stepfree

Is the Waterloo & City Line Step Free? It’s Complicated

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An excerpt of the Step Free Tube Map showing the Waterloo & City Line

A couple of weeks ago, a new Tube Map was published, to coincide with the new names for the London Overground lines. Besides the fact that north-east London is no longer a sea of orange but several different colours, another thing stood out to me. According to the Tube Map, there’s no step-free access on the Waterloo & City Line:

An excerpt of the Standard Tube Map showing the Waterloo & City Line

Stations that are step-free have a pictogram of a person in a wheelchair. But the platforms for the Waterloo & City Line show a regular empty circle at both of its stations, indicating no step-free access. So, surely the answer to the question of whether the Waterloo & City Line is step-free is ‘no’?

What does the step-free map say?

Actually, the answer is more complicated than that. Certainly, the Waterloo & City Line wasn’t step free in the past, as I noted in a previous blog post from 2017. But work at both Waterloo and Bank stations has resulted in the installation of lifts, meaning that the line is actually step free.

Transport for London publish a separate step-free Tube map, which offers more detail than the standard one. For example, there are letters (A, B and C) showing how big the gap between the train and the platform edge is (mind the gap), or the letters R and M if a ramp or mini-ramp can be used to help to bridge the gap. And here’s how the Waterloo & City Line appears:

An excerpt of the Step Free Tube Map showing the Waterloo & City Line

Note that there’s an ‘R’ at both ends, and, unlike the nearby Bakerloo line which is shaded out as being completely inaccessible, the Waterloo & City Line is in its usual colour. So, we can conclude, the Waterloo & City Line does offer step-free access. With the help of staff with a ramp.

So, why do the two Tube Maps contradict each other?

Complicated interchange

Well, I did say it was complicated. The step-free tube map also includes exclamation marks next to some station names. These indicate that there’s additional information to read about how accessible each station is. For Waterloo, it only covers the Jubilee Line; all the information about the Waterloo & City Line is on the Bank listing:

Lifts to the Waterloo & City line are available Mondays – Fridays, via the entrance on Walbrook. Step-free exit at Waterloo is via the National Rail lift (usually available Monday to Saturday 0430 – 0105, Sunday 0530 – 0105). Please check before you travel. Step-free interchange between the Waterloo & City line and the Northern line and DLR requires a 290m journey via street and lifts.

It’s that last sentence that’s worth paying the most attention to. Bank, along with nearby Monument station, is a massive interchange and the second largest on the London Underground after King’s Cross St Pancras. It’s also just had a massive upgrade, adding step-free access to the Northern Line for the first time, and step-free interchange with the Docklands Light Railway (DLR). However, there isn’t a direct step-free interchange between the Northern Line and DLR, and the Waterloo & City Line.

Say, you arrive at Bank on the DLR and can’t use steps or escalators. To get to Waterloo, you need to exit the station via the Cannon Street entrance, walk/roll along Cannon Street itself, turn right up Walbrook and re-enter Bank station underneath the Bloomberg building.

Similarly, the interchange at Waterloo, from the Jubilee Line to the Waterloo & City Line, would require you to go up to street level and through Waterloo mainline station.

So yes, the Waterloo & City Line is step-free, and is indeed the only London Underground line to be entirely step free, by virtue of having just two stations. But it doesn’t offer step-free access in a way that is useful to interchanging passengers. I suppose if you arrive on a mainline train in Waterloo, and your destination is Bank, then it’s fine. But say you arrived on a mainline train at Liverpool Street and needed to get to Waterloo, there are better options that changing at Bank (in this case, Elizabeth Line to Bond Street and then Jubilee Line to Waterloo). And that’s why the standard Tube Map doesn’t show it as step-free.

Quirks of the Waterloo & City Line history

The Waterloo & City Line has always been an oddity. It only became an official London Underground line in 1994, and was previously operated by British Rail. Indeed, its trains originally carried the old Network SouthEast livery, rather than the standard tube livery. When British Rail was privatised, it was seen as an anomaly and so given to London Underground, rather than parcelled up with the other services to Waterloo that become South West Trains (now South Western Railway). As far as I am aware, it’s never operated on Sundays, as it mostly serves commuters, and since the pandemic, there has been no Saturday service either.

