Queensway Tube Station

Story

Queensway is a London Underground station on the Central line, just inside the boundary of the City of Westminster with the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It is at the junction of Queensway and Bayswater Road, and is opposite the north-west corner of Kensington Gardens. It is between to the west and to the east, and is in Travelcard Zone 1.HistoryIt opened on 30 July 1900, as Queen's Road, and was renamed on 1 September 1946. The building is an unusual survivor of the buildings designed for the Central London Railway by Harry Bell Measures, with a flat roof so that commercial development could take place above – in this case, a hotel.The station todayThere is a crossover east of the station to allow trains to terminate there. The crossover is not often used.RedevelopmentThe station was closed between 8 May 2005 and 14 June 2006 for modernisation works. These works were prompted by the need to replace the station's two (very old) lifts, which had been breaking down quite frequently prior to the station's closure. In addition the station has been modernised and re-tiled, as well as having replicas of the original lamps fitted to the façade.Metronet, the private maintenance contractors, were originally given a deadline of 9 May 2006 to complete the works. When they failed to meet this or the revised 12 June deadline, Transport for London issued a harshly worded press release quoting London Underground Managing Director Tim O'Toole as saying "This is a further, and one hopes final, pathetic delay on a project that Metronet has failed to manage to time." The station finally re-opened on 14 June 2006.