Thameslink omitted from ‘parochial’ TfL’s Tube maps
TRANSPORT for London (TfL) is a very strange organisation. At one level it runs a high-quality, high-frequency service using excellent new rolling stock and utilising the highly successful Oyster system.
At the other extreme, many of its large outer suburban stations are decrepit and dirty, lacking most of the amenities even smaller National Rail stations have - not least lifts and (quite often) toilets.
However, the thing it has handled most badly in recent times is publicity. It abolished most timetables some years ago, leaving just the Amersham/Chesham and Watford booklets for the Metropolitan Line. Those were also discontinued this year, and although they remain online they are not in a format suitable for home printing.
TfL also abolished its five bus maps, despite much protest. And in this case, despite promising to retain online versions, these were also removed. Printed maps are still needed because screens - even on tablets, let alone phones - are too small to cover much terrain.
I note that even the Ordnance Survey, when recently asked if printed maps are on their way out, said they most definitely are not. The OS still prints four million a year for the UK alone.
So, all that TfL now produces is the timehonoured Tube Map. The best map is the one produced by National Rail called ‘London’s Rail & Tube Services’, which is updated twice yearly. It’s stocked in most National Rail stations, but for some time now TfL has refused to stock it in its stations.
As I reported in RAIL 835’s The Fare Dealer, that bar has also been extended to London Overground stations, despite those being National Rail. It’s time the Rail Delivery Group took TfL to task over its attitude towards Overground, but that’s another story.
I now gather this parochial attitude has escalated even further, and that in recent discussions with TfL regarding the completion of the Thameslink project, Govia Thameslink Railway was appalled to be told that while TfL will be putting the Elizabeth Line (Crossrail) onto the Tube Map, it will not be adding Thameslink across Zone 1.
The reason? TfL doesn’t own it. I’m actually
told it probably goes deeper than that, and that TfL fears an income loss if people divert to the new investment.
This means that Farringdon will not even be shown on the Tube Map as a major new crossroads between Thameslink, Crossrail and the Metropolitan/Hammersmith & City Lines in December 2018, despite public investment totalling £21 billion in the projects.
In the peaks, Farringdon will accommodate 27 trains each way on the Metropolitan/H&C, 24 an hour on the Elizabeth Line and 24 an hour on Thameslink. That’s a single-station interchange between 150 trains an hour, yet TfL wishes to ignore 48 of those.
One of the cornerstones of the £7bn investment in Thameslink is to relieve the Northern Line of horrific overcrowding on its City branch - but it seems it’s the wrong sort of public investment to get onto the Tube Map!
I am told TfL accepts that it has a duty to integrate transport in London, but suggests that it is enough to show Thameslink on the above-mentioned ‘London’s Rail & Tube Services’ map - yes, the one it doesn’t stock at its stations!
Most visitors value the Tube map for its detail within Zone 1, and Thameslink is the only National Rail route that crosses it.
In the days when Network SouthEast and London Underground worked together amicably, Thameslink was indeed shown on the Tube Map, between Kentish Town and London Bridge/Elephant & Castle (as can be seen from the extract from the 1999 version left). This continued until 2010, when today’s parochial ‘not-owned-by-us’ attitude kicked in.
So, over to you, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan. Please think again and overrule this parochialism, and allow visitors and Londoners alike to see all the benefits of recent public investment.