There is nothing very spectacular about the underground, although I do remember how excited I was the first time I had been on London’s network as a twelve year-old travelling to Lords with my parents and brother to watch cricket.

Nowadays, just about every major city has an underground, most infinitely superior to London, which suffers from being the world’s oldest (and narrowest?) extensive network. The stations made pretty good bomb shelters during The Blitz though.

You could argue that Eurostar is the most amazing underground in the world, not least because it joins two nations that have had a fair few differences over the years.

It is difficult to think of many memorable journeys underground – my recent trip under the Bosporus connecting Europe & Asia on the Marmaras Line was pretty impressive and a momentous feat of engineering.

Just Before Heading From Europe to Asia….

Probably the most memorable journey ever was in ’92 for all the wrong reasons. We got fined in Budapest for not stamping a new ticket when changing lines, I then got verbally assaulted by an old Hungarian lady for inadvertently standing on her foot and finally we got on a wrong train and ended up in a carriage washing shed at the end of a line!

Even the journey to the station was full of incident – I will leave that for another day though with a full account appearing in my forthcoming book!

My favourite tube system in the world has to be the Paris Metropolitain. Wide trains, spacious stations and where else would you find a nine-piece all male musical group or lovers reading a metro map together whilst holding hands?

Watch them play by clicking here

Finally I will leave you my favourite underground riddle – without looking at a tube map, name the only two London Underground stations that contain all the vowels in their name…..