please empty your brain below

Very glad that you're doing this for the Underground anniversary! (I was hoping for a Tube Week bis but this is very interesting too).
That platform indicator at Paddington only went in when the Circle line changed! Before then we had to rely on someone announcing when an H&C train had left Hammersmith
Looking forward to the rest of the walk as it's probably the exact route my Gt grandfather took as a 10 year old when his family moved to London in the 1880s from Somerset, and settled in Farringdon Road! They had relatives in Paddington and eventually moved back to that area.
Bishops Road station was put where it is because the Met was always intended to run through services from the GWR, and the station is on the connection between the two. Indeed through services still run on the former GWR's Hammersmith branch. (The other through services all ceased before WW2).
The Met took a share of ownership of the Hammersmith branch in 1867, but although the GWR ran no services over the line after 1910 it only passed into full LT ownership in 1950. The physical connections between BR and LT were removed in 1968 when two of the original four platforms were handed over to BR.

http://www.davros.org/rail/culg/hammersmith.html
Fascinating. Looking forward to more.

Just one quibblet:

"To save money most of the line was built beneath roads, rather than buildings, using the cut and cover method" Errm, I don't think that saving money was the main reason (though it undoubtedly did). From what I have read, as the law stood at the time, a dug tunnel under property would have only been legal if each property owner had given permission, which many or all of them would have refused, quite reasonably given what was not known at the time about how to dig safely and unsubsidably in London clay. (And no Greathead shields, of course). And of course the met could only use steam by being shallow with many holes, so shallow that going under buildings would have undoubtedly interfered with cellars, if it was even possible.

Even the tube lines, which were not steam and not cut and cover, still stayed under streets (witness the South Ken snaky curves on the Picc). I think the Victoria line in the 1960s was the first to ignore the street plan, the law having changed by then.
The twisty South Kensington curves are more to do with the fact that the section between South Kensington and the now-closed Brompton Road station was an afterthought, designed to connect together two originally quite separate projects, the Deep level District and the Piccadilly & Brompton, which were aligned almost parallel to each other. Some very sharp bends wer needed to join the end of the P&B to the junction with the DLD. In the event, the DLD never went further east than South Kensington, so the junction tunnels, and one of the two westbound platforms, were never used.
A similar cobbling together at the other end of the P&B resulted in the sharp curves at Holborn, to join it up with the alignment of the Great Northern & Strand Railway, laeving a short stub of the original GN&S main line to become the Aldwych branch.
Interesting, I was told that it was like that to avoid a graveyard, but the only graveyard above is the one in HTB, which isn't above the straightest route anyway..
You mention the Paddington exit straight onto the canal towpath. This exit proved very useful to me just over two years ago. I brought an inflatable canoe by train from Reading, took the handy exit, inflated my boat on the towpath and then spent an enjoyable day canoeing along the Regents Canal to Limehouse Basin (the basin was unrecognisable from the days when I worked nearby, 25 years earlier.) I recommend a headtorch for the Islington Tunnel (where signs warn 'No canoeing'.)










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