THE TUBE, Features

You can use the London Underground all year long with one exception: on Christmas Day. Service on the Central and Victoria lines was recently increased to 24 hours at weekends.

There are more than a billion trips registered each year on the Underground network: if you consider individual travellers, including residents, tourists, and commuters, that's about twenty-eight million people. With such big numbers, as you can imagine, the Tube is often overcrowded. Certain stations are even closed during big events like football games or musical concerts to avoid dangers related to huge crowds. Just think, during rush hour there can be up to four people squashed into every square metre.

The subway is famous for its efficiency and punctuality: in the unlikely event that your delay is longer than 15 minutes, know that you're entitled to a refund of your ticket, regardless of its cost!

Its stations and trains don't have any particular aesthetic features like the subway systems in other cities do: in contrast, its graphics are an absolute masterpiece, and have been studied and copied for more than a century as a model of clarity and legibility....