 Everyone loves the Elizabeth Line, but there is another line in London named after a royal that doesn't get nearly as much love as it deserves, despite in many ways being the spiritual predecessor to it. That would be the Victoria Line, built over 50 years before the Elizabeth Line, I'd even say in some ways it outdoes it. Let's talk all about this amazing piece of transit infrastructure. The Victoria Line is moderately short and doesn't have all that many stops, which makes it rather unique in terms of the London Underground lines we spend so much time thinking about. Thinking about metro systems as a whole, in the time around when the Victoria Line was constructed it was still relatively common to have densely packed stations in a centre city route like the Victoria Line, and so the fact that the stations on average on the Victoria Line are over a kilometer apart is rather unique. And the unusual nature of the line doesn't end there. Despite being on a system called the Underground, most lines on the London Underground spend a lot of their time above ground, but that's not the case on the Victoria Line. It's entirely underground, except for its depot, something that Singapore does still have on it. Now, of course, the Waterloo and City Line is also fully underground, but it was closed when I was in London, so you don't get any footage, sorry. Speaking more macro level, the Victoria Line is super interesting. You see, it was constructed in a different era for most other lines on the Underground network, many of which were mostly constructed decades, if not nearly a century before the Victoria Line. You can of course find out more about other lines on the London Underground network by checking out my dedicated explainer video. Now, the fact that the Victoria Line is a lot younger than other underground lines means it has a lot of modern design sensibilities. Now, to be perfectly fair, the Jubilee Line extension is the newest major addition to the London Underground system, but part of the Jubilee Line runs on older corridors, and so it's a bit more of a hybrid line. The whole concept of the Victoria Line is more as a unit, which I find really interesting. The Victoria Line was largely built as a relief line of sorts, similar to the relief line we're planning on building in Toronto, known as the Ontario Line, which I'll note is also relatively short and has wide stop spacings. The Victoria Line was closely linked and paralleled parts of the Underground network that it was meaning to decongest, and it also connected a lot of major transportation hubs, which is all similar to another transit line we've been talking about a lot recently. By the way, funnily enough, the Victoria Line was opened over 50 years ago, as I mentioned before, by Queen Elizabeth II, who also just recently opened the Elizabeth Line, which I also find super interesting. Now, you might have heard that the Victoria Line is the busiest line on the London Underground, and that's a bit complicated, but also correct. I've previously made a video on the Sao Paulo Metro talking about how it's the busiest metro system, and what I mean in this case and what people mean when they talk about the Victoria Line as the busiest line on the London Underground isn't that it moves the most passengers. It means that the ratio between the number of passengers moved and the amount of infrastructure is the highest on the Victoria Line, as well as on the Sao Paulo Metro. Put another way, the Piccadilly Line has over three times as many stations and is over three times as long as the Victoria Line, but it only moves marginally more people. So the Victoria Line has a lot of people getting on and off at every single station and has a lot of people riding on every single train. Now, all of this stuff is nice, but what makes the Victoria Line special? Well, for one, I think it's one of the first metro lines whose sole purpose for existing was to supplement existing lines and provide congestion relief, connecting places which were already connected. And I don't think that's a bad thing to be clear. I think it's actually one of the special things about metro systems. Having redundant links between multiple places means you have options and connectivity is good, even when parts of the system aren't working. I actually think that's a big part of what makes modern metro systems that are incredibly extensive so great. Of course, being able to add an entire new line to your urban transportation system without adding many new stations is also just a sign that you have a really developed rapid transit system. And at the time the Victoria Line opened, far fewer cities could claim that they could open a new line that was like that. At the same time, when the Victoria Line first opened, it was really advanced for its time. It used a track-based signal system that allowed it to operate autonomously between stations, an early form of automatic train operation. That's been superseded by more modern signalling, but the Victoria Line still does really well, moving over 34 trains per hour through its tunnels during peak periods. That means trains come less than two minutes apart. Now, the line also actually boasts the newest trains on the London Underground system. But if I'm going to be honest, I wasn't exactly blown away by the passenger experience on the 09 stock. The