I always assumed that the seats were that way to help Londoners perfect their skills in avoiding eye contact and to make them look at all the adverts.

I knew that longitudinal seating gives space for more passengers, but I didn't know that the wheels were sited below the seats. Thank you for increasing my knowledge and slightly reducing my dislike of this arrangement.

The seats face forwards but the trains move sideways.

I think another benefit, even if not an original reason, is that nobody ends up facing 'backwards'. Everyone can handle moving sidewards on a train without feeling ill, but some get dizzy when not facing forward

Didn't think about the wheels. Good point. Another benefit: The interior is taller in the middle, where people stand, but you don't need it to be as tall at the sides where people sit, so you can make the roof curved for the tunnels without having to make people tilt their head. The only place this doesn't work is at the doors.....which is why it's common for people to get their head bonked by the closing doors in rush hour. haha.

A few more that come to mind: -Transverse seating usually has wide / paired seats, in which case one seat gets blocked and becomes less efficient to fill or vacate than longitudinal seats that are all accessible. -Transverse seats tend to dictate the legroom, whereas longitudinal seats allow for dynamic legroom - allowing you to have quite a lot when it's not too busy. -With longitudinal seating everything is totally open to cameras and / or anyone inspecting the train, whereas transverse seating provides crannies that can hide objects, activites, etc.

Quite interesting. I always figured the longitudinal seating was there for the ease of loading and unloading passengers quickly. In traditional train seating (two by two forward-facing seats), the person seated on the aisle must get up to allow someone to enter or exit the window seat. The people getting up to do this then block the aisle, preventing others from either finding a seat or exiting. The longitudinal seating allows everyone who is exiting to simply stand up and head for an exit. It keeps the trains moving, essentially. The wheel thing had never occurred to me. I learn something new on KZfaq every day!

The idea of “scaling passengers down” is grim, but also a sound premise for a dystopian satire of some kind.

This also explains the somewhat unusual door layout of having double doors in the middle of the car and then single doors at the ends. Normal trains can have doors literally right on top of bogies.

The wheels are also the reason for the oddities in some bus interiors. The position of the stairs, the 'luggage' area, the rear facing seats at the back, the single one at the front.

The 73s on the Piccadilly line used to have transverse seating in the middle of the carriage, but were converted to sideways ones when the trains were refurbished. All the other types of trains (92, 95, 96, 09, S7) with only sideways seating were delivered like that.

Also, ceiling height. People tend to lean forwards when they sit down and stand up again, which means lower chance of them bumping their heads on the _cylindnrical_ ceiling if facing inwards. I found that ceiling ridiculously low and claustrophobic when visiting London, compared to the undergrounds cars in other major cities in Europe.

I learn at least one thing per Jago episode. I can't believe there are still things I don't know about the world. If Jago extended the range of his videos a bit I would soon know everything there is to know about everything and therefore be unassailable in pub quizzes.

Comment: “How does seating on the Tube work.” Jago: “It’s a longitudinal story.”

The refurbished S- Bahn trains in Munich now have "cuddle corners" (Kuschelecken). At the end of each unit, there is a continuous seat which starts off as transverse, then wraps around the window, the back of the cab and round to the other side. Supposed to be for families or romantic couples.

AS you say in your description "Welcome to the wonderful world of interior design" . A few years ago I was involved in the upgrade / replacement of the lifts in various underground stations, where we were given the same task as the train manufacturers, to make as much space as possible even though the lift shaft is the same size as before. It seems we arrived at the same solutions - build as wide as you can & stick everything inside the car. Add to that, because of the unique tiling in each station, each station had its own quirks. Shame they smashed up the murals when they rebuilt Tottenham Court Road. Why was that allowed to happen?

The length of the carriage is also part of the loading guage and determines the radius of curves and the overhang of carriages - so that the corners of opposing trains do not collide or hit the tunnel walls. Just love your channel.

Now I realise why you step up when boarding the sub-surface trains and down on to deep level trains that use the same platforms.

Sideways seating is also the preferred layout in NYC for the same crowding reasons. It allows for better crowd dispersal, even if there are less seats available. The older R46 and R68/R68A have the mixed transverse/sideways layout. It's fun to look out the window without craning your neck 180 degrees. However, when crowds form, the transverse seats create an extra pinch point, because they narrow the aisle.

It also has the advantage of making it easier to quickly spot empty seats (especially usually on a packed commuter train). Whereas with a traditional train layout you essentially have to walk the length of the carriage to check for free seats (assuming you can get down it at all).

Genius! You should do a video on passenger etiquette on the Underground (i.e. using the escalators, standing in the cars, getting on and off, ticket barriers etc).

