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The underground beneath houses and hotels - noise??

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Howardh

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Booked into a hotel near Euston (well, it's a pub actually) and although it sounds alright - there are "complaints" on youtube that they hear the tube "throughout the night". Never had an issue in hotels before, although I could certainly hear the tube at the youth hostel at Golder's Green - I found it quite soothing in a way.
Just wonder which hotels are the worst and is it worth trying to grab a room higher up even if it costs more? Also, I'm staying midweek, and I thought the tube stopped at about 1am (indeed I've looked at the timetables so i don't miss the last one back)? Are there service/inspection runs throughout the night?
 
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riceuten

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When I was a student at Queen Mary College, the Central Line ran every couple of minutes underneath the "Great Hall" (formerly the "People's Palace"). Which wasn't a problem when, for instance, Motorhead were playing there, but something of a distraction when taking your final exams in the same room

EDIT: I believe the Night Tube is suspended at the moment so your sleep is less likely to be disturbed
 

AlbertBeale

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Booked into a hotel near Euston (well, it's a pub actually) and although it sounds alright - there are "complaints" on youtube that they hear the tube "throughout the night". Never had an issue in hotels before, although I could certainly hear the tube at the youth hostel at Golder's Green - I found it quite soothing in a way.
Just wonder which hotels are the worst and is it worth trying to grab a room higher up even if it costs more? Also, I'm staying midweek, and I thought the tube stopped at about 1am (indeed I've looked at the timetables so i don't miss the last one back)? Are there service/inspection runs throughout the night?

Sub-surface lines and tube lines are obviously different in terms of effect, but even tubes can often be heard at the surface. My basement in Bloomsbury is about 100 yds laterally from the Central Line (which admittedly isn't especially deep in the area), and on a quiet night I can just hear it - but not enough to be a disturbance (it's almost reassuring!). I don't know whether it's more possible to hear it because I'm near the former British Museum station, and the larger space it runs through echoes or magnifies the sound in some way.

Where I work at Kings Cross the Victoria Line is almost directly underneath the building, and I've sometimes heard it even from the first floor, let alone the basement. From the basement, it's so clear I can easily tell whether it's a northbound or a southbound! (Though when I point out this subtlety to anyone else in the basement at the time they look at me as thought I'm weird...)

I suspect your Euston hotel noise is more likely to be the Circle/Met/H&C than any tube, if you're by or on Euston Road (which runs mostly on top of the tracks). There are still, I think, one or two vents on Euston Road traffic islands whch let the noise up from those tracks too.

I've never personally found any train noises a problem in a hotel - but tram wheels squealing is another matter...
 

Dstock7080

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Tube ‘noise’ is usually not direct noise that the ears detect, more vibration through the ground and foundations going up through buildings.
A major issue at Walthamstow was reported in the news a few years ago and while C Stock were still running there were similar complaints from residents in the Notting Hill/Bayswater area, which required a 20mph restriction for many months.

 

Camden

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Booked into a hotel near Euston (well, it's a pub actually) and although it sounds alright - there are "complaints" on youtube that they hear the tube "throughout the night". Never had an issue in hotels before, although I could certainly hear the tube at the youth hostel at Golder's Green - I found it quite soothing in a way.
Just wonder which hotels are the worst and is it worth trying to grab a room higher up even if it costs more?
Properties suffering badly from this are rare, so it would be rarer still to find yourself in a hotel that has the problem in any strong way. I imagine you'll probably find that other people's ideas of problematic noise is at a lower threshold than your own, especially as you say you've slept through such noise before.

Higher up won't guarantee less or no noise, as it's to do with how the vibrations travel so very dependent on the building structure. It could even be the reverse, where lower floors get no noise but higher ones do.

Typically the issue is more noticeable when you go to bed, as your head comes into contact with items through which the vibrations can directly travel. Perhaps when you check in, try lying down on the bed in your usual sleeping position for 10 minutes and see if you notice anything. That way if you do think it's a problem you can ask to be moved to a different room right away.
 

