London Underground 1972 Stock

Based on Wikipedia: London Underground 1972 Stock

The Oldest Trains in Britain Are Still Running Every Day

Somewhere beneath the streets of London, right now, there are trains older than most of the people riding them. The 1972 Stock trains on the Bakerloo line have been rattling through tunnels for over fifty years, and they're not scheduled for retirement until the mid-2030s at the earliest—possibly the 2040s. By then, they'll be pushing seventy years old, roughly double what engineers originally designed them to last.

These aren't museum pieces running on special occasions. They're the workhorses of one of London's busiest underground lines, carrying hundreds of thousands of passengers every week through stations like Paddington, Oxford Circus, and Elephant & Castle.

How did London end up depending on trains from the Nixon era? It's a story of bureaucratic compromise, financial collapse, and the peculiar way that infrastructure decisions made decades ago continue to shape our daily lives.

Born from a Heathrow Compromise

The 1972 Stock wasn't supposed to exist at all. In the early 1970s, London Transport faced a familiar problem: the aging 1938 Tube stock running on the Northern and Bakerloo lines was worn out and desperately needed replacing. Engineers began sketching designs for a completely new Northern line fleet.

Then came Heathrow.

When the government approved extending the Piccadilly line to reach the airport—a project that would transform London's connection to the wider world—everything changed. That extension required an entirely new fleet of trains. The solution that emerged was a game of musical chairs with rolling stock.

The plan went like this: build new trains for the Piccadilly line, transfer the Piccadilly's existing 1959 Stock to the Northern line, and scrap the oldest 1938 trains. Elegant in theory. The problem was arithmetic. The Piccadilly line had only 76 trains, and the Northern line needed more than that to operate properly.

The gap was about thirty trains. London Transport considered refurbishing some of the 1938 stock to fill it, but ultimately decided to order thirty brand-new trains instead. These became the 1972 Mark I Stock.

Victoria Line Twins, But Not Quite

Time pressure shaped everything about these trains. With no room in the schedule to design something from scratch, engineers essentially copied the 1967 Stock running on the Victoria line. From the outside, the two types look nearly identical—the same curved aluminum bodies, the same arrangement of windows and doors.

But appearances deceive. The Victoria line was London's showcase for automation, running with a sophisticated system called Automatic Train Operation, or ATO. Trains on that line could accelerate, brake, and stop at platforms with minimal human intervention, guided by electronic signals coded into the track.

The 1972 trains had none of this. They operated conventionally, with a driver at the front and a guard in the rear car controlling the doors. The two types couldn't run together on the same line, despite looking like twins.

This would matter later.

Mark I and Mark II: Spot the Difference

The initial order of thirty trains wasn't the end of the story. London Transport soon realized it needed even more, and ordered a second batch of thirty-three trains. These became the 1972 Mark II Stock.

Metro-Cammell built all sixty-three trains at their factory in Washwood Heath, Birmingham. Each seven-car train consists of driving motor cars at each end, trailer cars in the middle, and special uncoupling non-driving motors that allow the train to be split for maintenance. The total came to 441 individual cars.

The differences between Mark I and Mark II are subtle but telling. Step inside a Mark II train and you'll notice the seats are upholstered in a dark blue fabric, called moquette in railway parlance. The Mark I trains use red and grey instead. From outside, the Mark II trains have red-painted doors and a London Transport roundel on the carriage sides, while the Mark I trains display lettering in Johnston—the famous typeface designed for the Underground in 1916, which you'll recognize from every station sign in the network.

These cosmetic differences hint at something deeper: by the time the Mark II trains arrived, London Transport was already thinking differently about its visual identity.

A Wandering Fleet

The 1972 trains have led remarkably itinerant lives. They started on the Northern line, but they've bounced around the network as newer trains arrived and operational needs shifted.

In the late 1970s, Mark II trains began migrating to the Bakerloo line, where they shared tracks with the last surviving 1938 Stock. When the Jubilee line opened in 1979—originally running from Baker Street to Charing Cross before its later extension—the 1972 Mark II trains provided its initial service.

That changed when the 1983 Stock arrived. The first batch displaced half the 1972 Mark II trains from the Jubilee line, sending them back to the Northern. When more 1983 Stock arrived in 1987, all remaining 1972 trains on the Jubilee and Northern lines were converted to one-person operation—meaning the guard was eliminated and the driver took over door control—and transferred to the Bakerloo line.

There they displaced the 1959 Stock and settled into what would become their permanent home.