Piccadilly Line trains built back in the 1970s really don't feel all that inferior to them, though the doors are smaller. And yes, I know the Piccadilly Line trains have been refurbished. It's something more cities should spend more time doing. Anyways, hey, new tube for London is coming soon, so the Piccadilly Line will have new trains and the Victoria Line trains will still be kinda eh. What the Victoria Line does have going for it though is high average speeds. So you won't actually be on those trains for all too long. That thanks in large part to the widely spaced stops, again similar to another line. I'll also say the Victoria Line has every Metro fans' favorite feature, station humps, where the stations themselves are elevated above the rest of the tunnels. So as trains enter the stations, they're naturally slowed down by climbing up a hill and as trains depart stations, they're naturally sped up by going down that same hill. Now I've been making a decent amount of references to the Elizabeth Line throughout this video. A line whose scale and engineering feats are super impressive, and which has a lot in common with the Victoria Line, both acting as a higher order of transit service meant to relieve other underground lines. But I'd actually argue that in at least one way, the Victoria Line kind of supersets the Elizabeth Line. So many cross-platform transfers. To be perfectly clear, the Liz Line does have a very nice cross-platform transfer that I got to use a number of times with the central line at Stratford, but the Victoria Line has so many of them and they're underground. And I find the engineering and design that went into them super, super interesting. Now the line does have a number of more standard cross-platform interchanges, if I can call them that, at places like Stockwell and Oxford Circus. But things get very interesting at a station like Hyberian-Islington. Here we have the Northern City Line, which is a line which operates Siemens trains similar to Thameslink underground at this station. In order to provide for a cross-platform transfer with the Victoria Line, when the Victoria Line was constructed, the island platform that belonged to the Northern City Line was actually transferred over for shared use between the Northern City Line and the Victoria Line. It became the southbound platform for both lines. At the same time I knew, adjacent island platform was constructed to serve both the Northbound Northern City Line, which was realigned and the Northbound Victoria Line. A similar set of works were actually undertaken at Finsbury Park to enable similar cross-platform transfers with the Piccadilly Line, which the Victoria Line aims to provide congestion relief for. The number of grades separated underground crossings between these various lines at these locations is really impressive. But things get even more interesting when you look at Houston. Initially, the bank branch of the Northern Line had a really narrow platform here, akin to what you would see at the Clapham stations on the Northern Line. As it turns out, works akin to what happened at bank, which again also had a really narrow platform on the Northern Line until recently, actually also happened at Houston. A new diversion track was built that allowed the island platform, which was incredibly narrow on the Northern Line to have one track filled in, making it wider, and a mega island platform style of arrangement was set up. The difference is that unlike at bank, this mega island platform was so wide at Houston that the Victoria Line tracks could be punched straight through the middle, allowing for cross-platform transfers in both directions. There is a bit of a problem here, though. As you know, the bank branch of the Northern Line runs from the Northwest to the Southeast through the center. And the Victoria Line runs from the Northeast to the Southwest through the center. And that means that since the lines kind of crossed like this, if you were to have a conventional cross-platform transfer, while people heading south on the Northern Line would cross-platform transfer onto Victoria Line trains heading back north, which isn't natural and probably isn't what most people want to do. And so the engineers had to come up with a solution that would allow for same direction transfers between the Victoria Line and the Northern Line's bank branch. What they did was flip the tracks on the Victoria Line underground, just south of Warren Street and just south of Hyber and Islington. That means for a three-station section, the Victoria Line operates as a line would operate here in North America, with trains running on the right. This enables those same direction cross-platform transfers. So if you're heading south, your cross-platform transfer continues you heading south and vice versa going north. And it's just such a cool thing to think about an entire other line station at a location like Houston being reconstructed to better interface with the line you're talking about building, which is just really cool and crazy to imagine now. Now all of these good choices has meant the Victoria Line has been super successful and it's attracted a ton of ridership, but it's been a bit of a victim of its own success. And so we have to hope that Crossrail 2 will come to save us. Thanks for watching this video and I'll see you in the next one.