• Completed on 29th December 2024
• 9 Stations over 7 miles
• 0.5 Days Effort
• London Boroughs: Lewisham, Southwark & Tower Hamlets

Originally an overground line, and now once again an overground line. In 1933, the East London Railway came under the control of the London Passenger Transport Board. Although the infrastructure was still privately owned, passenger services were operated as the “East London Branch” of the Metropolitan line. The railways were nationalised in 1948, and became part of the British Transport Commission along with the Underground. Goods services continued to use the line until 1962, with occasional passenger trains from Liverpool Street until 1966. The short length of track connecting Shoreditch to Liverpool St was removed in 1966. The service to Shoreditch was reduced, with Whitechapel becoming the northern terminus for much of the time; by the time Shoreditch station closed in 2006, it was only open at peak times on weekdays and most of Sundays (for Brick Lane Market).

Services to and from stations further west were curtailed during the early part of the Underground era. The service to Hammersmith was reduced to peak hours only in 1936 and withdrawn in 1939, leaving the East London branch as an isolated line. Until 1999, its only passenger interchange to the rest of the Underground was at Whitechapel, with interchanges to main line trains at the two New Cross stations. In the 1980s and 1990s, the line gained two important new connections: Shadwell became an interchange with the Docklands Light Railway in 1987, and a station was added at Canada Water in 1999 for interchange with the Jubilee line. The line was closed entirely between March 1995 and March 1998 for major maintenance and refurbishment works, during which time a rail-replacement bus service operated.

The identity of the East London line changed considerably during the London Underground era. On Tube maps between 1933 and 1968 it was depicted in the same colour as the Metropolitan line. In 1970, it was renamed the “Metropolitan line — East London Section”, in Metropolitan line purple with a white stripe down the middle. In the 1980s it became a line in its own right (though it was still grouped operationally with the Metropolitan line) and from 1990 its colour on the map changed to orange. In 1995, London Underground threatened to close the line if it did not receive listed building consent from the London Docklands Development Corporation for the shotcreting of four arches of Thames Tunnel. Maintenance passed to the Metronet consortium in 2003 under a public-private partnership, although the operation of trains continued to be the responsibility of Transport for London (TfL). According to TfL, the line carried 10.7 million passengers per year before its closure in 2007. The line is now part of the London Overground network.

29th December 2024 – 7 Miles – New Cross Gate to Shoreditch