At one station that boasts both services, the Underground and Overground aren’t arranged how you’d expect
A major transport hub in East London – such a key interchange it houses two Tube lines, the Elizabeth line and the Overground’s Windrush line – has been put together in a rather strange way.
You’d be forgiven for thinking the Underground would, at least mostly, run beneath the ground, while the Overground…you get the picture. However more than half of the Undeground is actually above the ground (one part of it even travels over an aqueduct, on the Northern line between Finchley Central and Mill Hill East).
Meanwhile, six miles of the Overground’s entire length is actually beneath the ground.
Considering this, it might not be that surprising that, when the two intersect, they’re not always in the right order. Indeed, at Whitechapel station, you’ll have to descend further below street level to get to the Overground that to the Underground.
Whitechapel has only been part of the Overground network since 2010. When TfL gave the Overground different line names like the Tube – because it was pretty confusing before – it officially became a part of the Windrush line.
These days it links Dalston Junction to Crystal Palace and West Croydon via the Thames Tunnel.
Owing to the way the station was already laid out, it had to be positioned beneath the Tube services, however, these being the Hammersmith and City and District lines. If you wanted a Hammersmith and City line train toward Hammersmith, you’d have to descend to level -3.
To get to the Windrush line, though, you’d need to go to -4.
The Elizabeth line runs even deeper at level -7, which makes sense considering it only opened in 2022. If you’ve ever taken the massive escalator from the Elizabeth line platform up to the main station, none of this will come as a surprise.
Canning Town is another odd one – thanks to a varied history of train services, these days you can see different services stacked on top of one another. If you’re to look upward from platform 2 (a DLR platform), you would see other DLR trains arriving right on top of Jubilee line Tube trains below.
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