Good morning, behind me, somewhere there,
Gidea Park station, a TFL rail station,
will be on the purple line.
Actually an intriguing mix of both upper case
and lower slash sentence case signage at the moment,
which is interesting.
Not here to do a TFL rail video,
but yet, instead it's the perfect place to walk
in that direction, and go to the least used station
on the overground.
Emerson Park sits as the sole single station
between the Romford to Upminster shuttle
out in zone six of east London.
It's only been part of the London overground
and on the TFL map since 2015.
And to get there today,
I realised that it offered me the chance
to go and explore something that I've wanted
to go and find for ages.
So instead of just going
to Emerson Park direct,
because a while ago,
I made this video about London's only foot crossing,
which was tongue in cheek because I knew
it wasn't London's only foot crossing.
I thought I'd explore some of the foot crossings
that are on the Emerson Park line.
So between Romford to Upminster,
if you look on maps like OpenStreetMap or Google map,
it's hard to tell whether the three crossings
are all foot crossings,
or whether two of them are foot crossings
or one of them is a footbridge,
or is it an underpass?
So I've come down, I think it's Cranham road today,
Cranham road today,
you can see here already that the railway
has appeared to my right and coming up,
I can see, and it is the first out of three,
the foot crossing.
Okay. Gate. (Gate creaks)
Cyclists dismount, trains are bi-directional.
(footsteps crunching)
So in that direction, which is towards Romford, thank you.
The line is slightly curved, you can see it.
And in that direction, the line is slate.
Slate? (laughs) Straight.
You can see there's slight, sort of curvatures in the track
that is towards Upminster.
I believe if I hang on for two minutes,
the train should come from Upminster,
heading to Romford and it'll let us know
what type of train is running on the Emerson branch today.
(train whirring)
Did I say that way? I meant that way.
That's the 1216 to Upminster from Romford.
I'm going to carry on down Osborne road.
(footsteps crunching)
According to OpenStreetMaps,
there's also an underground river.
It looks like, at this point, that it pops out of the open
and it crosses under the railway.
The Emerson Park station is next.
And then there's two more crossings.
So I've crossed over the main road
that took me from the Western side of Emerson Park.
Emerson Park was sort of up behind me to my left.
And then I come to the Eastern side of Emerson Park.
We'll go back to Emerson Park in a minute, by the way.
Walking down Burnway which would take me to,
what I think is the second foot crossing.
And then another foot crossing,
which might be a foot crossing, or it might be a footbridge.
We're going to find out.
Hang on a second, what's this? what's this? what's this?
That is not on my map.
(footsteps walking)
Is that a stile? (laughs) That's a stile.
(footsteps crunching).
Okay, it's another foot crossing.
Checking both ways, there's no train coming.
The thing to note about this,
just crossing the foot crossing,
there's another stile, let's do that, get over safely.
The thing to note about this one,
is that this one isn't on my map.
I'm on the maps.me map,
which is the iOS and Android map,
that is OpenStreetMap data,
and there is - this crossing is not shown.
So I don't know whether that's on the OpenStreetMap website
or whether it's just failing on the app or not.
But that would concur with the rumour I heard
that there were three foot crossings and one foot bridge,
so it could be that there are four ways across,
three of them are foot crossings.
Upon closer inspection,
you can see that there is a line across the railway,
which shows the crossing,
but the alleyway leading up to it, or from it,
is not on the map.
(wind blowing)
Further down, we get to the next crossing,
which turns out not to be a foot crossing.
Okay. We've got to the third crossing down,
which, let's do a 360,
you can see is an actual bridge over the railway.
It's also started raining by the way, thanks weather,
which is intriguing because,
so the first one was shown as a foot crossing, found it.
Second one, not on the maps.
This one looked like a foot crossing,
but it's actually a bridge.
The fourth one, that way, towards Upminster,
looks like a bridge, maybe it's a foot crossing?
Let's go and find out.
