How Low Can You Go: The London Underground

Introduction:

Imagine if Ellensburg had a system of underground tunnels with trains in them. And every day, you would walk five minutes from your house to an underground train station, ride a train and then come up for air right at Morgan. That’d be pretty sweet, huh? Well London has a real system of underground trains, called, fittingly, the Underground!

Here’s the map of trains underneath the city of London. Each little dot is a stop, where you can get off and either change trains or get up to the city. Here’s the nearest stop to where I live. This means that if I want to get anywhere else in London, I need to take this stop to the nearest stop where I’m planning to go.

How do people get around?:

Inside the station, I first have to swipe a card called an oyster card. It's kind of like a student ID card, except you can load money onto it, and you swipe it every time you want to use the Underground. Then I take some escalators down, maybe four to five stories below the city surface. Then I take some walkways to get to the platform. The air isn’t so good down there; sometimes you can see the air. Bleh.

It’s usually very hot down here. The train comes every couple minutes, and I wait for the passengers on the train to get off before I get on.

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