The Mark I Story Ends Differently

The Mark I trains stayed on the Northern line until 1999, when shiny new 1995 Stock finally replaced them. Most were scrapped, sent to metal recyclers at Mayer Perry or CF Booth in Rotherham.

But a few survived.

Some Mark I cars were modified to run with the Mark II trains on the Bakerloo line. Others found new uses in the system's margins. One complete train set, numbered 3229, was stored at the closed Aldwych station for years, rented out for film and television shoots. If you've seen a period drama or action movie set on the Tube, there's a good chance you've seen this train.

In November 2021, that film star finally left Aldwych for Ealing Common Depot, then moved to Ruislip a month later. Another Mark I unit in an experimental paint scheme went to Acton Works, where it spends its days shunting—railway terminology for moving cars around a yard.

The Experimental Liveries of 1989

Before their retirement from the Northern line, some Mark I trains became test subjects for London Underground's identity crisis. In 1989, several units received experimental paint schemes, and three trains were internally refurbished as a trial run.

Train 3227 and car 3518 got blue doors against a white body. Train 3204 and car 3522 received blue and white bodywork. Train 3202 and car 3523 got what would eventually become London Underground's corporate livery—the scheme you see today on newer trains.

The refurbishment program stopped abruptly when management decided to order an entirely new fleet instead. But those painted trains became visible time capsules of a moment when the Underground was wondering what its future should look like.

Keeping Old Trains Running

A train designed for perhaps thirty years of service doesn't last fifty by accident. It takes constant work.

The 1972 Stock went through a major refurbishment between 1991 and 1995. Tickford—a company better known for working on Aston Martin cars—did the work at Rosyth Dockyard in Scotland. They replaced worn components, updated systems where possible, and essentially gave the trains a second life.

Then, between 2016 and 2018, the fleet went through yet another overhaul at Acton Works, Transport for London's main maintenance facility in west London. This second refurbishment pushed the trains' potential retirement date out to 2035.

The Bakerloo line has a peculiar operational feature that required special attention. North of Queen's Park station, the tracks are shared with the mainline railway network—trains run alongside National Rail services to destinations like Harrow and Watford. For this section, the 1972 Stock needed to be registered on British Rail's TOPS system, a computerized database tracking every locomotive and multiple unit in the country. They received the designation Class 499/2.

Why New Trains Never Came

The story of the 1972 Stock is also a story of replacement trains that never arrived.

In the late 1990s, the Labour government under Tony Blair attempted something radical: a public-private partnership to modernize the Underground. The idea was that private companies, with access to capital markets and motivated by profit, could upgrade the network faster than the perpetually underfunded public authority.

A consortium called Metronet won the contract covering the Bakerloo line. Under the deal, they would order new rolling stock to replace the 1972 trains, following completion of orders for the Jubilee, Northern, and Victoria lines. Twenty-four new Bakerloo trains were supposed to enter service by 2019.

In 2007, Metronet collapsed spectacularly after massive cost overruns. The entire PPP scheme unraveled by 2010. The promised Bakerloo replacement trains evaporated with it.

The Siemens Promise

In the mid-2010s, Transport for London began a new procurement process for trains to replace the aging fleets on the Piccadilly, Central, Bakerloo, and Waterloo & City lines. A feasibility study suggested that new trains combined with modern signaling could increase Bakerloo line capacity by 25 percent, running 27 trains per hour through the central section.

In June 2018, TfL selected the Siemens Mobility Inspiro design. These are genuinely futuristic trains: open-gangway layouts that let passengers walk the entire length of the train, wider doors for faster boarding, air conditioning—still a rarity on deep-level Tube lines—and the capability to run automatically with new signaling systems.

There was just one problem: money.

TfL could only afford to order trains for the Piccadilly line, at a cost of £1.5 billion. The contract with Siemens includes an option for 40 Bakerloo line trains, but exercising that option requires funding that doesn't currently exist.

A November 2021 planning document painted a sobering picture. Due to funding shortfalls, Bakerloo line trains might not arrive until the late 2030s or early 2040s. By then, the 1972 Stock would be sixty to seventy years old—roughly double its intended design life.

The Last of Their Kind

For decades, the 1972 Stock weren't quite the oldest trains in regular British passenger service. That distinction belonged to the even more remarkable 1938 Stock-derived trains running on the Isle of Wight.

The Island Line, as it's known, operates eight miles of track between Ryde and Shanklin. For various historical reasons, the line's tunnels and infrastructure could only accommodate small, narrow trains. When London retired its 1938 Stock, some of those veteran trains were shipped across the Solent to continue working on the island.

