Introduction

#

Trains! For most of my life I didn’t really think about them, as you’ll know if you’ve read The Gigging Experience for most of my childhood and teenage years I didn’t really go out much, all my socialising was done at school which was a fairly short walk away, just half an hour or so, so I didn’t really need public transport.

In my first year of high school I took the bus but then I realised that with the traffic the walk was actually quicker, that and the odd bout of scraps getting started or shit talked on the ride was enough to make me just use my feet for all the going from A to B and back.

There were of course the holidays, although less so as I got older, but for that we usually drove or flew, so whatever train journeys I did make were very few and far between, but around 3 years ago I started going out to the gigs, then I went to more, and more, and more.

We don’t have much in the way of a music scene where I live, well we don’t really have any music scene where I live, so that meant I needed to travel long distance. The great big culture capital that is London is where I’ve pretty much always gone for these shows but the trouble is it’s about 10 hours away if I walked, so that’s not really on the table.

I don’t have a car and I don’t have a licence to drive one, since I never needed to go anywhere I’d need one for I never bothered to learn, so there’s the bus and the train.

Trains are much faster and buses have to share the road with everyone else, trains only have to share their track with other trains, with buses you also have to ding the little bell to tell the driver you want to get off at your stop which means you have to pay extra attention to where your stop actually is so you don’t find yourself speeding past it, trains are much simpler, if your stop’s on the route it stops there and the announcements will tell you when you get there.

It’s an extremely convenient service and so train journeys have been my go to for travelling, to the point that even when I did go much further afield, all the way to Germany to work on MEGA, I opted for a high speed cross-border Eurostar train instead of a flight, less rules which = more convenience, even if it’s a higher cost, plus it’s more climate friendly, so that’s nice.

Of course the point of all these journeys is still the destination, I care more about the concerts, video productions, music shoots, meetups with mates and all the rest of it than what happens in between, but what I noticed was that I was really enjoying the experience of travelling too.

Barring the odd rush hour or late evening service where you’re packed in a flood of people barely even able to fit on the train, the journeying is a really fun and interesting experience. Getting around at lightning speed, earphones pumping tunes into my ears, it’s the flow and connectivity of the city in its purest form, something that almost always puts a smile on my face no matter how many times I cover the same ground.

With that warm feeling has come a curiosity, I’ve taken to watching train themed YouTubers like Geoff Marshall and Jago Hazzard and reading the newsletters of London transport buff IanVisits, and over time I’ve noticed more of the oddities around the whole system, that’s what I randomly decided to start writing about 2 weeks ago so here we are.

History

#

To give a short history of rail in the region, from the 1800s to the early 1900s rail in Britain was all run by a huge jumble of hundreds of private companies, in the early 1900s most of London’s rail was bought out by businessman Charles Yerkes, who folded it into a conglomerate called the Underground Electric Railways (UERL), which started to form a coherent design language for the network, which they called the “Underground”. Over time they rolled out a unified map for the capital’s services, the “Tube map”, a unified logo, a roundel symbol made by Edward Johnston, and a font designed by him for all of its signage, called Johnston.

Nationwide most of the other big companies were merged by the government into a group of 4 sprawling conglomerates nicknamed “The Big Four” in the early 1920s: The Great Western Railway (GWR), the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS), the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) and the Southern Railway (SR), then in 1933 the London Train and Tram services outside of the Big Four were all consolidated into the nationalised “London Transport”, which rolled out the standardisation even further.

The UERL’s networks became London Transport’s first lines:

• The Baker Street and Waterloo Railway became the Bakerloo Line
• The Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway became the Piccadilly Line
• The Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway, City and South London Railway and became the Morden–Edgware Line, later the Northern Line
• The Central London Railway became the Central Line
• The Metropolitan District Railway becomes District Line

And another company, the Metropolitan Railway, along with its subsidiary the Great Northern & City Railway was folded in too, adding the Metropolitan Line and the Northern City Line (with the Metropolitan line later rebranding as 4 different lines: Metropolitan, Circle, Hammersmith and City and East London, and the Northern City Line later becoming part of the Northern Line).

In 1948 the big 4 were also nationalised as “British Rail”, leaving all of the UK’s train networks in public hands. So trains in and around London were split between the Underground and British Rail.

This was the status quo for the next few decades, with a few new developments inside it, 3 new lines were developed, the Victoria and Jubilee lines in the 1960s and 70s, which became part of the Underground, and the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) in the 1980s, which became its own network, owned by London Transport but contracted out to be run by private companies.

2 networks also changed hands, in the 1970s the Northern City Line moved from the Northern Line to British Rail, while the Waterloo and City Line, a tiny shuttle service, moved from British Rail to London Transport.

The next big shakeup came in the late 1990s, when the government decided to privatise British Rail, BR was splintered into dozens of different train “franchises”, each contracted out to private “Train Operating Companies”, BR’s Network Southeast, which covered the lines in and around London, was split into 11 different franchise networks, each under their own TOCs with their own branding, although they were later also given the unified name of “National Rail”.

London Transport stayed out of this scheme and was instead reformed as the local government owned “Transport for London”, initially just with responsibility for the Trams and DLR, as well as other services like taxis and buses, but in 2003 it took over the Underground as well.

From there it rolled out a contactless payment system on the network known as Oyster, where you could load money onto an Oyster Card and then use it to make journeys without buying a ticket, you would just “tap in” on an Oyster reader at the station where you start your journey, “tap out” at the station where you finish it, and it would work out the fare and charge you accordingly. Originally this was only available on TfL services, but the TOCs started gradually adopting it on their networks as well¹.

