One of the super random things I’m really proud of is that I’ve ridden every color of the tube lines. Or at least I had until the new Elizabeth Line opened in May 2022. The project of creating the new line was approved in 2007 at a budget of £14.8 billion and construction began in 2009. It was supposed to open in 2018…they only missed by 4 years, that’s nearly a 50% increase. Cost estimates are apparently still being tallied - I couldn’t find anything definitive on final price - but the latest I saw was a report from the National Audit Office of £18.9 billion - that’s less than 30% over … barely.
All of that aside, I had to update my personal status of riding on all the lines.
We rode from Canary Wharf to Paddington and it really was a nice, shiny, new train car. The stations had been spiffed up too. I know the price tag and the timeline were both hard to swallow, but it sure was fun to add the new line to my list.
We rode a ton of tubes all over the city. Charlotte got good at scanning her Oyster card. Olivia & Adam looked positively English by the end.
The flat where we stayed wasn’t easily walkable to a tube station, but there was a bus stop literally on our doorstep which could take us to one of three options for a tube station within about 10 minutes. If you’re not aware, Adam dislikes buses. Dislike may not be strong enough of a word, but you know what I mean. Sadly for him, he rode so many buses in our week in London. You know who wasn’t sad about it? A little girl who thought sitting on the top of a double decker bus was a vacation all to itself.
The final form of transport in my ode to people conveyance post was not so much a required one but more a fun thing to do. We rode the Cloud Cable Car across the River Thames from Greenwich to the Royal Docks.
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