Converted and designated British Rail Class 483, these trains ran until 2021—eighty-three years after their original construction. When they finally retired, the 1972 Stock became, by default, the oldest non-heritage trains running regular passenger services anywhere in the United Kingdom.

It's a distinction no one planned and no one particularly wanted.

The Hybrid Train

The fleet's complexity is visible in at least one unusual configuration. One current Bakerloo train is a genuine hybrid: its middle two cars are actually 1967 Stock vehicles, numbered 3079 and 3179, while the front and rear pairs are 1972 Mark I cars.

This Frankenstein train exists because, despite their apparent incompatibility, engineers found ways to make the types work together when necessity demanded. After withdrawal from other lines, surplus cars were adapted and recombined to keep the Bakerloo fleet at operational strength.

Those middle cars, units 3079 and 3179, were overhauled at Eastleigh Works—a National Rail facility, interestingly—with modifications including removing cab windows and running new cables between them. They were originally intended to become part of an Asset Inspection Train, replacing an even older track recording vehicle. But in July 2021, that project was abandoned and the partly converted train was scrapped at a recycling facility in Sittingbourne, Kent.

Inside a 1972 Train

What's it like to ride these fifty-year-old trains?

Step aboard and you'll find 268 passenger seats per seven-car train. The interior feels distinctly retro—not in a deliberate heritage way, but in the honest sense of technology from another era. The seats are narrower than modern standards prefer. The ventilation relies on opening windows rather than air conditioning, which becomes particularly noticeable in summer when the deep-level tunnels act like bread ovens.

In 2014, British textile design studio Wallace Sewell created a new seat covering for the fleet. Called a moquette—the French word for velvet pile fabric traditionally used in transport seating—it's a variation on the 2009 Barman design, but warmed up with colours reflecting the Bakerloo line's brown identity rather than the blue-based original.

The doors have that distinctive slam rather than the pneumatic whoosh of newer trains. The acceleration feels different too—less smooth than modern stock, with the particular character of direct-current traction motors designed before microprocessor control became standard.

For regular passengers, these aren't charming period details. They're just the daily reality of commuting on infrastructure that governments have repeatedly promised to replace and repeatedly failed to fund.

What the Numbers Mean

Every underground train has identification numbers that tell its story to those who know how to read them. The 1972 Stock uses a four-digit system where the first digit indicates the car type and position within the train.

Numbers beginning with 3 are driving motor cars at the north end. Numbers beginning with 4 are driving motors at the south end. The remaining digits identify the individual train set and its position in the build sequence.

So when you see unit 3313-4313 paired with 4213-3213, you're looking at two halves of the same train, built together and still running together after half a century.

The Infrastructure Trap

The 1972 Stock illustrates a pattern that repeats across aging infrastructure worldwide. Decisions made decades ago—the Heathrow extension, the choice to order 1959-derived trains rather than something new, the PPP collapse—cascade forward in time, constraining options for future generations.

Every year the 1972 trains keep running is another year Transport for London doesn't have to find billions for replacements. But it's also another year of declining reliability, higher maintenance costs, and service that falls further behind modern expectations. The longer replacement is delayed, the more critical it becomes, but also the more expensive and disruptive.

The Bakerloo line itself compounds the challenge. It's one of the oldest deep-level tube lines, dating to 1906, with tunnels and platforms designed for much shorter trains than today's seven-car sets. Any upgrade involves threading new technology through Victorian-era infrastructure.

Meanwhile, passenger numbers on the Bakerloo line continue to grow. The feasibility studies showing how new trains could increase capacity by 25 percent aren't academic exercises—they represent the difference between a functional transit system and one that regularly turns passengers away because trains are too full.

Living History

There's something strange about infrastructure that outlives its intended lifespan by decades. The 1972 Stock trains have now operated through the careers of multiple generations of drivers, maintenance workers, and transport planners. They've carried passengers through economic booms and recessions, through the 2012 Olympics, through a global pandemic.

The engineers who designed them are retired or dead. The factories that built them are closed. The technology they represent—direct-current motors, cam-shaft controllers, guard-operated doors—belongs to a different era of railway engineering.

Yet every morning, somewhere in a depot in northwest London, maintenance crews check these trains over and send them out for another day's work. They'll do it again tomorrow, and the day after, and quite possibly for another decade or two.

The oldest trains in Britain are hiding in plain sight, carrying millions of passengers who rarely think about the extraordinary longevity of the machines moving them through the darkness beneath the city. Until something better comes along—and the funding to pay for it—the 1972 Stock will keep running, one more day at a time.