When you are travelling on the tube consider this:

The train you are on will probably travel 76,800 miles a year at an average speed of 20.5 miles per hour, and it is one of 4070 cars on the network. To look at it another way thats 11 round trips to New york from London a year and if your plane went as fast as the tube it would take at least 7 days to get there at that speed.

You will be on of over a billion passengers who use the network each year.

The staion you are travelling to is one of 270 stations, and to get to the platforms there are 412 escalators. The shortest is in Stratford and the longest is in Angel with a length of 197ft. And if you have boarded the train at Victoria this is the busiest station on the network with over 76million people using it each year.



The total length of the network is 249miles of which 45% of it is underground. The longest tunnel is East finchley to Morden on the Northern Line and that is 17.25 miles.

Depending on what journey you are taking you could be over 500ft above sea level on the Metropolitan line out beyond Amersham, or 220ft below ground level on the Northern Line near Hampstead. Over 30million litres of water are pumped out of the network a day, that enough to fill a normal sized swimming pool every 20 minutes.

Its an all electric railway and it currently uses 1,163Giga Watts of energy to keep it moving. Thats enough to power at least 283,000 average homes for a year.

And finally its been called the Underground since 1908, when the famous blue and red logo that is instantly recognisable first appeared.






















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