In New York parlance,that type of seating is called bowling alley,as there is a direct line right through the middle of the car! The streetcars,and buses both used that type of seating due to a tight loading Guage also! See Shillibeers bus in the transit museum! In New York and elsewhere in the US,the horse buses,copied London and Paris,so when the horsecars came along,so did the seating! The trolleys did the same,but the Interurbans went to bay seating for long distance comfort! The railroads also had that type of seating,but that's another story! Thank you,Jago,for another excursion into the fanny culture! Thank you 😇 😊!

Another home run, JH! As an Edmontonian, Im still obsessed with the deep-level tube and how a functioning metro system can fit within the dimensions of a standard Boring Company 12 foot tunnel with a bit of wiggle room to spare... Meanwhile our Valley line is still having issue after issue and is still 3-4 years behind schedule... SMH..

Thank you Jago. It has often irked me, when travelling to King's Cross to catch a train to Edinburgh, that my luggage stowed neatly out the way under my seat on the District line, but when I change onto the Piccadilly at Hammersmith it wouldn't. Now I know why, there's wheels down there.

Classic example of all this The C Stock refurbishment of 1991 All the seats were transverse before, and longitudinal after, and it was amazing how they still managed to keep a 4 seat bay on the refurbs even though you'd think there was only room for 3.

It's definitively interesting to see how the problems of low-floor trains have been solved throughout the time. In fact, one of the first underground railways, the Budapest M1, also is a low-floor system with the stock being more typical of (articulated) trams than your average metro albeit without a gangway between the individual cars (transverse seats are placed above the wheels). Nowadays, 100% low-floor trams are quite common with fully walkthrough cars and also allowing for transverse seating, though you still can see the limitations there like static bogies and sometimes weird seating placements (if 1+2 seating is used which is typically of the more narrow trams).

Once I had a visitor from nyc and he complained about how stupid the design was that instead of a luggage space under the seats there was a useless box. I didn't have an answer then but later I knew that it is an extremely smart design.

Watching this while sitting sideways on a tube seat

Thanks for the point about the wheels, which I hadn't realised before. My main gripe with longitudinal seating, especially for longer trips, is that every time the train accelerates or decelerates you're thrown sideways, which I find much more uncomfortable and tiring than when you are facing forwards/backwards according to the motion of train. The main point that people seem to make, about having to sit Facing Another Person (horror), applies just as much to transverse seating if the seats are arranged in groups facing one another, which transverse seating always is/was on the Underground.

I took the advantage of your Incogni discount a few weeks ago, and I'm delighted I did. I had no idea how much my info was shared. So, thank you I feel more secure. And, thank you, this was another terrific video.

that's an interesting topic I heard a lot of people wondering why Paris still prefers transverse seating to this day, although nowadays trains also have longitudinal seating at carriage ends. Paris metro trains have a bigger loading gauge, but aren't very wide at all, so sideways seating doesn't make much sense and doesn't save any room

We used to go to Whitby on the Esk Valley Line - when it gets to Battersby, the train changes direction - the trains that used to run on that line, most of the seats were all pointing in the same direction, apart from two at the end that were facing each other - my mother didn’t like travelling backwards, if she could avoid it, so we sat in those seats that faced each other and swapped seats at Battersby! Mam’s reasoning was “I like to see where I’m going, not where I’ve been! If all the seats faced sideways, we wouldn’t have that problem - if the train has to pull out of a station the way it went in, you’re still travelling in the right direction, as it were - should have these seats on mainline trains - as it is, the trolley dolly (or geezer) can’t get the trolley through that tiny corridor - in the days of a buffet car, that used to be in the middle of the train - it was like a game in Jeux Sans Frontières where you had to get your food and drink back to your seat without spilling it down other passengers or ruining their computers or whatever - they moved it to the rear of the train at one point - today, it’s someone with a trolley - used to have a restaurant car on the old Inter-City that served full meals! With sideways- facing seats, if they also have a little thing between them, you could put your suitcase in that and you can also go to the toilet without endangering your life as well - and get off the train at your destination station easier! Although it’s less cramped than a coach - those little poles under the seats on coaches act like tourniquets - if you’re sat still for ages, when you finally get off, it’s like you’re paralysed and can’t walk!

Another factor for the passengers is how easy or difficult it is to embark or disembark. Stockholm very recently introduced sideways seating on the newest metro sets, and one of the reasons was to reduce uneven crowding by the doors. For fear of missing their stop, people hesitate to step into the aisles, and instead stay and block the doors. (They're probably the same people who make sure to grab a seat while waiting in line at a fast food restaurant, "because all the seats will be taken". It doesn't matter that they're objectively wrong, their behaviour is still going to exist.)

Had never thought of that! That was very informative!

The downside of longitudinal seating of course is you usually end up directly facing someone, which is always a bit uncomfortable.

You are probably more popular than you were expecting, and well deserved.

