Northern Line extension opens

Tube Station updated

The Northern line extension, which cost £1.2bn and includes two new stations, Battersea Power Station and Nine Elms, is now open. Both stations are conveniently located in Zone 1, and journey times to the West End and the City take only 15 minutes.

Mayor Sadiq Khan said: “[this will] hugely improve the links between these vibrant, growing south London neighbourhoods and the rest of the capital…The new stations are beautiful, and I encourage Londoners and visitors to start using [them].”

The new extension runs from Kennington and it's the first change to the Underground map since the Jubilee line was extended to Stratford back in 1999.

Major construction started back in 2015. But it wasn’t until 2017 that the tunnelling started using two 650-tonne tunnel-boring machines named after two famous Battersea residents: Amy after Amy Johnson, the aviation pioneer and Helen after Helen Sharman who became the first British astronaut in 1991.

The tunnels are the widest tunnels on the Tube network and feature an emergency walkway along the side of them. In the summer of 2019 an engineering train travelled the full length of the tunnels for the first time. And by February 2020, the station roundels were put in place: 62 for Battersea Power Station and 51 for Nine Elms. At the end of 2020, the first test passenger trains travelled along the line from Kennington to Battersea Power Station and back again.

Both new stations are step-free and are served by six trains an hour during peak times, although that will ramp up to 12 an hour by mid-2022. Fun fact: Battersea Power Station (station) is the only station on the London Underground with the word station in it.



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