Vaguely Interesting Snippets | 3 January 2013

• In Underground, Overground: A Passenger’s History of the Tube the author, Andrew Martin, states that 1920s carriages from the London Underground were given a second life as changing rooms next to playing fields in southern England.

• The changing fashions of Londoners are vividly depicted in the returns to the London Underground’s lost property offices. In the 1930s, some 250,000 umbrellas were handed in every year. Nowadays, the figure is roughly 10,000. Hats no longer feature in the top ten of lost property.

• According to Christopher Woolmar in Engines of War: How Wars Were Won and Lost on the Railways, the French army was slow to engage with military potential offered by the railways because they believed that allowing soldiers to use trains would make them effeminate or soft.

• The population of Japan is ageing so rapidly that sales for adult nappies (diapers) exceeded those for babies for the first time last year.