TfL then continued the work that London Transport had started, rolling out their consistent design language across the network, the DLR got its own Underground style roundel and became part of the tube map and in 2007 one of the TOCs, Silverlink, had its Silverlink Metro service folded into TfL, run by a private company under TfL contract like the DLR, it also got its own roundel, Johnston, Oyster and a place on the map as the “London Overground”, which also absorbed the East London Line.

The Oyster rollout was completed across the whole city by 2010, with it later being extended beyond London since, and in 2014 contactless bank payments joined the Oyster system, rather than having to load money onto your Oyster card you could simply tap in and out with your bank card and have the fare charged straight to your bank account.

A year later, a new line known as Crossrail began service as another TfL contracted line, complete with the TfL design language, initially partially splintered and under the provisional name of “TfL Rail”, in 2022 the network was finished and rebranded as the “Elizabeth Line”.

The last big development happened late last year, where the Overground was rebranded as rebrand into 6 separately coloured lines on the map, the big orange blob became the yellow Lioness Line, the blue Mildmay Line, the red Windrush Line, the maroon Weaver Line, the green Suffragette Line and the grey Liberty Line.

Wayfinding

#

Branding and Maps

#

On the whole it’s a very good system, one that’s gotten me through hundreds of journeys all in good time, letting me enjoy so many events and see so many places that I otherwise never would’ve, as well as it being well run it’s also really well designed in terms of wayfinding, all the lines have their own stand out colours and names, all stations very clearly signpost all the stops on the routes, where the interchanges are, which platform runs which line, everything you need to know is easily up front, making travelling on the network usually a very smooth process.

But it’s also a system that’s been built inconsistently through policies that chop and change, work that’s half finished, so there are outliers. At first I didn’t notice them, but as I’ve gone to more and more places all over the city they start to stand out.

When you step onto a National Rail platform or station it’s like stepping into a parallel universe, the fonts are all different, the logos are different, the colours are all different, all that work that the UERL, London Transport and now TfL put into consolidation and consistency in the design language goes out the window, the train company gets to follow whatever language it wants and that has pretty much nothing to do with the TfL style guide.

But that’s more of a nitpicky aesthetic thing, a much bigger problem is that this parallel universe just isn’t shown on TfL maps.

If you get a regular tube map or find one at a station, it only shows the TfL branded services (Underground, Overground, Elizabeth Line, DLR and Trams), the only National Rail line shown is Thameslink, which was added during COVID to help reduce congestion on Tfl services, encouraging more social distancing (originally as a temporary change, but after 4 years it’s still there).

_{The Tube Map}

This is also the map shown on TfL’s navigation app, TfL Go.

Since all of the other NR lines are missing, this means a huge number of connections just don’t exist on the map, which can cause all sorts of problems.

For example, if I want to go from Liverpool Street to Tottenham Hale, there’s no direct link between the two.

To reach it I have to get on the Victoria Line, but Liverpool Street isn’t on the Victoria Line, so I have to connect to another Victoria station and go from there, so I could:

• Take the Weaver Line to Walthamstow Central (5 stops) then Victoria Line to Tottenham Hale (2 stops)
• Weaver Line to Seven Sisters (8 stops), then Victoria Line to Tottenham Hale (1 stop)
• Or take the Circle, Metropolitan or Hammersmith and City lines to Kings Cross St Pancras (4 stops), then Victoria Line to Tottenham Hale (4 stops)

That’s 7, 9 and 8 stops for each option, they all need me to change trains, and each journey would take around half an hour.

But guess what? All of that would be a massive waste of time, because there is a direct link between these 2 stations, the Greater Anglia service, it’s a 1 stop journey that takes about 10 minutes.

But it gets worse, as well as a bunch of routes being missing there are dozens of stations that are completely missing from the map too, because they’re only run by National Rail.

Here’s another example, let’s start from Liverpool Street again. a few months ago I went to a gig in the huge Alexandra Palace venue, , the closest station to it on the Tube map is Wood Green on the Piccadilly Line, 20 minutes away according to TfL Go, half an hour according to Google Maps.

So I have basically 3 options to get there:

• Circle/Hammersmith and City/Metropolitan line to Kings Cross St Pancras (4 stops), Victoria Line to Finsbury Park (2 stops), Piccadilly Line to Wood Green (3 stops)
• Circle/Hammersmith and City/Metropolitan line to Kings Cross St Pancras (4 stops), Piccadilly Line to Wood Green (7 stops)
• Weaver line to Seven Sisters (8 stops), Victoria Line to Finsbury Park (2 stops), Piccadilly Line to Wood Green (3 stops)
• Central line to Holborn (4 stops), Picadilly Line to Wood Green (9 stops)

That’s between 2-3 changes and 9-13 stops, plus the walk it makes for roughly a 50 minute journey.

But again, this is all a waste of time, because there’s another station much closer to the venue, Alexandra Palace station, about 10/15 minutes away. To get there I just go from Liverpool Street to Moorgate and then take the service from National Rail company Great Northern, 8 stops.

You don’t even have to take a train to go between Liverpool Street and Moorgate since they’re linked by a tunnel connection running along the Elizabeth Line underground platforms, but if you wanted to you could take the Metropolitan Line, Circle or H&C, it’s 1 stop.

So we go from 2-3 changes to 0-1, 9-13 stops to 8 and from a 20/30 minute walk to a 10/15 minute one, it’s an obviously better journey but you wouldn’t even know it was possible if you just went by the map.

Even though they aren’t on the map TfL Go will tell you about these connections if you search for journey advice, as will TfL’s journey planner website, so this isn’t so bad, but if you just work off the maps you could find yourself wasting a lot of time.

