Every Londoner knows that the fastest way to get around the city is the Underground, so long as you’re not confronted with delays.
Although the Elizabeth line is not technically an Underground line, it reaches around 60 miles per hour on the new central section, making it the fastest of the lines according to Freedom Of Information (FOI) data obtained by MyLondon.
In the inner city, the Tube stations are often very close to each other which means trains aren’t allowed to reach top speeds. By the time they speed up, they’d have to slow right back down again.
Out in the countryside, however, the stations are more distanced which means that the trains reach much higher speeds. The tube line with the fastest average speed is the Metropolitan line.
Trains between Fairlop and Hainault stations are the slowest
(Image: Ewan Munro)
This is probably down to the fact that there is some real distance between some stops on the line – like the 3.9-mile gap between Chesham and Chalfont and Latimer.
It has been recorded that the Metropolitan line has reached 62 miles per hour on this stretch of journey.
In contrast, the slowest stretch takes place on the Central line, on the eastbound service from Fairlop to Hainault. In this part of the journey, the Tube travels a distance of 0.47 miles in just under three minutes, making its average speed just 9.66 miles per hour.
To give you a sense of scale, the average walking speed of a human is 4 miles per hour. This means that the Tube is moving at just over double the average human walking pace.
This raises the question, would running get you there any faster?
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