Trackman

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I once stayed in a hotel off Tottenham court road and the tube woke me up in the morning.
The thing is once it starts it’s non-stop, Im guessing the tunnel was directly below me.
Also is what is a bit strange I didn’t notice it during the day as I had a nap in the afternoon, but I’d had a few drinks.
I wouldn't mind I paid extra for a superior room but ended up on the bottom floor and my view was a brick wall and bins from the kitchen.
 

riceuten

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My favourite hotel in Paris is directly above a Metro line 6 and there isn't a floor or a room where you can't feel the metro, even the 6th. They have a system, as with many Paris terminal stations, where the train runs round a terminal loop to face the right way rather than the driver changing ends, so we can hear it on either side as it passes around us.
 

S&CLER

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Not London, I know, but the Merseyrail Loop can sometimes be heard in the auditorium of the Empire Theatre by Lime Street station. Not every train is audible, I think they must set up a resonance when running at a particular speed. Do any West End theatres suffer from this problem? I know that recording venues in London have to be carefully sited to avoid underground noise.
 

Howardh

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Sounds like (pun intended) if it's vibrations then ear-plugs won't work! Although the idea of a few drinks beforehand should do the trick!
 

AlbertBeale

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Tube ‘noise’ is usually not direct noise that the ears detect, more vibration through the ground and foundations going up through buildings.
A major issue at Walthamstow was reported in the news a few years ago and while C Stock were still running there were similar complaints from residents in the Notting Hill/Bayswater area, which required a 20mph restriction for many months.


Hmmm - I reckon the slight noise I sometimes hear of the Central Line in my Bloomsbury basement is actually a faint noise, and not just a vibration; though maybe that relates to the ex-station I mentioned. And the Victoria line under my Kings Cross building is certainly a real noise. The changes in the noise which allow me to identify things about the train are too subtle for it to be "just a vibration". (Technically, of course - wearing my physicist's hat - all noise is actually a vibration; but I'm assuming a less technical meaning here!)

The building of the Royal Festival Hall alongside the Hungerford Railway Bridge had to deal with potential noise intrusion in a major way - and did so successfully.
 

Dr_Paul

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Where I work at Kings Cross the Victoria Line is almost directly underneath the building, and I've sometimes heard it even from the first floor, let alone the basement. From the basement, it's so clear I can easily tell whether it's a northbound or a southbound! (Though when I point out this subtlety to anyone else in the basement at the time they look at me as thought I'm weird...)

I also noticed the sound of the Underground trains when I was working in the bookshop's second-hand basement some years back, especially on those quiet days when there weren't many customers. I was never quite sure what line it was, as I don't know precisely where the various tube tunnels go in that area and which ones are deeper than others. I was surprised to hear them, as I thought that even the shallowest lines would be some way down, judging by the length of the escalators at the station.
 

MotCO

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Not quite the same thing, but there was a rumour when the new UCLH hospital was being built at the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Euston Road, they had to be very careful about building the deep foundations in the right place. The Linear Accelerator is located in the basement, and the rumour was that when it was working, the huge magnets would attract passing tube trains and pin them against the wall!
 

AlbertBeale

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I also noticed the sound of the Underground trains when I was working in the bookshop's second-hand basement some years back, especially on those quiet days when there weren't many customers. I was never quite sure what line it was, as I don't know precisely where the various tube tunnels go in that area and which ones are deeper than others. I was surprised to hear them, as I thought that even the shallowest lines would be some way down, judging by the length of the escalators at the station.

When they built the Victoria Line, they managed to weave it in above both the Piccadilly and the Northern (the latter being the lowest), whilst being sufficiently below the Met and Circle (and well clear of all the other stuff down there!) - so the Victoria is the shallowest of the "deep" tubes at Kings Cross. (The Victoria crosses the paths of the Picc and Northern; it runs more or less parallel to the SSLs where the Circle/Met platforms are, though tucks underneath their footprint slightly.) The basement which you and I know is pretty much on top of the cross passage and stairs between the platforms at the northern-most end of the Victoria platforms - it's where you arrive at the Vic Line if entering from the old Pentonville Road entrance. When my office was in the basement, I always knew that I'd overdone the night-shift a bit when I suddenly heard the first Victoria Line of the new day running underneath me. When the Victoria was built, the building's owners were paid for the loss of their "to the centre of the earth" subsoil rights with respect to part of the footprint of the building.

