Oooh, a passival!

[conuly]

Sleeping in the Underground

The passival is in the third picture down, one the poster with the ship - more are building, not being built. I'd heard of the passival, but I didn't realize it had lingered that long! If you prefer, you can get your information about the history of the passival and the progressive passive in podcast form here. Not all the information overlaps between those two links, but it mostly does.

Comments

[eofs.livejournal.com]

I love the picture of the entertainment at Aldwych. Partly because I love l'accordéoniste's glasses. But mostly because everyone's sitting on the tracks to watch. Back in the days before a third rail, clearly!

Fun fact: you've almost certainly see Aldwych station on film. Since it closed a couple of decades ago, the majority of appearances of LU stations on film are shot at Aldwych, dressed as whatever they need to be. (Which is probably one of the reasons you so rarely see things set on above-ground stations.)

Oh, and the one directly below with the chap's hat perched on top of the two cases! Love it. (And the smile of the little girl to the right.)

The people sleeping on the escalator's a bit alarming. Tea from a watering can is resourceful. (I broke my watering can earlier by putting hot water in it, damnit. I'm really annoyed about that.)

Would you care to join me for the lunch ballet? Or if you can't make that, perhaps the after-lunch ballet would suit.

What really strikes me though is how recognisable the Underground is in this. Individual things have modernised, but there are no pictures here which wouldn't look fundamentally the same to this day. In many cases, if not all, the same tiles are probably still on the wall. The tiled 'way out' signs visible in Oxford Circus are certainly still around.

With the exception, that is, of the travelator - I had no idea they ever had those on the Underground! (And looking them up on Wiki, I discover I missed my chance to go on one in St Petersburg. Bugger.)

Cool link, thanks. Also makes me shiver a bit though. Carlisle, where I used to live, flooded badly last night/today and there were reports of people sleeping on the platform at the station (and definitely people sleeping on the train(s?) which got stranded there).

[conuly]

The people sleeping on the escalator's a bit alarming.

I thought so too, and had no idea how they did it!

With the exception, that is, of the travelator - I had no idea they ever had those on the Underground!

*googles*

Oh, the moving sidewalk! We have some stations here that could sorely use them. The Fulton Street Center, connects directly to the R at Cortland. Clean bathrooms, water fountains - and a 2 block underground walk in the most boring tunneled area ever. With the money they spent on that, they could have managed a moving sidewalk, or at least some public art.

[eofs.livejournal.com]

But it's inclined! That's what I find remarkable. Apparently we have some flat ones on the Underground (Waterloo was mentioned) but I've never seen an inclined one. And those ones looked steep - I mean, they looked as steep as an escalator!

That change sounds like it's probably as much fun as Bank-Monument. I love this diagram (http://londonconnections.blogspot.co.uk/2008/03/how-bank-monument-works.html) which shows you the layout - and which shows there are travelators there, in fact! (I've only been on the Waterloo and City twice, both times pretty much just so we could say we had. So I don't remember it that much - I remember the platform, but not the rest.) But absurdly to find the distance you have to walk to change between Bank and Monument is really hard. Which is probably why the only place I could find it was the response to a Freedom of Information request (https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/transfer_stats_between_monument)!

Once I saw the travelator, I do have to wonder whether it was that people were sleeping on rather than an escalator.