East London Line - History - The London Underground Era

The London Underground Era

In 1933, the East London Railway came under the control of the London Passenger Transport Board. Although the infrastructure was still privately owned, passenger services along the line were operated under the auspices of the "East London Branch" of the Metropolitan Line. In 1948, the railways were nationalised and became part of the newly created British Transport Commission along with the Underground. Goods services continued to use the line until 1962, occasional passenger trains from Liverpool Street until 1966. The short length of track connecting Shoreditch to Liverpool St was removed in 1966. The service to Shoreditch was also reduced, with Whitechapel becoming the northern terminus for much of the time; by the time Shoreditch station closed in 2006, it was open at peak times on weekdays and most of Sundays (for Brick Lane Market), and closed on Saturdays.

Services to and from further west were steadily curtailed during the early part of the Underground era. The service to Hammersmith was reduced to peak hours only in 1936 and was withdrawn altogether in 1941, leaving the East London branch as an isolated appendage on the edge of the Underground network. Its only passenger interchange to the Underground was at Whitechapel, with interchanges to main line trains at the two New Cross stations. In the 1980s and 1990s, the line gained two important new connections: Shadwell became an interchange with the Docklands Light Railway in 1987, and a new station was added at Canada Water in 1999 for interchange with the then new Jubilee Line extension.

The identity of the East London line changed considerably during the London Underground era. On Tube maps between 1933 and 1968 it was depicted in the same colour as the Metropolitan line. In 1970, it was renamed the "Metropolitan Line — East London Section", in Metropolitan line purple with a white stripe down the middle. In the 1980s it was renamed as a line in its own right (though it was still grouped operationally with the Metropolitan line) and from 1990 the colour on the map changed to orange.

The maintenance of the line passed to the Metronet consortium in 2003 under a Public-Private Partnership, although the operation of trains continued to be the responsibility of TfL.

According to TfL, the line carried 10.7 million passengers per year before its temporary closure in 2007.