A Station For The Chattering Classes
A few years ago on the North London line, some of the stations were a tribute to the ingenuity of British Rail’s maintenance and their hard-working contractors, with poor lighting, dangerous stairways, pot-holed platforms with little shelter.
But look at these pictures I took of Hampstead Heath station today after the station’s reopening after a full makeover.
There is now a lift on each platform, lots of shelter, bike racks, a coffee stall, extra handrails on the stairs and perhaps most importantly extended platforms for the new 5-car Class 378 trains.
Some might questioning, this rebuilding of the station, but the passenger usage figures tell an interesting tale.
From just 334,000 passengers in 2004-2005 they had grown to 858,000 in 2008-2009, by which time the line had become part of the London Overground. The last figures quoted in the Wikipedia entry for the station is 2,718,000 for 2012-2013. So in just four years, passenger usage has more than tripled.
The Anonymous Widower 