We could go over an endless number of more examples, but you get the point. Now, if you’re in North London, this isn’t so much of a big deal, you’re losing out on potentially faster options and smoother connections, but TfL’s services cover so much of the North of the city that you can still get where you need to go reasonably enough.

But when you get to South London it’s a very different story. South London in the Tube map looks really barren for the most part, all you have is the Overground, Thameslink and Trams, with a small number of Underground services running just across the river. It’s way less connected than the North. For a long while I just genuinely thought that’s how it was, that the South just didn’t have much going for it when it came to rail lines.

But you can probably guess where this is going, that’s because almost all of the trains in South London are run by National Rail companies, so you don’t see them on the map. If these missing links would make your journey more inconvenient in the North, in the South they would make it impossible.

But here’s the kicker, TfL actually does have a map that shows almost all² of the connections around the city, they call it the “London Tube and Rail Services” map ( first released back in 2011³) and if you compare it you can see just how many extra connections there are it makes a huge difference. It might look incredibly complicated and messy but in its large form on a station wall it’s actually nicely readable, and given just how much more info it gives you I think the trade of simplicity for clarity is worth it.

_{The Tube and Rail Map}

But this map is only shown at certain stations, like Overground stations, Underground stations with NR connections, and the NR stations themselves, most tube stations stations just use the regular tube map with half the connections filed off, and that’s the one given out on pocket maps as well.

Since almost all of the shows I go to are in the north I just didn’t really notice that this parallel universe existed, but in the last few months I’ve been going more south and I realised just how much was missing.

Since the regular TfL maps aren’t based on geography, not showing the real distances or angles between stations to make the routes more easily readable, it’s not actually clear just how much is missing.

TfL actually has an internal map they call the “London Connections” map that does it justice, showing all the Tube and Rail services on a geographic map of the city, which they revealed after a Freedom of Information request, and it puts things into real world context.

_{London Connections Map
Side note, update the lines, replace the road names with postal codes and this could actually be a great wayfinding tool in itself}

It’s just over a decade old so some things are a bit out of date, several finished services (Overground extensions, Crossrail and a Northern line extension) are marked as future plans, Crossrail hasn’t been named Elizabeth Line yet, several lines have their old TOC names (LNR is “London Midland”, Thameslink and Great Northern are “First Capital Connect”, GWR is “First Great Western” and SWR is “South West Trains”) but here we can see the geography of where these lines really are.

The southwestern boroughs of Kingston and Richmond have sizable networks run by SWR, the southeastern boroughs of Greenwich, Lewisham, Bexley and Bromley by Southeastern, but as far as the Tube map is concerned they’re pretty much empty.

Just as a comparison, in the Northwestern corner the tiny town of Chesham, with a station that has a whopping 1 platform, a grand total of 2 trains an hour, a population of about 20k and a location that is definitely not London (it’s a 30 minute train/drive away or a 4 and a half hour walk away from the last station actually in London), gets to be on the map.

None of the excuses for this make any sense, why should half the network be excluded? 

Simplicity?

The Tube map isn’t simple even without them, less complex than the T&R map maybe, but still not simple.

They’re not run by TfL?

Neither is Thameslink, and even though the DLR, Overground and Elizabeth Line use TfL style branding they’re run by private companies too, but those 4 are still on there.

They use different trains?

The different Underground lines have their own train types, so does the Overground, the DLR, the Trams, etc etc. The Overground and Elizabeth Line actually run the same stock as GA and some of the other private companies.

They go outside London?

So do the Metropolitan line, the Central line, the Lioness line and the Weaver line.

_{Authors: Edgepedia, Dylan07gggg, Licences: CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC-BY-SA 4.0
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:London_Underground_with_Greater_London_map.svg, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Overground_Route.svg}

Or here’s a good one, what about service patterns? TfL branded lines stop at all the stations on their route, National Rail doesn’t for many of their services, gotcha!

_{A point TfL’s own contracted researchers make
https://content.tfl.gov.uk/redesigning-the-london-overground-map-customer-research-march-2023.pdf - Page 16}

Oh wait, no, there’s just 1 line on the whole network that doesn’t do this, the Metropolitan line, the Metro also runs “Fast” and “Semi-Fast” services that skip some stations.

The District line also has a tiny 1 stop branch that’s so infrequent it has to be coloured differently on the map.

Speaking of that, what about frequency?

Sure, TfL services are much more frequent on average, every 2-3 minutes or so normally, National Rail is much less frequent, it’s often more like every 10-20 minutes, especially if you’re looking for a stop that not every train calls at.

It’s at a level where I have 2 different brains for the different services, on TfL 7 minutes or more is a delay that makes me genuinely pissed off, while on National Rail waiting 10 minutes + is totally relaxed and normal, just mill about on the platform or sit down in a waiting room like it’s nothing.

But with the simpler and closer connections National Rail can sometimes give you, like the examples I mentioned earlier, the timesaves can often make up the difference or make NR the much faster option.

And there are also some stations that are just underserved by TfL and better served by NR.

Take New Cross, it’s on the Windrush line but this part of Windrush has 3 branches, Clapham Junction, Crystal Palace/West Croydon, and New Cross itself. New Cross is the least served part of the line, most trains bypass it. National Rail’s Southeastern on the other hand has 12 trains an hour stopping there, 6 going north and 6 going south.

_{Author: Sameboat Licence: CC-BY-SA 3.0
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:London_Overground_map_sb.svg}

Late last year I went to a show at a nice pub called the Amersham Arms, which is right next to New Cross station, to the point where you can literally see it from the platform.