From the rear windows of the building, higher up, you can sometimes hear stuff on the southbound Thameslinks tracks when all else is quiet. When they abandoned the Kings Cross suburban rush-hour connection onto the City Widened Lines to Moorgate, necessitated by the alteration of the track level in the tunnels from St Pancras to the CWLs when the latter were electrified as part of the Bed-Pan [later to be Thameslink] electrification (1970s?) (meaning the junctions into the St Pancras route from the Hotel Curve and the York Road curve became out of kilter), I presume they didn't really seal off the openings from the disused Kings Cross route tunnels onto the St Pancras tracks. In the middle of the block the building's on, there's still a stretch of the old York Road curve's trackbed visible down through a grille where the trains vented back in the day [and now publicly accessible since redevelopment works allowed access to some of the inside of the block for new bars etc]; I guess that opening, where the old tunnel below leads to the former junction with the CWLs only a few yards along, is at least part of the source of the audibility of the Thameslink route trains.

Not quite the same thing, but there was a rumour when the new UCLH hospital was being built at the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Euston Road, they had to be very careful about building the deep foundations in the right place. The Linear Accelerator is located in the basement, and the rumour was that when it was working, the huge magnets would attract passing tube trains and pin them against the wall!

Hmmm - interesting... though one suspects that the shape of the magnetic field in a linac isn't quite right for that purpose...

Now for something which isn't a rumour... When the British Library building was being built, next to St Pancras, it was of course fronting onto Euston Road, underneath which run the Circle/Met etc. An early version of the design of the building had one of the Reading Rooms proposed for a basement level at the front. Then someone wondered whether the sounds - through not that many feet of earth - of the trains running past every few minutes might disturb the concentration of the people using the Reading Room. So they paid a lot of money to a university Environmental Psychology department, and asked them to answer that question. The researchers involved couldn't believe their luck; they took the money, went away for a respectable period, and came back with the answer - "Yes". The building's planners then switched some of the Reading Room space for some of the book storage space...
 

matt_world2004

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Not London, I know, but the Merseyrail Loop can sometimes be heard in the auditorium of the Empire Theatre by Lime Street station. Not every train is audible, I think they must set up a resonance when running at a particular speed. Do any West End theatres suffer from this problem? I know that recording venues in London have to be carefully sited to avoid underground noise.
Cineworld Haymarket you could hear the trains rumble over the film.
 

Andrew S

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Do any West End theatres suffer from this problem?

Yes, quite a few. I've worked in a number of them, and from memory, those on the route of the northern line are most affected, ie the Garrick, Duke of Yorks, Wyndhams, Noel Coward, Ambassadors, and Phoenix theatres.

All of these have auditoriums at below ground level, which may make a difference. I'm not sure if those on Shaftesbury Avenue are affected by the Piccadilly line, but possibly they are.
 

jfollows

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The radio theatre in Broadcasting House suffers from tube noise from the Bakerloo line (I think it's in a basement, certainly it's at a relatively low level in the building), to the extent that it's noticeable when you're there but apparently generally not audible on recordings.
 

edwin_m

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I used to stay quite often in the Premier Inn on Euston Road and the (now demolished) Ibis on Drummond Street, and the Underground was audible from both. I also stayed once in a Travelodge just east of Kings Cross where the sub-surface lines came out into the open for a short distance, and the sudden burst of noise every few minutes was the worst of all, not helped by it being a hot day with no aircon.

Not sure if the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle still exists, but you could hear the Metro in there.
 

Mojo

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My sister once lived in a house that was above the Piccadilly line between Manor House and Turnpike Lane. Every time the train went past you heard the rumbling noise and it was quite prominent, but it didn’t make anything rattle or shake like you may expect with, say, a lorry going past the house on an uneven road.

