Last Train to Redbridge

This week the number of pageviews for this blog passed the 200,000 mark.

As a footnote to the earlier posts about British Museum station I finally got round to watching an episode of the 1969 television series Department S which can be found online ( a boxset is also available). I may well have seen it on first broadcast as I do remember watching and enjoying this series in the dim and distant past. This episode is entitled Last Train to Redbridge and should be included in the filmography associated with 'ghost' underground stations.

The last tube train of the title arrives at Redbridge station on the central line (although Redbridge is not a terminus) with all the occupants of one carriage dead, apparently gassed. Cue the summoning of Department S who specialise in solving such mysterious cases. To cut a long story short, we are eventually told  that a criminal gang, led by a ruthless businessman, have intercepted the hotline between London and Washington and are hoping to eavesdrop on information about the fluctuating price of gold in order to make a killing.

The only killing that does take place (in a cough and you'll miss it explanation) is when one of the gang gets cold feet and runs out of their hideaway - that happens to be a disused tube station - and jumps on a train stopped at a signal. However he's pursued by another gang member handily equipped with a canister of deadly nerve gas (manufactured by the businessman's company - some Skripal topicality here). To stop the villain blabbing the whole carriage is poisoned and the perpetrator escapes dressed as a guard.

An amusing site with reviews of each episode - complete with captures of the ubiquitous 'Department S corridor' can be found here.

At one point Jason King - by far the most memorable member of Department S, who was subsequently of course to get his own series that made Peter Wyngarde world famous (perhaps notorious) -  is imprisoned in the station and is later subjected to the same nerve gas that renders him temporarily amnesiac and befuddled, a good performance here.

Later, when he's recovered his senses he tries to recall where he was held - there was the sound of trains, 1930s posters on the wall (a nice touch that), tunnels, and the realisation dawns:

JK: An underground railway station.

Stewart Sullivan: Old, disused. That would tie in with the murders. Are there any stations like that?

JK: Let's see. On the Central London [sic] Line two: British Museum, which was closed when they opened Holborn and when they opened St Paul's they closed ... Post Office.

In actual fact Post Office was just renamed St Paul's in 1937 (the same year as the Central London became the Central line), although it had an interesting history during the Second World War, when its disused lift shafts housed control rooms for the electricity grid for London and the South East. See here. Also in WW2, the then-unfinished tunnels on the extension to Redbridge were utilised as an underground factory making aircraft parts. See here.

The disused station scenes are clearly filmed in a real place and it would have to be Aldwych, used for the vast majority of film and television underground locations.  A comprehensive site for London underground station locations is here. At long last I should be visiting this 'ghost' station on one of the London Transport Museum's tours later this month.