Great to get some latitude (excuse the pun) on this, Jago. Thanks for the knowledge. I do miss the transverse seats (though leg room was challenging) that we used to have on the District Line trains (and the green-lined interiors), but the walk-through carriages we have now are a huge benefit.

Thanks for the explanation Jago.

Nothing more unpleasant than awkwardly jamming knees with a stranger on a busy bakerloo line train!

Tube trains are luxuriously roomy compared with a Lodekka bus.

That was so incredibly interesting! Funny that (some of) the trams here in Melbourne use a similar idea (much less efficiently) to make the floors of the trams lower, but I honestly never thought of that for tube trains!

Thanks, this was a very insightful video. I knew the principle from low floor trams but then the location of the wheels is a lot more obvious then in tube carriages.

I'm logging this as "something I really didn't need to know but am somehow glad I now do"

despite having a pretty large loading gauge, with transverse seating as a norm, Paris metro is slowly but surely converting to more and more sideway seating. It's more compatible with full wall-thru trains for quickly cramming as many people as possible, without having to resort to the unethical solution of cutting their arms off. Tiz just a flesh wound.... "Ticket please!" How can I show you my ticket? I have no arms!

2:56 hey, nice to see Bury here!

I know that for the SkyTrain in British Columbia, Canada it uses rather small trains (2.65 meters wide) yet nearly all of the seats are transverse. But since the SkyTrains are rather tall (3.275 meters) it allows for more vertical space and since it uses Linear Induction Motors it has smaller diameter wheels (585 mm) allowing for more space. I know that longitudinal is preferred for high capacity systems but as a passenger I like transverse. Ideally there should be a mix of both to cater to a passengers need.

Ok... I thought that mainly it was about head room for taller people. I'm tall and know how annoying overhead luggage storage racks can be if you're trying to stand up from a window side seat in a crowded train. Never thought it was about space for the wheels... an eye opener!

Buses do much the same and even single deckers that have the engine in the rear have raised seating to cover the engine bay. Simples

Well I never knew that! I have a fairly comprehensive (nerdy) knowledge about a lot of such things but I’d never heard that or figured it out. I thank you sir, you are the font to my knowledge

And I can’t help but mention noticing that the old Metropolitan A Stock used to be fully transverse seating, not a single longitudinal seat.

It’s embarrassing how much I like your nerdy videos like this.

Makes it bigger inside & smaller outside for trips down black holes - we're all travelling in Dr Who's Tardis 😊

I hadn’t realised these were low floor trains. Makes a lot of sense though. Wonder why some seats aren’t made longitudinal on those recent main-line trains with low-floor entrances for level boarding, but which raise the seats over the wheels to keep them transverse all the way. Much like in buses. But a switch to longitudinal around the entrances would seem less disruptive to the flow of the train than a step in the middle, surely?

I love the way the recorded announcements say "The doors will open on the right hand side" (or left hand side) which really means nothing when seated sideways to the direction of travel. I've always thought they should treat the train as a ship and say port or starboard side.🤣

Well, Sir Jago Hazzard. I hope 🤞 you enjoy 😉 reading 📖 this threefold comment of mine about this “Longitudinal Tale From Da Tube”! If you did, why not give it a ❤️! *Until this video, I’d always wondered why seats 💺 on a tube train 🚋 were sideways. But when you said it was to provide more space for passengers, it soon 🔜 made sense to me.* *I wonder 💭 if other metros 🚈 and underground 🚇 systems have their seats 💺 sideways? New York City, Paris, Kyiv, Moscow and Tokyo and the likes 👍 should do it like 👍 London tube trains 🚇.* *……and you, Sir Jago Hazzard are the “Sensible Ceiling” to my ‘KZfaq Passenger’.*

Scaling passengers down reminds me of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory". More seriously, I always thought the design was to help passengers on and off more quickly when most people are only travelling for a few minutes.

Mr Hazzard, would be great to get a video on the New Tube for London carriages. I didn't know the longitudinal seats were an artifact of the low floor, but makes total sense.

I personally always thought it was for speed or something, like it's easier to get out a tube seat then a normal trains seat because on a normal train you need to deal with the bloke on the aisle seat

Bakerloo line was always strange to me for that reason and it's like a bloody sauna on that line too. Underground in the heat, face to face with a stranger. Lovely.

I miss the "A" Stock , which had transverse (i.e. forward and backward facing) seating throughout. I think this was behind the reason to put some transverse seating on the "S7" Stock, which it replaced, on the Metropolitan Line services.

Interesting! I had never considered that on some tube trains the wheels are accommodated within the longitudinal seating. Actually, that restricted loading gauge can be an issue - my son is 6' 6" (2m) tall and he has a problem standing in the deep level tube trains

There is another reason. It helps those who cannot decide whether to "face the engine" or tavel "back to the engine".