It was only the second deep tube line to be built in London, after the City & South London Railway (now the Northern Line). It was built by the London & South Western Railway (LSWR) to provide a link from its major terminus at Waterloo, under the River Thames and into the City of London. At the time, many rival railway companies had stations in the city, and this was the LSWR’s way of competing without needing to buy lots of land, demolish buildings and build new bridges. It’s also the only tube line to be entirely underground, including the depot at Waterloo station (the Victoria Line’s depot is above ground), and it’s completely isolated from all other railway lines. When trains require heavy maintenance, they have to be lifted out of the depot by crane and taken by road.

Since it opened in 1898, the Waterloo & City Line has remained a simple, two station shuttle. Over the years, there have been many enhancement ideas banded around. These have included adding additional platforms to serve Blackfriars station, or trying to somehow join it on to the DLR at Bank to allow through journeys to Waterloo.

Step-free access on London Underground

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Bakerloo at Waterloo

I’ve talked briefly about our recent trip to London. It was our second trip with our toddler, but last time I drove us all down. This time, we went via train, and we brought a pushchair.

Our toddler now has two pushchairs. There’s the big Bugaboo Chameleon, which we’ve used since birth, and a lighter folding pushchair. The latter fits in our car boot more easily and can be stowed away in luggage racks, but it’s not so good on rough ground and doesn’t have a rain cover. So we still use the Bugaboo now and again, if it’s wet or we’re going somewhere off the beaten track. But for London, we took the lighter pushchair.

On the whole we coped well. The only station where we had major problems was Kew Bridge, a South West Trains station near where we were staying. Although it’s a simple two platform station with a footbridge, there’s no step-free access, and a very wide gap between the train and the platform edge.

We coped okay with the Underground. King’s Cross St Pancras has lifts serving all of its platforms, following a comprehensive rebuild of the station to tie in with the new Eurostar station. This is a major improvement over 2004, when I travelled to London with a friend in a wheelchair. It took two of us to balance the chair on the main escalator. Fortunately we were heading for Olympia, and both Earl’s Court and Kensington (Olympia) stations had lifts even back then.

This time, we were heading for Waterloo, to take a train to Kew Bridge (as mentioned before). Though not the most direct route, we were able to take the Victoria Line to Green Park. Lifts were installed at Green Park in 2012, ahead of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Changing at Green Park took quite a long time, with some long walks between the platforms. Had we been able to use the escalators, I expect this would’ve been quicker.

Then, onward to Waterloo on the Jubilee Line. When the Jubilee Line was extended in the late 1990s, all of the new stations had step-free access from the beginning. Unfortunately, at stations like Waterloo, this didn’t include existing lines, so although it’s possible to get from the Jubilee Line to the street and mainline station without steps, you can’t change to the Northern, Bakerloo or Waterloo & City lines.

Step-free Tube guide

Transport for London (TfL) publishes quite a good step-free Tube guide. Whereas the basic tube map only shows stations with step-free access from the street to the platform or train, the guide goes further. For example, there is step-free interchange between the Bakerloo and Victoria lines at Oxford Circus, but no lifts to the exit. Others, like Cannon Street, have step-free access in one direction only. A map is provided and it greys out stations and lines that are not accessible. The whole of the Bakerloo Line south of Oxford Circus is missing, for example, as is the whole of the Waterloo & City Line.

It also tells you how wide the gap between the train and platform is at those stations which are accessible, and there are some detailed notes. For example, changing trains at Kew Gardens requires a 600 metre walk on nearby streets.

It’s perhaps also worth mentioning that the entire Docklands Light Railway, and Croydon Tramlink are step-free, should you find yourself in East or South London.

Future improvements

TfL is rebuilding a number of Tube stations, and these should all gain step-free access. Farringdon and Blackfriars recently became accessible as part of the Thameslink Programme, and Crossrail… sorry, “The Elizabeth Line”, will see many other stations gain lifts. These include Ealing Broadway, Paddington, Bond Street, Tottenham Court Road, Moorgate, Liverpool Street and Whitechapel.

Additionally, TfL are rebuilding Victoria and Bank stations, with plans for Camden Town. Again, these should all become step-free when the work is complete. Frustratingly, the recent rebuild of Shepherd’s Bush tube station on the Central Line, to tie in with the opening of the Westfield shopping centre, did not include the addition of lifts, apparently due to costs.