Disappointing at Islip

A reader recently paid a visit to Islip and says it’s an odd case: a modern small station bristling with CCTV, built to main line standards to serve a small village, yet with a very sparse service (there are four-hour gaps) and few passengers. The car-park was almost empty.

He rightly says that on an unstaffed station, information provision is its only ‘shop window’. Yet there was no timetable on the bridge, nor on the London-bound platform.

On the other platform Chiltern Railways did have a timetable - but the wrong one, as it only showed the departure sheets for Oxford Parkway!

Sadly, this is all-too-typical of Chiltern’s attitude towards some stations, in which it appears to have no interest. Sudbury & Harrow Road is another example. Trains run from Marylebone in as little as 13 minutes, whereas the Piccadilly Line offers nothing faster than half-an-hour from central London to the nearby Sudbury Town.

So, what does Chiltern offer on this much faster route? Four trains each way a day, none weekends.