So to get there I had basically 3 choices:

• Waste time checking timetables so I could time things just right to get one of the rare Windrush trains to New Cross
• Get a Windrush train on the Crystal/Croydon branch to its sister station New Cross Gate, 10 minutes away, then walk the rest of the way
• Turn up and go with Southeastern

Wasn’t exactly rocket science which one I chose.

And again, even if we assumed TfL was always better, which it isn’t, that didn’t stop them adding Thameslink.

Performance? An argument TfL often makes is that they’re way more competent than National Rail, and that’s usually quite true but TfL has their share of disasters too, I remember last year the Central Line was delayed constantly pretty much every day for months because they hadn’t maintained the trains properly and huge numbers of them had to be taken out of service, meaning that the few trains that did run were absolutely cramped.

Greater Anglia, by contrast, has almost never had any severe delays in my experience and not much in the way of minor delays either, boasting the best performance record in the country with the overwhelming majority of services being on time and very few cancellations, almost all of the delays and cancellations they do have are ones that were out of their control, things like severe weather events or unexpected obstacles (like animals or people jumping/falling onto the track).

Greater Anglia’s trains are also well maintained and they’ve refreshed their network with new trains just 3 and half years ago, while a lot of the TfL network is at the same standard the Piccadilly Line trains I’ve been on are usually scrawled with graffiti and the stock they use also dates back to 1975, the Bakerloo line stock actually dates back even further all the way to 1972, the oldest trains on the entire UK passenger network, and while the Picadilly trains are getting replaced, the Bakerloo are not.

4 more lines (Central, Jubilee, Northern, Waterloo and City) haven’t had their stock replaced in over 25 years, last getting new trains in the 1990s, and even though the Met and its sisters have gotten new stock just over a decade ago that looks and feels very nice, last time I was on them back in 2024 they still had badly coloured stickers slapped on some of the route maps showing connections to TfL Rail, which if you remember from earlier, hadn’t existed for 2 years by then.

Really there’s no consistent standard at all, sometimes it’s National Rail that’s glossier, take London Bridge station, a huge sprawling glossy complex with services up the wazoo, compared to the Underground London Bridge which is a small, pretty generic tube station.

Then look at NR-run Essex Road, an empty echoey set of tunnels which don’t even have any escalators, just a lift and a staircase that when I was there was closed, it also still has old route maps from Network Southeast which its TOC, Great Northern, just haven’t bothered to remove.

Nearby is Underground run Angel station, which while not super glossy has some nice art and escalators to get in and out and just generally feels like something that belongs to a city instead of a ghost town.

Even if TfL is better on average, what about the times that aren’t average? The only reason I’ve actually been to Essex Road is because going there saved my arse when I needed to get home.

I came into a show in Haggerston on the Windrush line and then by the time I was ready to go home the Windrush line got suspended, Essex Road was the closest station I found with trains heading towards home and Great Northern were still running, so I rushed there and managed to make my way back to Tottenham Hale, and then on the last leg of the journey home to a sound warm sleep.

Essex Road might be a shabby station dated back to the 80s, so empty and quiet you can practically hear a pin drop, but it was one that had trains in it, which the nicer looking Windrush stations didn’t. So it was pretty good fortune that this hidden branch of the network existed.

At the time I was making a rushed decision eager to not miss the last train, but now I’ve looked around on Google Maps again I can see there were 4 options I had for the nearest stations not on the suspended Windrush line.

• Old Street on the Northern line, which going by Google Maps is a 27 minute walk away, then 19 minutes on the tube from there, so 46 minutes total.
• London Fields, Weaver line, 22 minutes away, 15 minutes on the train, 37 minutes total.
• Essex Road, Great Northern, also 22 minutes away, 10 minutes on the train, 32 minutes total.
• Then there’s another option that I didn’t realise, Dalston Kingsland, Mildmay line. It’s actually closer than Essex Road at around 19 minutes away, but it would’ve taken me roughly 14 minutes on the train, so when you add it up, 33 minutes total. Great Northern was still a tiny bit faster.

But this doesn’t account for a few things, how long it would take me to walk might vary a bit (Google usually overestimates the time) and this doesn’t count the amount of time I would spend waiting on the platform for the train to actually show up. Essex Road gets 8 trains an hour (4 north, 4 south), Dalston Kingsland gets double that at 16 (8 north, 8 south), so maybe depending on the timing the Mildmay would’ve been faster, maybe not.

But you can see how this was a valuable spot on the network to know about, it was better than 2 out of the 3 TfL options and maybe 3 out of 3.

And again, even if we assumed TfL was just better than National Rail all the time without fail, which it isn’t, there’s Thameslink. Including Thameslink on the map really destroys any argument for excluding NR, if Thameslink’s connections should be shown because they reduce congestion and give passengers more options, why not the rest?

Platforms, Cars and Announcements

#

Inside the trains and platforms themselves you have a similar problem, the route maps there do actually show National Rail connections, or at least they’re supposed to, but they do it very poorly. For connections to other TfL branded services the service will be specifically listed by name, but with National Rail connections the maps just put a big double arrow (the NR logo) next to the station name.

This is pretty much useless for navigation since “National Rail” covers 14 different lines, if we look at the example of this diagram from Euston, Highbury and Islington is on Great Northern, Finsbury Park is on Great Northern and Thameslink, Tottenham Hale on Greater Anglia.

Then there’s Kings Cross St Pancras, that station doesn’t directly have any NR services but it connects to 2 mainline stations, Kings Cross (which serves LNER and Great Northern (as well as 3 special “open access” operators, Hull Trains, Grand Central and Lumo) and St Pancras International (which serves EMR, Southeastern and Thameslink), that’s 6 lines, 9 if we count the open access operators, all being lumped together under 1 symbol.

