Future fit

During the strikes last week, we noticed that TfL also put up some timely posters about the Fit for Future commitments that it wanted to bring to the tube service in the future. One of these is of course the 24-hour ‘night tube’ service which they want to bring to selected lines from 2015 onward, which … of course they can’t do until they’ve made savings by cutting back on ticket offices in stations.

But when the plans were first announced a few weeks ago, one of the smartest comments we saw was simply this – “I’d rather they concentrate their efforts on getting the current service as it is now running perfectly, before they try to extend it to run 24 hours”, and a huge part of us agrees.  We’ve seen many examples in the last week where things just don’t work under normal circumstances, which you’d kind of hope that they would.

Rayners Lane Train

Here are two quite major examples of things that we’ve seen recently that we think you would agree need to be fixed.

The ‘next train’ indicator (going westbound) at Ealing Common on a very frequent basis, shows the wrong destination.

It often gets information confused and so District and Piccadilly Lines are shown out of order.

Here’s a District Line train leaving the other day, and on board it was a passenger who really thought it was going up the Piccadilly Line and refused to believe us when we told them otherwise.

Another Rayners Lane Train!
(Photo courtesy of @tkell97)

The irony of this is that it’s actually possible for this to be true – i.e. what is clearly a District Line train gets routed up the wrong branch, it happened last week and it’s happened many times in the past as well.

The signaller has messed up meaning that a train is routed up the wrong branch,  and the driver wasn’t paying attention and a District Line train really has gone up the Piccadilly Branch.

Here’s a shot of it from last week at North Ealing station. It caused massive delays, and crowds of people swamping the platforms back at Acton Town in the evening rush hour, as other Piccadilly services backed up behind it whilst measure were put into place to ‘retrieve’ the District train.

The passengers have to get off at North Ealing, and the train has to go all the way up to South Harrow before it can reverse.  (It’s worth noting, that for the passengers it’s quicker at this point to get out at North Ealing and walk to Ealing Broadway than it is to wait for a train back down to Ealing Common, and then wait for a train to Ealing Broadway).

So … A 24 Hour Tube system? That’d be nice for sure – but what would be nicer is if all the issues in the current system could be resolved first.