Earls Court station

The theme letter for our ‪‎travel pics this week is R – for Railways.

For Friday, it’s Earls Court station in London – a name that may not mean much to younger readers, but which was emblematic to Aussies of my age.

Earls Court was where thousands of Aussies and Kiwis made their home in England in the ’60s and ’70s .. and the Earls Court tube station was where many an Aussie’s London adventures began.

This is, by the way, a tube station – even though you can see buildings and open sky above .. most of the tracks are below ground, but this particular platform is not.

The Tube is astounding, to Aussies – 270 stations, 11 lines, 400km of track (180km of it underground), tubes as small as 3.5m in diameter filled with trains carriages carrying hundreds of passengers .. it’s an engineering marvel. The oldest underground railway, the Tube is not the biggest, however .. the longest is Shanghai, and the busiest is Beijing.

Interestingly, just outside Earls Court station’s main entrance is a ‘Tardis’ style police box. It’s no longer operating as a police box, but it is still there – and attracts dozens of Doctor Who fans each day, who just have to have their photo taken next to it (and yes, I am one of them!)