The King's Cross St. Pancras nexus - a novelty tube map

Just in time for the closure of King's Cross Thameslink and the opening of the Thameslink platforms at St Pancras this weekend, here is a complete diagram I've made of the whole complex, in the style of the tube map. It attempts to show every public passageway, escalator and entrance, and as far as possible it's geometrically as well as topologically accurate, so in a very approximate way the shape of the interchange blobs matches the shape of each interchange.

There are a few of the more obvious things I left out:

• None of the changes for the new King's Cross concourse are shown, though the new tube station passageways underneath it are.
• It shows all of St Pancras as open. The Circle and the coach station are not.
• Pancras Road continues further north.
• The public part of the mezzanine level at St Pancras is not shown, but there's very little on it of note.
• The temporary diversion of the passageway to the Piccadilly Line is not shown.
• I couldn't be bothered drawing separate lines for GNER/NX East Coast, Hull Trains, Grand Central, etc.
• It's in Gill Sans, not New Johnston.

Links: PNG | Zipped PDF

Hitachi A-Train on its way to the UK

The first train for Southeastern's forthcoming high speed Channel Tunnel Rail Link services to Kent has completed testing in Japan and has been loaded onto a ship bound for Southampton. It'll arrive in August and begin testing on the network in October.

Transport Briefing has a pretty picture of the train and some more details, though they incorrectly state it can do 186mph (the line speed is indeed 186 mph, but the A-Train's top speed is only 140 mph). There's a picture of it being loaded onto the ship on the Southeastern site.

St Pancras rebuild

Fantastic detailed article from Arup about the St Pancras rebuild, written in 2004.

Channel Tunnel Rail Link domestic services

This isn't news, but I've noticed the Southeastern website has a decent description of what high speed services to Kent will run, along with a map showing journey times. For some reason it doesn't mention any trains calling at Ashford off-peak, though we can safely assume all the East Kent trains will, giving it two trains per hour.