Last month, we were on an Overground train to Clapham Junction at the weekend which was suddenly diverted.

“This train will now be terminating at Battersea Park” announced the driver helpfully. Except .. it’s not very helpful, is it? That’s all they said – they didn’t announce any other stops that it would still be calling at or where Battersea Park is.

“This train will call at Wandsworth Road, and then go to Battersea Park instead of Clapham Junction” would have been a much more useful announcement,

So this Station Master spent time talking to people telling them where Battersea Park is on the map, because the carriage maps on the Overground doesn’t show it.

Except that it now does! As of last week, we noticed that new carriage maps have been put up individually showing all the different lines of the Overground – a bit better – but arguably more confusing because surely the carriage map of the line should pertain to the line that you’re on?

Again, it’s just added fuel to the fire that the Overground lines need to be coloured differently, and just to have the carriage maps on the lines on which the trains now actually run. But yes .. Battersea Park is shown as a pecked line ‘Limited Service’ on some in-carriage Overground maps.

Remember how when the Tube map changed back in May, an extra kink was put into the Central line (on the online and posted editions only) to make it Crossrail-ready? Well, something else has happened with the new January 2016 map.

(Also, let’s note the fact that Vauxhall has got a blue ‘accessibility blob’ even though the lift is not yet operational, and so the map is wrong – Vauxhall is not an accessible station)

The Tube map last year on the southern bit of the Overground around the New Cross area looked like this:

2015 Map

After Surrey Quays, the line went straight down to New Cross, with Clapham / West Croydon / Crystal Palace trains all following the same, then splitting with Queens Road Peckham on the Clapham branch and New Cross Gate heading straight down south.

Well, now with the new January 2016 Tube map, it’s changed and has become a ‘3-way split’, here:

2016 Map

So why have they done this, you might ask?

It can only be because of a new Overground station that’s coming between Queens Road Peckham and Surrey Quays – namely Surrey Canal Road.  Well – except it isn’t any more it’s may end up being called ‘New Bermondsey‘ instead, and work was expected to have started by now, but we don’t think it has!

But that’s some forward planning by the Tube map designers to get the name of the Overground in early, just as they’ve done with moving the Central line to accomodate Crossrail when it appears on map.

Or will it be called New Bermondsey?

With the addition of the new Overground stations in London, it was only a matter of time before the carriage maps got updated, and they look like this …

Overground Carriage Map

Which is quite frankly a bit of a mess, because now the whole orangey-network of Overground lines have been squeezed into a shape that is not suitable for them. But most importantly, the topological layout has been completely distorted, and there’s no way that you would use this as any sort of journey planner for the Overground.

Why not just put Tube maps (which should be called the TfL map anyway, because that’s what it really is) up in Overground trains, which would help people plan much better journeys.  By having Overground lines up in carriages shown only on those trains, it might make you take a journey purely by Overground that would be much quicker if you used instead used a tube line!

It’s a right old mess … so much so that you should read Diamond Geezer where he calls it “TfL’s worst map”, which is hard to disagree with.