he has in there.  Here is a picture  I took :

Looking at that roundel, the station name is not in Johnston font (compare with the No Smoking sign), so methinks is not genuine...

(Edited to say posted before I saw abe's simultaneous post)

It looks to me that the typeface of that roundel and the typeface of the Met diamond in the video further up the thread are identical. Therefore I suspect a cheap conversion was done, replacing the upper and lower diamond segments with upper and lower roundel segments but leaving the original name board. Of course this assumes that the roundel as pictured at Mangapps Farm was genuinely used at Drayton Park and is not something that the museum itself has made up using parts of signs on hand.

Did they leave the roundels there too? The reason I ask is that there is an Essex Road roundel at the LT museum which seems to have been rescued from the station.

Both portals are earthed over and cannot be detected from the surface. However, there is a small gate which connects between the down Moorgate line and emerges in the west side of the former northbound tunnel, just north of Drayton Park station. I should add that this gate is securely locked and also has motion detecting CCTV installed! The other end of the disused northbound tunnel has numerous cross-passage connections to the Victoria Line, which is the normal means of access to these tunnels. The Drayton Park gate appears to be purely an emergency exit / ventilation opening in what would otherwise be a dead-end tunnel.

If you are talking   about my photograph , then they guy who owns  the collection said  it had all been given to him over the years by different companies...like  LT  and BR


Next time I go maybe  next week ,  I will ask him specifically about that sign

Not likely as the platform is a surface type with totem signs.

Bronze frame signs are normally reserved for curved wall platforms.

Here is a picture I took at Old Street (Northern City Line ) where this one little section of the wall still has the original tiling from the London Transport days:




This  and  Essex Road are eerie....anyone  else agree?