Stanmore station, perched on the boundary of Hertfordshire and London in Zone 5, is a bit of an oddball on the London Underground network.
The station’s platforms are numbered in a peculiar sequence – instead of running 1, 2, 3 from left to right as seen from the ticket barriers, they’re labelled 2, 1, 3.
This quirk has no doubt baffled many a commuter in a hurry to catch their train. As the northern end of the Jubilee line, Stanmore station first opened its doors in 1932 as part of what we now know as the Metropolitan line, then known as the Metropolitan Railway.
It was handed over to the Bakerloo line in 1939, before finally becoming part of the Jubilee line in 1979. The reason for the unusual platform numbering can be traced back to the station’s past.
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A third platform wasn’t introduced until a whopping 74 years after the station initially opened. In 2004, TfL started building this extra platform to accommodate the growing demand for trains, with the new platform officially opening for business in July 2011.
The space for the new platform was located to the right of platform 1, leaving TfL with the dilemma of either disrupting the logical order of the platforms or renumbering them. When platform three was finished, passengers quickly picked up on the perplexing platform numbering system.
Yet, despite this, the setup remains the same 12 years on.
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