On a similar nature from my workplace I can hear trains go past underneath even though the line isn’t directly beneath our office. You can even tell which way it’s going as in one way you can hear the jingling associated with crossing a rail joint. Unlike in my sister’s old house, it isn’t obvious and you can only hear if it’s silent and you’re actually listening out.
 

rebmcr

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Victoria line trains decelerating for, and accelerating from Warren Street station are clearly audible from the semi-basements of buildings on Fitzroy Square. It's "sound" not "vibration", as it consists of high-pitched traction motors (not low frequency rumble), which I don't believe would transmit in the form of resonance in soil or foundations.
 

Alfonso

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Not London, I know, but the Merseyrail Loop can sometimes be heard in the auditorium of the Empire Theatre by Lime Street station. Not every train is audible, I think they must set up a resonance when running at a particular speed. Do any West End theatres suffer from this problem? I know that recording venues in London have to be carefully sited to avoid underground noise.
The Scala Cinema Club in Kings cross used to be constantly affected by the.rumble.of trains, probably less an issue now it's a club club not a cinema club.
 

AlbertBeale

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Yes, quite a few. I've worked in a number of them, and from memory, those on the route of the northern line are most affected, ie the Garrick, Duke of Yorks, Wyndhams, Noel Coward, Ambassadors, and Phoenix theatres.

All of these have auditoriums at below ground level, which may make a difference. I'm not sure if those on Shaftesbury Avenue are affected by the Piccadilly line, but possibly they are.

The Piccadilly Line doesn't run along the route of Shaftesbury Avenue, so is unlikely to affect the theatres along there. It does go past the southern end of that road of course, at Piccadilly Circus - but even there, the Bakerloo is shallower, and more likely to be the cause of any noise in building basements.
 

52290

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A favoured venue for recording classical. music in the 1950- 70's was the Kingsway Hall in Holborn. EMI and Decca used this hall, on account of it's accoustical properties,to record works conducted by John Barbirolli,Adrian Boult and Benjamin Britten to name just three. On Sundays the Kingsway Hall was a Methodist church under the direction of the Rev Donald Soper. One problem with the venue was that the microphones picked up the noise of tube trains going about their business. The sound engineers invented some
way of sucking out the train noises from the recordings. However when the CD replaced the LP in the 1980's it was discovered that the elimination of surface noise, which had been masking the train noises on LP's , revealed that the trains were still audible on CD's, in the quieter passages at least. This remains the case today and I have a number of these CD's. It isn't a very obtrusive sound, but it is there.
.
 

AlbertBeale

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A favoured venue for recording classical. music in the 1950- 70's was the Kingsway Hall in Holborn. EMI and Decca used this hall, on account of it's accoustical properties,to record works conducted by John Barbirolli,Adrian Boult and Benjamin Britten to name just three. On Sundays the Kingsway Hall was a Methodist church under the direction of the Rev Donald Soper. One problem with the venue was that the microphones picked up the noise of tube trains going about their business. The sound engineers invented some
way of sucking out the train noises from the recordings. However when the CD replaced the LP in the 1980's it was discovered that the elimination of surface noise, which had been masking the train noises on LP's , revealed that the trains were still audible on CD's, in the quieter passages at least. This remains the case today and I have a number of these CD's. It isn't a very obtrusive sound, but it is there.
.

I think Kingsway Hall stopped being used for any such purposes, and became a fancy office building, many years back. Though the frontage - at least - is intact.
 

adc82140

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Not quite the same thing, but there was a rumour when the new UCLH hospital was being built at the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Euston Road, they had to be very careful about building the deep foundations in the right place. The Linear Accelerator is located in the basement, and the rumour was that when it was working, the huge magnets would attract passing tube trains and pin them against the wall!
When we installed a 3 tesla MRI machine at a London hospital, we had to consult with LU as it was rather close to the District Line. There was a rumour that they were concerned about trains sticking to the tunnels, but that was just someone being mischievous. In fact they just wanted to ensure that the magnet didn't interfere with the signalling system.
 

VauxhallandI

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The gold in the vaults of the Bank of England sleep soundly next to the rumblings of the Central Line.
 

Royston Vasey

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I am sure there are many examples of this, it's something you get used to if you're there long enough.

The good parishioners Of St Mary's in Sunderland used to have to wait out a short pause in proceedings whenever a coal train rumbled through Sunderland, and you can even hear Metros only a few metres below.
 
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