Night Tube Launches

NightTubes_20160822
Stacked area chart showing total number of tubes running on all lines from midnight on Thursday 18th August through to midnight on the following Monday morning.

The first night tubes started running last Friday evening, so I couldn’t help wondering what that does to the number of tubes running. The graph above shows the total number of tubes running from Thursday 18th to Sunday 22nd August. My first reaction was, “what night service”, but then I read the TfL statement and realised that this is only the Central and Victoria lines with the rest to follow in the Autumn. The arrows on the diagram above show where the extra services show up in the statistics.

The following graph of only the Central and Victoria lines shows it a lot better:

NightTubes_20160822_CV
Stacked area chart showing the number of tubes running on the Central and Victoria lines only.

The total of around 20 tubes running through the night, with a total capacity of around 800 passengers each (TfL Rolling Stock) is a significant extra capacity. It’s just that the peak rush hour service is so much bigger by comparison. I also wonder whether they were testing the Central line on the Thursday evening because of the large number showing up there over night? Normally we get a small residual number of tubes moving during the shutdown period which I’ve always put down to engineering services.

What is going to be interesting is to see how the service adapts to usage over time.