This is the exact same problem that led to the Overground rebrand, the Overground is 6 different lines that aren’t all connected to each other, so reading that a station has a connection to the “Overground” is pretty much useless since the Overground could mean half a dozen different routes and stations in several different directions going north, south, east or west, National Rail has the same problem but on over double the scale.

Then there’s the last ones, Blackhorse Road and Walthamstow Central still have the National Rail signs even though they moved to the Overground a whole decade ago, Seven Sisters did too, but still gets a very limited Greater Anglia service in the mornings and evenings.

In some cases this is because TfL just haven’t bothered to update the signs, either because of the time or the cost it would take (for example Walthamstow and Blackhorse have had their NR symbols removed in in-car maps ages ago) but in others its because the rules aren’t consistent, as well as NR connections that don’t exist still being labelled, some connections that do exist are not, so not only is this symbol fairly useless for navigation, it’s not even used properly.

An example of what the difference could be, I couldn’t find the platform map I used in my example, so instead I’ve used the in-car diagram instead. I took the latest one I could get from TfL’s archive then used assets from their style guide to redesign it.

_{For more info on the changes I made, click here.}

It’s a shite map because it’s all pixelated and shoddy since I did it in good old MSPaint, but you get the idea, these changes make it a lot clearer what all of the connections you can make actually are.

The 4 Overground lines and 7 NR lines you can connect to from this part of the Victoria Line are actually shown as the different networks they are, rather than 2 big blobs. Does it make the list of interchange boxes more complex? Sure, but you have to balance that out with the clarity users can get from knowing all the changes they make, and like with the Tube Maps I think it works out that having more info is more helpful.

The audio announcements on the trains could do with the same kind of fix, whenever you’re on a train on the tube any connections to other lines will be namedropped as you approach the station, like “Change here for the Northern Line”, when there’s a National Rail connection it’s mentioned too, but only as “National Rail services”, or for a grand total of one station “National and International Rail services” (at KCSP, because of the Eurostar).

Again they don’t actually tell you which National Rail services you can change for, which makes the info pretty useless.

Worse than that is status updates, when there are delays on a line you can transfer to at the next station you’ll be told as you arrive, but for NR services delays are usually not announced except for station closures, their status also isn’t mentioned on TfL’s website unless you manually switch in a drop down menu, and since NR isn’t on the TfL app, it’s not mentioned there either.

This obscuring of the “parallel world” is something that deserves to be fixed, your average traveller doesn’t care if a line is run by TfL or not, they care about how to get from A to B.

Of course, a more radical option for all of this would be to fold even more of the current NR services into the TfL brand like the Overground did with Silverlink, maybe turn the whole NR system in London into more Overground lines, to truly finalise that process of consolidation that the UERL started a century ago, and TfL has been arguing for something like this, a change they call “metroisation”, for some time.

Maybe a middle ground between the two would be NR continuing to run them but giving their lines their own line names like the Overground and Underground do, giving more clarity to all the different routes you can take. Because hearing there’s a connection to “Thameslink” is much better than “National Rail services”, lumping it in with 13 other completely different networks, but it’s still kind of vague, if you look at a Thameslink map it’s like a sprawling spider.

In general this is something the NR could do with fixing, but then you do run into the problem of deciding what is a line with several branches and what is several different lines that happen to meet at certain points.

But really that’s a whole other conversation, the key is that commuters should know all the options they have, rather than half of them being hidden from them by poor wayfinding resources.

Payment

#

Useless Tickets

#

But this goes beyond a visual problem, it’s a systemic one too.

National Rail and TfL services have their own different payment systems, they each share paper tickets and (in the zone for it) Contactless and Oyster, but there are also QR tickets, which are sold on apps by the train companies as well as private third parties like Trainline, and by select companies in special paper form, a lot of train companies also offer Smartcards where you can buy a ticket and load it onto the card.

Most stations in London (and the UK in general) have ticket barriers that manage access in and out of the platforms. It’s simple enough, if you’re using a paper ticket you push it into a little slot, take it out again and the barriers open, if you’re paying by card, Oyster or using a Smartcard, there’s a reader for you to tap your card on, for QR tickets there’s a scanner.

But there are several problems with this.

With QR tickets there are no QR scanners on the barriers in London except for on National Rail platforms, TfL platforms just don’t have them. So what do you do? You have to show your ticket to a member of staff and get them to open the barrier for you, so rather than a simple ticket swipe or card tap you have to waste time awkwardly going up to them and explaining yourself every time you want to get through.

On top of that most barriers will have at least one member of staff there but sometimes they don’t, meaning you have to faff about searching for a gateline that does or call for help, making the journey much more awkward, that or force the barriers open or jump over, risking getting yourself in the shit.

Maybe not the worst thing in the world if you only have to deal with it once or twice, but if you’re travelling a lot, every month, every week, every day, this sort of thing can make things 10x worse.

And if you’re using a smartcard there’s actually a 2 hour delay between buying a ticket and being able to load it onto the card (unless you buy it on your phone and are able to use NFC, or you buy it directly from a ticket office).

On top of that the Smartcard system is actually extremely fragmented. Although all the cards use the same technology, called ITSO, the cards are given out by the train companies, who set their own rules on when, where and how they can be used. They might block you from using certain ticket types on the cards, block you from using their company’s card on another company’s line, or just not even allow you to use the card at certain stations at all, so sometimes you can use them for seamless travel across multiple networks, sometimes you can’t.