(train whirring)
A quick cut through St. Andrews Park
and around a residential block of houses,
brings you to the fourth way,
that isn't a road bridge, to cross the railway line.
And this looks like number four.
Come through a gate with a big warning
saying police are monitoring you, okay.
And to my joy, I have discovered that crossing number four
is a foot crossing, albeit down in a cutting,
have to go down this slope, across it,
to get to the other side.
So there are four crossings on the Emerson Park branch
between Romford and Upminster.
Three are foot crossings,
one is that bridge.
I'm going to walk this one
and then walk back to Emerson Park.
(train whirring)
There's some steps down on this one.
Steppity, step, step, step down.
No train that way, and no train that way,
because it just crossed a moment ago.
Up the steps and onto the other side.
(footsteps crunching)
To Emerson Park.
A walk back to the station itself
takes you to a single platform,
and the station which has oyster validator's,
a help point, a dot matrix display,
and of course, litter bins.
(train clattering)
So these bin bags here are the incredible
Oscar award-winning bin bags that featured in,
was it 12 minutes of bin bags blowing at Emerson Park?
If you've never watched it,
and like 30,000 people have,
you're missing a treat.
Just make a cup of tea, sit down and watch the entire video.
But what about the passenger figures?
The annual figures for Emerson Park,
as in the amount of passengers
using this train station every year,
are here on the board, yes.
I'll put up a top 10 as well,
so you can also see how it compares
to other overground stations.
But it's out in zone six,
it's the one train shuttling backwards and forward.
You get a train every 15 minutes,
but it's only half an hour in each direction
between Romford and Upminster,
and it's just the one unit going up and down.
It used to be run by Greater Anglia until TFL took over
and it became part of the overground.
Brilliantly, they had a sign up which had,
"it's 1909 when this station opened",
its original name of Emerson Park Halt.
If you look on the Wikipedia entry for this station,
there's a beautiful old sign.
But if you divide that annual figure by 365
for an approximate daily figure,
842 people use this station every day,
either, I would have thought, to get down to Upminster,
and get a fast C2C train,
or that way to go to Romford
and then get a TFL rail slash purple line train,
all sorts of connections.
So it's near Hornchurch,
there's also not a park at Emerson Park.
I've looked at the map.
I've had a quick wander around the area.
I can't actually find a green space,
that's actually Emerson Park,
otherwise I would have gone there.
So in fact, the only thing I can do of interest, of fun,
is to go up there, back out into the road.
(train whirring)
I've come up to the footbridge, road bridge,
it's the crossing upon which you're going to look down
on to Emerson Park station.
Something that we've never really mentioned
about Emerson Park before,
and it is worth mentioning,
is that for many years,
it's part of British Rail Network SouthEast.
There were chevrons, the Network SouthEast
blue, red, white, grey coloured chevrons.
You can still see them today at Waterloo,
on the Waterloo and city line,
but Emerson Park used to have them here as well.
Kind of like buried into the concrete, burned in,
there's an old photo that I found from my friend,
Dave Exade, that he took many years ago.
And then a couple of years ago,
TFL came along and they removed them.
They removed them.
So what I'd like do is that I'm going to hold
the camera very steady at that point
where my friend Dave took his picture,
and if we all concentrate very hard,
I think we could get the networks - did I say chevrons?
They're kind of diamond? No, kind of slanty,
whatever that shape is,
let's get them back here at Emerson Park.
(train whirring)
(door whooshing)
This is Emerson Park.
(train clattering)
Back on the train to Romford,
one more thing we should do is to compare the figures
of this station to the other lines on the tube map.
When compared to the other lines
and the stations that we've done so far in this series,
Emerson Park comes second to bottom,
with fewer passengers than Roding Valley
on the central line,
but a lot more than Avenue Road on the trams.
So there you go that's Emerson Park
and it's three foot crossings and one bridge,
the least used station on the overground.
We've still got TFL rail and the DNR to go.