RAIL fares expert Barry Doe does not understand why Thameslink is excluded from latest Tube Map.
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
Timetable displays
Still on the subject of Transport for London, a reader was annoyed to find that at Wembley Central there were no timetable posters on display for Southern or London Northwestern (then London Midland) services.
Wembley Central is served by both operators, as well as by the Bakerloo Line and London Overground. But despite having through trains to Milton Keynes and East Croydon, the station is managed by London Underground.
LU has 5.8 million passengers a year pass through the station, and National Rail 3.4 million. Our reader knew it was no good taking it up with LU as it has no interest in timetables, so he emailed both Southern and London Midland.
It is interesting that Go-Ahead-owned Southern seemed as if it couldn’t care less, and said it was LU’s station. Yet London Midland (also Go-Ahead) responded: “We have now notified TfL and LU in regards to your comments and have asked that we work together to rectify the situation as quickly as possible.” I shall miss London Midland - I always found the operator responsive and positive, and its trains clean.
While on the subject of station usage, I note 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 that three of the least-used around the country have experienced significant rises in annual use ( RAIL 842): Coombe Halt (Liskeard branch, four trains a day) has increased from 48 to 212; Shippea Hill (seven trains a week) from 12 to 156; and Pilning (two a week) from 46 to 230.
Campaigning, special trains and (not least) local groups fighting really helps - as did the All the Stations project that has been so wellfeatured this year.
One real oddity remains Newhaven Marine. It’s open, but trains haven’t called since 2006 owing to safety concerns regarding the canopy. Southern provided a taxi for those with tickets to Marine, but got around that by removing the station from the fares database!
Compare that with Norton Bridge, which officially closed on December 9. There has been no trains there since 2004, but it had a replacement bus, so is in the fares database. That replacement bus is to continue until March 2019.
So, as a reader who is a booking clerk pointed out: “I can now sell a ticket to Norton Bridge, which is closed, but not to Newhaven Marine, which is still open. Isn’t rail bureaucracy wonderful?”
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.