_{https://www.c2c-online.co.uk/tickets-and-fares/c2c-smartcard/, https://www.southernrailway.com/tickets-and-payment-methods/ways-to-pay/the-key-smartcard, https://www.chilternrailways.co.uk/smart}

There’s also the same problem as the QR tickets, the TfL barriers, in theory National Rail smartcards should work with TfL’s Oyster/Contactless readers, and there was a big project back in 2014 called “ITSO on Prestige” aimed at making this work across the whole TfL network, in practice there are still black spots where it doesn’t. When you add all these problems up these “smartcards” can actually be pretty stupid, and really aren’t the replacement for paper tickets they’re presented as.

So these systems designed to make travel more convenient can actually do the exact opposite.

The Oyster Minefield - Outside Journeys

#

And then there’s Oyster and Contactless. Now in theory these should be a pretty much flawless system, you tap in, you tap out, that’s it.

But Oyster and Contactless are only valid in certain areas, everywhere inside London and select stations around it, if you’re travelling to or from a station outside that zone you need a ticket.

So there’s a problem, if you travel from a station outside London to a station inside London, you can’t tap in because you’re already behind the barriers, and Oyster needs a tap in to work. Since unlike a Smartcard there’s no ticket on the card it needs a tap in to know where you started the journey and a tap out to know where you ended it so it can work out the fare, so what do you do?

Well, there’s a solution for that, certain stations that are inside the contactless zone but can be used to go to and from stations outside of it will have Oyster/Contactless readers on the platforms, so you can get on a train outside London with a ticket, arrive at the London station, tap in and then continue the rest of the journey with contactless.

A good example of this is Seven Sisters, which has platforms for the Victoria Line on one end and on the other end a set of platforms used by the Overground’s Weaver Line and (rarely) Greater Anglia, so in those times I would start my journey outside London at a GA station, using my ticket to get through the barriers, then go all the way to Seven Sisters, get off the train, tap in, make my journey across the TfL network and then finally tap out at the barriers at my destination.

Simple enough. So, problem solved? Yes… And no. A lot of these readers are badly labelled, so if you’re not familiar with them you might not understand what they’re for.

You’re only supposed to use them when you’re either getting off a journey you have a ticket for and starting a contactless journey, or ending a contactless journey so you can get on a train you have a ticket for, they’re for changing trains, not for leaving the station.

I’ve only once seen a platform reader that actually warns you about this, most other readers I’ve seen are either unlabelled or even carry signs saying “Oyster/Contactless users, Please Touch In and Out”.

So you might get off the train at a station you’re planning to leave, see the sign, touch out, then find yourself at the barriers. When you try to touch out there after you’ve already touched out at the readers, one of two things will happen:

1. You get an error message and the barriers don’t open, leaving you stuck in the station and needing to find someone to let you out

2. The barriers do open, and this counts as touching in, starting a new journey, and because you’ve just exited the station you can’t touch out, when you touch in without touching out again the system will charge you a “maximum fare”, the highest possible fare, since it doesn’t know what the journey was

This is an especially easy mistake to make in some cases as there are stations that don’t have barriers, where you genuinely are supposed to touch out at the platform and then walk out.

Then there are other cases where these platform readers don’t exist, and there are 2 other kinds of steps.

The Oyster Minefield - Barrier BS

#

One is still having a mix of NR and TfL services behind the same barrier, but without the readers, this is an extremely stupid format that leads to a bunch of timewasting. An example of this is Liverpool Street, it has 2 main sections, the National Rail platform and the Underground platform, the Underground platform runs a bunch of TfL services while the NR platform runs Greater Anglia, Elizabeth Line and Overground services.

So what happens if I arrive from a Greater Anglia service and want to continue my journey on the Overground contactless? Well, I have to do the extremely stupid manoeuvre of getting off the train, using my ticket to go through the barriers, then turning right around and tapping in at those same barriers all over again, then finally going to get my Overground train.

And the same thing vice versa, if I’m arriving on the Overground from North London and getting ready to go home via Greater Anglia, I can’t just move to the GA train a few platforms down and get on, because if I do that I’ll get the maximum fare for not tapping out, so I have to go to a barrier, tap out, go through the barriers, turn around again, put the ticket in and then go to the train.

That, or tap out without going through the barriers, which can leave staff chasing after you and making you show your ticket, in case you might be a fraudster.

It sounds like a small thing, but if you’re in a rush to catch the last train it can cause a bunch of unneeded anxiety.

The other model is a separate barriers system, an example of this is at Tottenham Hale, Tottenham Hale has 2 different gatelines, one leads to the National Rail platforms run by Greater Anglia, the other to the TfL platforms on the Victoria Line, they’re completely separate.

So what you’re supposed to do is if you’re coming in on a ticket from Greater Anglia you use your ticket to pass through the NR barriers then tap in at the Victoria Line barriers, same thing the other way around, if you’re leaving on Greater Anglia, you use your contactless to tap out from the Victoria Line, ticket to go through Greater Anglia.

Simple enough. But if you’re not familiar with this system you can find yourself getting confused, I know that because I’m speaking from experience, having been used to the system at Seven Sisters I once got off my GA train, tapped at the barriers, then tapped again the Victoria Line barriers, leaving me with a big incomplete journey charge, I once did the same thing the other way around too, tapping into the GA platform instead of using my ticket. 

In both cases I applied for a refund and TfL gave it to me no questions asked, but whether they decide to do this is at their discretion, they can also just tell you it was your fault for making the mistake and slap you with a fine.

To try and combat this problem Greater Anglia have posted a bunch of warning signs at these gatelines but they’re very badly worded, the most common ones simply warns you that you have to pay a £100 penalty fare if you travel to/from Stansted Airport without a ticket, which is true since the Airport doesn’t take contactless, but it doesn’t tell you anything about the other stations in-between.

