Fare Dealer
RAIL fares expert Barry Doe praises West Midlands Trains for its impressive Smartcards.
ALMOST exactly three years ago, in RAIL 843’s The Fare Dealer, I wrote at length about the strange organisation that is Transport for London (TfL).
At one level it runs high-quality, frequent services using excellent new rolling stock. At the other extreme, many of its large outersuburban stations are decrepit, dirty, and lack most of the amenities that even smaller National Rail stations have - not least lifts and (quite often) toilets.
However, I explained that the aspect it handles most badly is publicity - or the total lack of it. TfL has abolished all timetables and maps, aside from the Tube map - not only in printed format, but also on its website, which is quite the worst of any transport provider in the country.
The ‘Tube’ map includes trams, Crossrail and London Overground. I wrote in RAIL 921’s The Fare Dealer how TfL is now trying to give the impression that Overground is not National Rail, by removing the Double Arrow signs from its stations.
However, it won’t show other National Rail services. Those only appear on the separate map, published by National Rail, called Rail Network Maps for London’s Rail & Tube and London & the South East.
This is superb and widely available - but not at any London Underground station, as TfL refuses to stock it.
In the days when Network SouthEast and London Underground worked together amicably, Thameslink was shown on the Tube Map - between Kentish Town and London Bridge/Elephant & Castle. After all, most users value the Tube map for its detail within Zone 1, and Thameslink is the only National Rail route that crosses it.
However, all this changed in 2010. One of the cornerstones of the £7 billion investment in Thameslink was to relieve the Northern Line of overcrowding on its City branch. But then
Tube revenue started to fall, so the Mayor (Boris Johnson) decided he no longer wanted Thameslink on the Tube map, because he’d sooner collect the Tube fares than see a revenue transfer to Thameslink. Customers only mattered if they were London Underground’s.
Of course, TfL hopes all my criticisms have been forgotten with the passing of three years, so I was bemused to see a press release from TfL just over a week before Christmas telling the good news that “Thameslink services are to be temporarily added to the latest Tube map to help support customers during the Coronavirus pandemic”.
I think that’s one of the most ‘loaded’ statements ever to emanate from TfL.
Firstly, TfL admits that the addition of Thameslink will help support customers - but note the word “temporarily”. Heaven forbid that TfL would wish to support customers by offering such a lavish addition to its map after the pandemic is over. Once it’s over, it wants everyone back on the Northern Line!
It goes on to say it will also help relieve the forthcoming closure of the Bank branch of the Northern Line later in 2021. But it does not offer a single word about the Waterloo & City Line to Bank, which has been shut for ten months with no word of reopening. Perhaps it has merely forgotten?
Incidentally, Thameslink is to be added across all the Zones, including to Dartford and Swanley, and will appear on the large station posters at Tube stations, too.
We can be sure that TfL can’t wait for the day when the pandemic is over and Thameslink can be stripped off these maps.
The Tube map, of course, should no longer exist. The all-embracing National Rail version I referred to earlier should be the only map issued, with TfL a part-sponsor, so that users can see all railways in Greater London and beyond.
Of course, it won’t happen because that would mean TfL accepting it has a duty to integrate transport in London. Oddly enough, I’m told it already has that obligation - but you’d never guess!