TubeHack

Underground Overground: A Passenger's History of the Tube by Andrew Martin was published yesterday. Andrew Martin is a novelist and journalist who may be better known for his Tube Talk columns in the Evening Standard and his series of early 20th century railway detective novels, the Jim Stringer series.

It tells the stories of some extraordinary men, often considered the martyrs of the tube, from Charles Pearson, the first to conceptualise an underground railway with his work on the Metropolitan line in the 1850s, Frank Pick and his art deco vision of the modern tube system in the 1930s, right up to Ken Livingstone's work in the 70s to the current day to bring down fares and stimulate tube usage. Underground Overground was generally an interesting read offering a detailed chronological line-by-line development of the London Underground system dotted by the occasional Qi-like trivia piece. However, it was somewhat lacking in these humourous factoids and anecdotes at points and might not be everyones cup of tea.

Underground Overground retails at £14.99 but you can currently find it as a hardback for just £7.50 at Amazon.

Great tube map variation here featuring the classic 80s icon Pac-Mac. I'm hoping someone with the coding knowledge will go on to create a working game of this Pac-Man map. If such a thing already exists, please post a link in the comments.

The Pac-Man tube map was created by publicgriefjunkie and was originally for sale as an A1 print for £17.99 here. It's currently out of stock but perhaps more will be produced if enough people request it. This image is also available as a card holder for £4.50 here.

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There were countless London Underground posters produced during the art deco period and this is one that caught my eye the other day. It was created by Frederick Charles Herrick in 1927 and shows, somewhat inaccurately, how the London Underground tube system offered a warmer environment for travellers as opposed to overground services.

He also created a parallel poster the year before in 1926 that was to be displayed during the summer months, It Is Cooler Below, showing how those who get tickets for the service always have the more temperate option.

I find that the tube system is definitely pleasantly warmer in winter but stifling in summer and certainly not much cooler than the surface. Your thoughts?

This great diagram was created by Cameron Booth and shows the USA's interstate system as a London Underground map. This is the second version which was originally created exactly 2 years ago is more realistic and emphasises the London Underground styling more heavily with accurate line colours, station markers, line thicknesses and curves.

There are posters of this image for sale from the CamBooth site and a high resolution version (4000 x 2667) version can be found on flickr here.

Real London Tube is a great iPhone app that represents the London Underground tube map in a more geographically correct way. It shows the various tube lines overlain onto Google Maps (only with an internet connection but can be pre-cached) and intends to reveal how close certain stations are too each other despite what the traditional tube map would suggest. For example Mansion House and Barbican are in fact only 0.6 miles apart whereas on the tube map they're shown as being on opposite sides of the circle line, therefore it would be quicker and cheaper to simply walk between these two stations.

This app is a bargain at just £0.69 from the iTunes store, a cost that'll be easily recovered if this app saves you from taking just one unnecessary tube journey.

From making animals out of the tube map to making a tube map out of a human, this creative infographic shows the various systems of the human body as tube lines. This image was created by Dutch graphic design artist Sam Loman and is available to buy as a postcard or poster on her RedBubble page.

It's been around for a while now but Animals on the Underground is a strange phenomena that is definitely worth a feature on TubeHack. A whole range of animals from emus to elephants have been outlined using the topological map of the London Underground tube system by people with perhaps a bit too much time on their hands. Perfectly understandable though from those that are spending up to an hour at a time underground on a train.

Click the image below to get to the Animals on the Underground website where you can find all the, as of yet discovered, animals in high resolution. Be sure to submit any animals you encounter when you next stare at a tube map to them too.

Stickers On The Central Line is a tumblog that's been going for a few months now run by an unidentified commuter that has been sneakily applying self-made stickers over the Central Line maps found within tube trains. I can only assume that the person behind these stickers is either from Buckhurst Hill or has a bit of a dislike for the place as a majority of the stickers are placed over this station. There's often a slight political agenda to the stickers and a form of protest against certain aspects of London Underground service.

These are but a few so visit the Stickers On The Central Line blog here and be sure keep your eyes peeled for more of these stickers in the wild during your next Central Line journey.

Tube Tracker is a great app offering you live updates on the London Underground tube system down to the smallest detail. By using your current location it can identify your closest tube stations and with TFL's API data can give you live updated departure times on all the tube lines from every station along with the current locations of every train. This truly is a must have for any commuter's iPhone/iPod Touch and you can find it on iTunes here.

This tube map was first created by Mark Ovenden for the book "Metro Maps of the World". It has since been reproduced by Alan Foale from LS London for the London Transport Museum and this version is available in high resolution here.

Although given a lot of artistic licence, it does roughly follow the overall shape of the official London Underground Tube Map with the Hainault/Woodford loop of the Central Line running through Japan and Korea and the Heathrow Piccadilly Line loop making up South America.

TubeTap makes it easy for you to file a refund claim when you're delayed by 15 minutes or more than the estimated time of a London Underground journey. A solid app built with function and aesthetics in mind, it offers you a voice to tell London Underground when you're unimpressed with the service.

"I hope that Tube passengers will all use this - not to bankrupt TfL - but to try to make the Tube a better place that's held to account when things go wrong.  In the future, I'd love to see TfL incorporate this feature into the Oyster functionality so there's no need for the app and refunds are truly automatic."  -  Jason DaPonte, TubeTap Creator

TubeTap is available for just £1.99 from the iTunes App Store, a price that will be easily recovered if you make just one successful claim. With one iTunes App Store reviewer having claimed back £21 at the time of reviewing, I can see this App becoming very popular amongst London Underground commuters.

A few people have asked where TubeHack’s Twitter background was from. It’s an alternative tube map created by Francisco Dans with the tube lines made up of various circles and arcs instead of conventional straight lines.

I think the most amazing thing about this map is that it works just like the official London Underground map. Although (obviously) not geographically correct, it is topologically sound meaning that the lines meet in the same places and if you have the concentration, you could even use this as a tube map during your next journey.

The Twisted London Underground Map is its working title so if you have any suggestions, leave them in the comments below or on the image on flickr. There are a few known errors already that the artist is still working on and plans to add the DLR and Overground lines in the future. If you notice any anomalies on the map that aren’t already mentioned on the flickr page, be sure to point them out before the next version is released.

 The beauty of Twitter is it’s simplicity and the fact that anyone can access it’s API in order to create tools to help everyone in their daily lives. These twitter feeds were created by @WillHowells using data from TFL and provide automated status updates on the various tube lines while somewhat humorously personifying them.

It might clutter up your twitter feed a bit if you follow all of these lines but perhaps just follow the one or two lines you use the most. I’ve created a Twitter List here containing all of these feeds.

Musical Tickets London have put together this tube map with an overlay of the locations of London’s main theatres. It’s an invaluable resource for anyone trying to find out the closest tube station to the theatre they’re visiting and although the locations aren’t entirely spatially accurate, neither is the tube map. Musical Tickets London is a site that provides relatively cheap musical tickets to many West End musicals.