The warning type is outright wrong, telling you that you have to pay the penalty fare “if you travel without a valid ticket for the journey”, it’s wrong because while some GA trains from that platform go outside the Oyster zone, others don’t, meaning that some routes you can actually use Oyster on. You can even find these “don’t travel without a ticket” messages right next to other messages saying “please touch in” with Oyster!

Other NR lines like Thameslink and Great Northern make it really easy by just showing you on their route map which stations you can use Oyster and Contactless for and which you can’t.

In fact, they all do this ⁴ except LNER and EMR (which only have 1 station in London each⁵), Avanti West Coast and GWR (which only have 2 London stations each⁶), the Heathrow Express (which is entirely inside the Oyster Zone) and Greater Anglia.

I wanted to double check that this info was on the trains themselves, not just the route maps online, so for the lines I haven’t used myself (C2C, Chiltern Rail, Gatwick Express, LNR) and ones where I just didn’t remember what the signage looked like (SWR, Southern) I looked up some videos of the trains online and they did show the zones on their route maps except for Chiltern.

The only one I couldn’t confirm was Gatwick Express where the videos I found didn’t really get a good angle to show the signs, but GE is run by the same company as Thameslink, Great Northern and Southern, which do all show them, so I’m confident enough. 

So that leaves Chiltern and Greater Anglia as the only services going through London that don’t show you where the zones start and end, womp womp. Greater Anglia does actually have a special poster that clears all this up, but I’ve only ever seen it used at a select few stations like Liverpool Street, Hackney Downs, Waltham Cross and Broxbourne, it isn’t used at Tottenham Hale.

After some further digging I found that they do actually have maps that show the zones, called the “smartcard route map” and “dynamic disruption route map”, but they’re in specific pages of their website, not linked anywhere else, never shown on the trains themselves and are actually out of date.

_{Thick yellow/grey lines = Where the the boundary actually ends, the Hertford East branch was added to the Oyster Zone 13 years ago, the Hertford North branch 5 years ago}

So they do have a simple poster that gives the correct info, but it’s used inconsistently, and they have maps, but they bury them in their website and don’t bother to update them, instead opting for messages that are at best confusing and at worst outright wrong.

You have signs threatening exorbitant fines for things that could be totally legal and a lack of signs clarifying the things that actually are illegal.

The system should be really easy to explain, you just display up to date maps that show where the Oyster/Contactless zone starts and ends, then for platforms that take trains going outside the zone you have signs on the barriers leading in saying “don’t tap in if you’re going outside the contactless zone, use a ticket instead”, on the barriers leading out you put some signs saying “arriving from outside the contactless zone? use your ticket to exit this barrier, don’t tap in”.

Some train companies already do this, take this example from SWR.

But others don’t, which can lead to their customers getting costly fines.

For the platforms with standalone readers, put notices on top of them explaining what they’re for, you’ll still get some people who make mistakes, but it would be far less if this stuff was explained better.

Conclusion

#

How much does this stuff actually matter? Well as for the wayfinding stuff, not a crazy amount, very few people who are taking the train are going to be doing it just by looking at the internal maps, they’re using an app like Google Maps or Citymapper that should be telling them everything they need to know.

Does it still matter to me? Yes, because if you have a whole intricate signage system, surely the goal should be that it tells you everything you need to know, and if that’s the goal, it’s not going well right now. But still, in the grand scheme of things, not as big of a deal.

When it comes to the payment problems, much more of an issue, again a lot of these things (like where you can use Oyster, Contactless, where you need a ticket, where you can use QR tickets and so on) can be checked online or just figured out after a little bit of experience, but that sort of trial and error can cost people money, lots of money, and that’s an especially big risk when you get to certain groups like tourists who won’t have as easy a time figuring out the system, commuters shouldn’t be losing money because they were given bad or misleading info or just not given info at all.

Luckily there are some prospects for truly fixing all of this, Contactless has been expanding outside London overtime, with the plan eventually being for every station to allow tap in/tap out payment with bank cards, Oyster isn’t being extended anymore because the system apparently ran out of fare zones to use, meaning that you’ll still run into problems with tapping in or out if you use Oyster then go outside the Oyster Zone, but that won’t matter too much in the long term.

The only real benefit of using Oyster over Contactless is that you can add a Railcard (a card that gives you discounts on journeys) to Oyster, but not to Contactless, something that should be fixed in the long term, once it is Oyster will pretty much become irrelevant, Contactless will rule and people should be able to seamlessly travel on the cheap in more and more places until it reaches the whole country.

As for branding, in 2021 the government binned the rail franchising system and announced Great British Railways, a new body to integrate a lot of the National Rail network, and the new Labour government elected in 2024 has announced that privatisation is being gotten rid of entirely, with GBR being the new nationalised rail company for the whole of the National Rail network. The first train companies are due to be nationalised as their contracts run out later this year, with the whole network planned to be in government hands by 2027.

This could be a pathway to a new rebrand making the whole network much more consistent and understandable, one of the reasons TfL might have been stubborn about putting the rest of NR on the maps over the years might be that with the franchising system, different lines were at risk of changing companies (and as a result, brand names) every few years, and you don’t want to have to redo all the signs every few years just because a line changed from one company to another, with everything being run by the government that roadblock will basically be gone.

Hopefully in the long term it could mean much more consolidation overall, not just in terms of design but systems too, everyone selling and accepting the same kinds of tickets, one Smartcard for the whole country, one paper ticket type, everyone accepting QR tickets and contactless, barriers and readers equipped for all them at every station on every network across the country, so it doesn’t matter who you’re travelling with, just that you’re paying your fair share in fares. That’s how it always should have been, but the fragmentation caused by privatisation meant diverging standards or, when there was collaboration, sluggishness in bringing things together.

