- And we are out on the Central Line.
It is a warm summer's day,
and finally, we're getting to do the least used station
on the whole of the London Underground.
It's the least used station on the Central Line.
- [Announcer] The next station is Roding Valley.
- Roding Valley is just outside the greater London boundary
on the Hainault loop in Zone Four,
and off-peak only gets a service every 20 minutes.
That's the least frequent on the tube network.
Originally opened in 1936 as Roding Valley Halt
by the London and North Eastern Railway,
it saw steam trains run through here first
until it was later absorbed
by the London Underground network
which it became part of in 1948.
There's no one else here.
No one.
Which is what you would expect
for the Underground's completely least used station, right?
Even though it's the least used station
on the whole of the network,
it's still got dot matrix indicators,
litter bins and waiting rooms, and this ticketing area,
but it is one of the 12 stations on the network
not to have ticket barriers.
Oh, and the "Labyrinth" is in the waiting room
on the westbound platform,
but I headed for the waiting room on the eastbound platform.
It's a very calming, almost zen-like experience being here.
Here is now an echo-y a waiting room
on the eastbound platform.
We'll do some passenger figures.
Five years ago, it was 0.24 million
and then increased slightly
over the next two years to 0.26 million,
and then the last two years,
in the year that we last had statistics for,
it rose again to 0.37 million passengers a year.
It's that many per day.
Most of those are in the morning peak
and then evening coming and going into central London
to or from work.
Apart from that, the rest of the day, it's very quiet.
So, Roding Valley has actually got an entrance on each side.
Each side is step-free.
To get the step-free exit,
you have to approach the correct side.
There's a foot bridge between the two,
and amusingly, there's been some people coming through here.
It's not a completely deserted station,
but a lot of the people just use
the footbridge to cross over.
They're not getting the train.
They're just using it as like a cut-through.
Another thing that is worth noting here at Roding Valley
is that most of the time,
trains just shuffle in between Woodford and Hainault,
but due to the location
of the Central Line depot at Hainault,
just down that way,
if you look at the timetable,
there are some trains highlighted in red,
and I always thought that it was
like Monday to Fridays, peak hours only,
but there are indeed three in the morning
and then one in the afternoon about four o'clock,
which go through Woodford
and carry on down into central London.
But bizarrely, it also happens on a Saturday
and even on a Sunday as well.
There's one at 7:47 in the morning
where it goes straight through.
This, by the way, is really good advice.
Please carry water with you in hot weather.
It is one of the warmest days of the year
that I'm filming this on,
but my advice would be to take that a little further.
Don't just carry it with you, but actually drink it as well.
So, carry and drink.
Time to go for a walk.
'Cause when I do these least used tube stations,
I point out the facilities.
One of the facilities is quite often is there a bus,
a bus stop, a connecting bus?
And the one at Roding Valley is kind of here,
but it's around the corner.
This is the bus stop for the extremely rare
and lesser spotted 549,
one of the few London buses that I've never caught,
not including all the night buses,
because on the timetable in some places
it's up to an hour and a half between buses,
and I would wait and catch it just for one stop,
but I want to go for a walk
and take you to six something else amazing instead.
So, you take a short walk,
and you find why Roding Valley is called Roding Valley.
Have you ever wondered why it's called that name?
It's because, yes, there is a valley here,
and here down to my left, just here,
this is the River Roding.
And just here (chuckles)
is what I've come to see.
Thing is, when you think about viaducts on the Underground,
you think of the Dulles Hill viaduct,
which gets a lot of fuss made about it,
at least on the Northern Line,
but the Central Line has got
its own little viaduct here, too,
over the River Roding at Roding Valley.
Sit.
There's the water.
There's nature and there's birds.
Sun's out.
It's all good.
(train whirring)
And so for the last time,
let's have a look at the chart to see
how the Central Line compares
to all the other least used stations on other tube lines
with Roding Valley's third of a million passengers per year,
except I then realised,
as I called a bus,
that it doesn't have to be the last time.
And that is Roding Valley.
Yes, I just got the 549 line bus for one stop.
Sorry, bus drivers.
I know you hate it when people do that.
I can now take that off my list as well.
That is Roding Valley.
That is the least used station on the Central Line
and the least used station on the whole
of the London Underground.
We did a whole series apart from the Waterloo & City Line.
That would be silly, of course,
but that's not the end of the series
because we can still do
the least used station on the Overground,
the DLR, and the trams,
so there's at least three more to come.