Last original lift installations

Are these the lifts which a member of staff actually 'drove' manually? Oh and also had hand operated (what I think are called) Bostwick gates inside the lift?

These were at Aldwych, shortly before the station closed I went there with my camcorder and filmed one of them in action.

You are correct:

This is probably a question that the late Mike Horne could have answered.

It is probably a case of working through the opening dates of the below ground stations. On another thread it was stated the Paddington Bakerloo had escalators from the start. Is that a clue?

Over the years I had to do the course several times to be able to take possession of lifts and escalators when doing maintenance work in their vicinity. We normally got taken into the machine chamber under the escalators at a station and only once got into a lift machine chamber and used the control panel. This was at Edgware Road.

This was the only time I got the X in the box for lift operation.

I'm now retired but I've still got that card somewhere.

I lift trained at Edgware Road in 1974 where we all had a go at handwinding and the noise of the breakers was quite unnerving as we could not look at them in case we drew an arc so concentrated on the white mark on the cable.

This reminded me of a conversation with LT's Lift & Escalator Engineer back some fifty years, when he was concerned about the operation of so many sixty year old lifts. Little did he know that some would have to work another twenty years. The Otis lifts incorporated many safety features. One which fascinated me was the ultimate hope if a lift car plunged down its shaft. Otis claimed that metal blades would spring from the shaft sides to engage in wooden bulks beneath the car, so breaking its fall. I was told that this could never be tested, and had never been required to operate since lift cables were replaced well before their guaranteed life. If a lift car was so stopped, it was unknown how it could be retrieved from its position. Anyway, this device depended on the detection of slack in the suspension cable, and a bigger worry was a rotting wooden floor dropping away from its car!

At Covent Garden all three Otis lifts would be worked from landing controls for the theatre rush at the end of the day. The modernised lift cars had a Bostwick gate which swept the full width, but the landings had solid wood doors with a very small window. There was a gap of a foot between the gate and the doors, and this was swept by a panel at right angles and towards the edge of each door. One evening a full lift was dispatched from the top station by the lift operator, and the outer doors closed. However, a man on the right side was struck by the Bostwick gate and, being unable to press into the car, stepped back to await the next trip. The gate closed and the lift immediately descended. Unfortunately, he found himself standing on the foot-wide landing looking down a 112-feet void, like standing on an eleventh-floor window ledge! Fortunately, he kept his nerve and awaited the return of the lift car, after which he let staff know his predicament in no uncertain terms!

Since the lift operated as designed, I presume the problem was put down to passenger action and this type of lift gave another twenty years of public service!

Thanks for that excellent video link.

I think there may be elements of one of those early gated lifts complete with pre-recorded announcements and sound effects somewhere in the Covent Garden Transport Museum. It also reminded me that during a visit to the Acton Museum Depot I came across the remains of really ancient spiral Escalator. I guess that kit dated from a similar time-frame to those scary PaterNoster continuous lifts which were all the rage in Eastern Europe and developed a reputation for causing accidents.

I was not clear if the pile of rusty bits at the Depot Museum was ever installed anywhere on the tube, let alone made operational, but it did trigger one obvious question:

Are there still locations on the TFL network where normal lifts are struggling to handle normal passenger numbers but where there is no room for conventional straight escalators to be retrofitted, which may explain why someone was trying to devise a more compact curved/spiral escalator which might fit?

LUL are at least willing to try new technology to solve practical problems like installing inclined lifts. A while back I recall seeing several Mitsubishi curved escalators were operating reliably during a visit in Las Vegas.



As the Japanese seem to have finally figured out how to make reliable curved escalators I wonder if there are still locations on the tube where the ability to retrofit an escalator along a curved route to perhaps avoid disturbing load bearing or other below ground structures would actually be a great solution.

The spiral escalator was installed at Holloway Road, but there is no evidence it was ever operational.
blog.ltmuseum.co.uk/2018/08/02/spiral-escalator/
londonist.com/london/transport/the-spiral-escalator-of-holloway-road

There is an old thread on the subject here: districtdavesforum.co.uk/thread/2596/reno-circular-escalator

In the 90's I used a Paternoster daily at GEC Borehamwood. As a joke for newcomers, an old hand would loop the top, doing a handstand to make it seem the whole cabin rotated!

The mechanics are extremely simple: in the video the rim of one chainwheel can be seen in the loft, and the front top right corner of the cabin is fixed to one link-pin of that chain. There's a second chainwheel offset to the rear (one cabin's height below), where a second link-pin is attached to the diagonally opposite cabin corner. Two further chainwheels sit in the sump, plus a motor. That's it!

My daughter spent an academic year in the University of Neuchatel. She had a room on the 14th floor hich was served by a lift with no internal doors. Good fun until the day i went to bring her back. The lift broke down in the evening and we had to walk up and down the stairs to bring all of her stuff down. And she had a lot of stuff!