Nearly 50,000 excited travellers were hosted by London Underground on its Night Tube service on the inaugural night with Mayor Sadiq Khan taking the very first train – almost three years after the plan was first announced.
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London mayor Sadiq Khan rode on the first service departing from Brixton in the south.
According to Transport for London, the first Night Tube services are now running on the Central 74-kilometer line and the 21-kilometer Victoria line, with services on the Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly lines following in autumn.
Above ground, however, businesses ranging from hotels to pubs and retailers are hoping for an immediate fillip from the introduction of a service tipped to add as much as £77m to London’s economy annually and generate up to 2,200 new jobs.
London joined a small club of cities – New York, Vienna and Copenhagen, among them – in offering weekend round-the-clock service. But the service is also meant to serve doctors, cleaners and others who work graveyard shifts.
Advocates of the Night Tube emphasise its benefits on the rest of the cultural sector, with theatres and galleries now able to stay open late if visitors can get home.
Alan D Miller, chair of the Night Time Industries Association, said that his members were looking forward to a service that would “prevent the last meal rush to get the last tube” but had concerns that much of London’s nightlife was being suffocated. With trains roughly every 10 minutes through the night, Transport for London (TfL) said nocturnal journeys would be 20 minutes quicker on average, with many passengers saving more than an hour.
“So we are serving many different people with many different requirements and this is fantastic for London and now we are part of that 24/7 operation”. It is expected the Night Tube will transport about 200,000 people between now and the end of the year.
All-night services roared into action in the early hours of Saturday morning without a single crime being reported, British Transport Police (BTP) said.
“You can feel the buzz”, Khan told the news service.
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Strikes over pay postponed the launch until now.
