Welcome to Reconnections’ Friday Reads. This week’s list: • London’s Pollution Pods (NextCity) •

Some TfL panels are always worth keeping an eye on for unexpected developments, and the most recently announced Rail and Underground Panel meeting set antennae twitching at LR Towers with notable indications that something significant was involved. The date of the meeting has only been recently been publicised which left us wondering, perhaps erroneously, if this suggested something urgent was to be discussed. The agenda also suggested that the public and press would be barred from some of the ...

Operationally the Northern Line is probably the most interesting tube line. As the line’s signal upgrade programme comes to an official end, we look at the recent Northern Line timetable improvements and how frequency seems to be slowly but steadily improving. We recently looked at the Subsurface Railway (SSR) timetable commencing in December 2014 which contained some significant improvements off-peak. These improvements may not have been publicised but if one knew there were to be an ...

TfL have now made public the details of the public consultation for the extension of the Northern Line to Battersea via Nine Elms. As was indicated in the leaflet distributed last June, the chosen route is that which formed option 2 in the original Treasury Holdings Consultation. This will see a 3km tunnel constructed from Kennington to Battersea Power Station with a mid-station in south Nine Elms. The associated consultation documents confirm that cost and the high passenger levels already ...

With the Olympics and Paralympics over, September brings something of a return to normal for London’s Transport network. On the Underground, this means the unfortunate (but sadly necessary) return to weekend closures. In the corporate offices of TfL, however, it means it is time for a Board Meeting – along with the Commissioner’s Report and its accompanying appendices, which are always well worth digging into. This September’s Board Meeting was no different, with the Commissioner’s ...

As the final quarter of 2011 drew to a close, the future seemed bright (or at least no longer entirely dark) with regards to extending the Underground. The release of the Mayor’s updated Transport Strategy earlier that year had brought both the extension of the Metropolitan Line to Watford Junction from Croxley and the extension of the Bakerloo line firmly into the public eye – with the Mayor promising to bring it to the eyes of Whitehall as well. There they joined the extension of ...

With Crossrail under construction and extensions to both the Bakerloo and Northern Line being mooted, it seems a pertinent time to provide a brief reminder into some of the whys and wherefores for those less familiar with subsurface engineering and London’s underground history. One lesson quickly learnt by the early entrepreneurs who built early tube lines (and by this, as for the duration of the article, we mean the deep level lines) was that the longer the line and the bigger the ...

Writing about public consultations on the proposed Northern Line extension to Battersea seems to be developing into somewhat of a May tradition. In May last year, TfL and Battersea Site owners Treasury Holdings undertook a public consultation aimed at establishing which of four Northern Line extension proposals should be taken forward by the developers (you can find all the proposed options here). Today, the two bodies have announced that a final likely route has been chosen and they are now ...

Treasury Holdings, the company which effectively owns Battersea Power Station developers REO, have begun a public consultation their plans to redevelop the Battersea Power Station site and to see the Northern Line extended to Battersea. Back in October 2009, a planning framework for Battersea and Nine Elms was published by Wandsworth, the Mayor’s Office and the developers which effectively concluded that any development of the site would require the extension of tube services into the ...