I wonder why longitudinal seats are used on some of the modern mainline stock such as the LO 710s. Is that purely to increase standing room perhaps? Great video as always

That is a 'bugger me' response Jago. Amazing.

Seats facing front or back greatly reduce your chances of unobtrusively tripping up fleeing muggers, boisterous children, amputees, and elderly women with huge bags of shopping.

Congrats on your ITV News appearance!

Always enjoy it when a B-roll shot is a station I immediately recognise. (Haydons Road!)

Now that you mention it the tube train does sit lower to the ground than a lot of commuter trains I've seen in Australia.

I stand in awe of the information you present. But not too tall because even though I'm short, I may bump my head on the deep level trains. :) It really does make sense with how the past still informs the present (and with New Trains for London, the future.)

I’m not surprised that Jago is part of the Cyber Punk future 🔥

The video hints at this, but to make it clear, passengers seated longitudinally allow the ceiling to slope downward, allowing the train to fit inside the round tunnels, while passengers may stand in the middle, where the ceiling can be higher. Essentially, the train envelope (as it's called) must fit inscribed a circle of the tunnel diameter through which the train rides.

That was wheelie well explained, thank you.

Ah, that explains a lot. Always wondered why they didn’t retrofit the seating on the bakerloo to a more lightweight one than those boxy seats. Because the wheels are in there.

In Berlin they changed the train gauge. The lines started before WW1 were narrower, the lines started after, were wider.

Where I live (Edmonton, AB, CA) the space under the seats is used for storing traction sand and heaters. (It gets cold and snowy in the winter; and the line is mostly above-ground.

Next week: Why does the driver always sit at the front?

That's actually really smart and explains other things too like how sometimes the platform at a few stations is higher up than the entrance to the train

I really like the layout on the 72 bakerloo. Better when riding with friends and family.

Yes folks, this HOW you PROPERLY pack sardine cans. Bravo!

Speaking of loading gauge, here's a question: Why are so many platforms on the tube lines not level with the carriages? I understand in cases where trains share track but even underground and on sections not shared this is an issue. Also, will this ever be fixed? It seems if they start adding platform edge doors they would need to.

New fear unlocked of the seats breaking and giving way to the grinding pit of wheels beneath

elizabeth line trains are also an exception with middle carriages often having “normal train” seats :) although i guess it’s questionable to call the elizabeth line the tube

Maybe because they are designed to be sideways to allow passengers to walk past in the middle and for passengers to sit on the seats sideways. Perhaps it’s always been like that when the London Underground was built and tube stocks were built with longitude seats. Same with on the London Overground Class 378 and Class 710.

an engineering marvel with a sensible ceiling.

I remember when tube trains had a mix of transverse and longitudinal seating's.

What a revelation! Thank you, Jago! 🥸👍

Oh that's good! That's brilliant!! I assumed the initial reason, but it hadn't occurred to me the wheels/gage would have something to do with it, absolute genius, that's clever optimisation for you, efficiency at its finest~

Clearly the good folk of Glasgow must be smaller than average given the Clockwork Orange is gagued at four feet, somewhat narrower than the norm

Jago, you are one of those youtubers who dont aak for likes and subs, you earn them. Keep on the good work. New subscriber earned 👍

Why are seats on the tube train sideways? Good question, so let's find out with Professor Hazzard.

92 stock doesn't have wheels under the seats, just had small wheels/bogies.

Wooowww...i am amazed with such useful information! Initially thought was only to increase interior space and nothing to do with wheeels. That is the reason why Talgo independent wheel trains have so narrow gangway floor space as the wheels are on the sides as well as Siemens Combino trams with its independent wheels on the side of the chassis as well as traction equipment linked to those wheels on the side. Thank you so much for sharing another interesting video.

Last time I was on one they wer’nt sideways! That was in 1965, a long time ago. Cheers from Oz.

Horse buses had longitudinal seating for much the same space reason so it maybe isn't too surprising they were adopted early on especially for the tiny City and South London Railway. Although the seats on the buses upstairs were often in the centre with the passengers facing outwards.

It also allows the cars to be lower/shorter along the outside, since the passengers are seated.

Hi Jago from a warm Spain where it is 35° at 9.20 pm. thank you for another interesting video about the lesser known bits of the tube

Elizabeth line line also have mixed orientation seats

That was so much more interesting than I thought it would be. No offence 😊

The use of space in that cramped gauge makes up for the awkwardness of sitting opposite someone avoiding eye contact 💀 - the leg space with transverse seating like the Bakerloo on the deep tube would be comical

Fun fact : the fouling/loading guage on Central Line was in correctly specified when the trains were built in the 1980's. The first test train (with no people on it) ripped the side off the entire train when it came into a central London station. Big Oops.