London Underground To Stay Open All Night At Weekends

Transport for London are making enormous changes to the way the tube works. We're up all night to get home in a more efficent manner.

Transport for London is going to run five tube lines all through the night from 2015.

Trains won't stop running on the Victoria and Jubilee lines from Friday morning until Sunday night. The same schedule will apply to almost all of the Central line, almost all of the Piccadilly line and everything but the Bank branch of the Northern Line.

There will be at least four trains an hour through the night. And if it turns out to be a success then the timetable could be expanded to other lines.

If you live on one of these routes you'll never need to get a night bus again.

This is what the 24 hour tube map will look like.

Oyster is on the way out. From next year you'll be able to pay for tube travel with a contactless debit card.

Paying by contactless debit or credit card is already available on most bus journeys. Boris Johnson has previously indicated that he doesn't want TfL keep running its own payment system for much longer.

The transport authority is already preparing to introduce daily and weekly price caps for contactless bank cards and it is expected this system will eventually replace travelcards.

For example, rather than buying a weekly Zones 1-2 travelcard at the start of the week for £30.40 you just start travelling. And when your travel bill hits £30.40 during a seven day period then you won't pay anything extra until the next week begins.

As a result, all ticket offices are going to be closed.

Top up elsewhere or use your debit card. Most of the 5,750 ticket hall staff will get jobs elsewhere on the network, although 950 of them will be left without a job.

But starting all-night operation will mean an extra 200 tube drivers need to be hired.

There will be strikes.

skuds / Via Flickr: skuds

RMT union boss Bob Crow has pledged to fight against any job losses with strike action. So expect to see disruption to your journey over the next couple of years.

All this means that London is going to get a new sort of horror: the 3am tube person.

Very drunk people and early hours tube trains are going to be an interesting combination. This is what happened when people held a party to oppose the decision to ban alcohol from the underground.

Look at it carefully. This is going to be every Friday and Saturday night.