The London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, also from Labour, was also re-elected in 2024, meaning that we have a national and London government that are much more in sync, a pathway to plugging the gaps in an otherwise great system? I can only hope.

Anyway, that’s enough yapping for one article, I hope you found it enjoyable, interesting to read, or ideally both! And if not, well, you chose to read this far, that’s more of a you problem, and I can’t refund you your time or your energy so all I can say is I hope you have a good rest of your day and beyond, bye bye!

---

Tube Trivia

#

This is a little addendum section for points I found interesting and relevant enough for the article, but not enough that I wanted to interrupt the flow of what I’d already written to slot them in, they’re all about visual design and wayfinding so if that segment wasn’t as interesting to you this is something you might want to just skip, if it was interesting, feel free to browse!

Identity Crisis - Part 1

#

All trains on TfL have the routemaps that show their routes, but there are just 2 networks where the trains have maps for other routes as well: The Overground and the Circle, Hammersmith and District lines.

The Overground’s is a leftover of when the whole overground was treated as one line, originally it had a single route map for the whole Overground network, then in 2015 the map was split into 6 different ones, with the single map being used alongside them.

But every Overground train still had all 7 maps on display and when the Overground lines got their own names and colours this was kept, as well as a force of habit this also allows Overground trains to be moved from one line to another without needing to replace the maps.

For the C/H/D network, the Circle and Hammersmith lines don’t even have their own map, instead they share one, this is because except for a small stretch of the line on the east end and the “circle” in the centre they share the same route, stations and platforms. The combined c and h map is shown opposite the separate district line map on all trains for all 3 routes, again so they can share trains between the routes without changing the maps.

The Metropolitan Line trains only use the Met map even though the Met shares the east end of its route with the other 3, this is because it uses a slightly different train model, the S8, as opposed to the S7 used by the C/H/D lines.

But there’s another detail they do share, the seats on tube trains are coloured based on the line you’re on, both the S7 and S8 each have 4 colours on the seats, pink for H&C, green for District, magenta for Met, yellow for Circle.

Because they use the same platforms, the platform route maps will often show the 4 lines together where they intersect, it’s a legacy of the fact that Metro, Hammersmith and Circle all used to be one, with the District being built alongside them, really you could argue that the 4 are still 1 line just with many branches.

In fact they’re so interconnected that you can actually find C/H/D trains changing from one line to another mid journey, so you get on a Circle line train, travel a few stops, then it literally “turns into” a Hammersmith and City train and goes in another direction.

Identity Crisis - Part 2

#

But that’s not the only identity crisis the network has, while the C/H/D/M lines are kind of like 1 line pretending to be several, there are 2 examples of the opposite phenomenon, several lines pretending to be one.

The DLR is branded as if it’s a single service, but it has 3 different routes, the first connects the stations of Bank and Woolwich Arsenal to Stratford International, the second connects Tower Gateway and Beckton to Stratford International, the third connects Bank and Lewisham to Stratford (different station, not international).

Then there’s the Tramlink which has 2 routes, one connecting the stops of Wimbledon to New Addington and Elmers End, the other connecting East Croydon to the stops of Elmers End and Beckenham Junction.

If you look on the DLR and Tram’s own maps they have a single route map but they’re shown in different colours as if they were different lines, although without any line names, but on the other maps they’re just one colour.

This is unique on TfL’s services, before the Overground was split all of its lines were shown in the same orange colour, and other lines with branches (like the Northern line, Piccadilly line or Central line) still show them as one colour.

Well, almost unique, even more obscurely some parts of the new Overground lines also further splinter their branches with different colour shades, but not on the Tube Maps, not on the in-car maps, none of that, just on the platform maps, as if they wanted to split the lines even more than they actually did but backed out because they didn’t want to clutter the maps too much.

Hidden Lines

#

Thameslink being on the Tube Map and the Rail and Tube Services map actually aren’t the first time bits of the National Rail network have been on the Tube Map, the “Thameslink Core” (the parts of Thameslink passing through Central London), Waterloo and City line, the Northern City line (now part of the Great Northern TOC) and North London line (now part of the Overground’s Mildmay line) were included back when they were part of British Rail, either in yellow or white.

When TfL took over, the Waterloo and City line stayed because it became part of TfL while Thameslink and Northern City were axed from the map, but strangely for several years the North London line stayed on the map even though it was run by a TOC, Silverlink.

Before TfL made the Rail and Tube map, British Rail actually made their own that they called the London Connections map (not to be confused with the geographic map from earlier), a tube style map that included all of the underground as well as BR, but it was a bit of a mess since the whole BR network only used one colour, orange, with different lines through them to show 4 different types of service, a black line in the middle to show their intercity lines, white line through the middle for the North London line (or North London Link as they called it), black borders for Thameslink, and plain orange for the rest.

Wider Watching

#

The Quintessential Rapid Transit System! | London Underground Explained and All About London’s ENORMOUS Suburban Rail Network (by RMTransit)

The Entire History of the Overground (by TfL Three)

The Tube Line That Wasn’t and The Northern City Line: The Tale of the Big Tube (by Jago Hazzard)

The changes for the diagram redesign

#

I started by replacing the Overground so now it has the new Overground lines and then added the specific TOC names for each National Rail line, using National Rail boxes usually used for showing station names and replacing the text.

The only ones I didn’t do this for was Kings Cross, for 2 reasons

1 is the obvious, there’s not enough space, 2 is that “Kings Cross St Pancras” is technically a separate station from the mainline “Kings Cross” and “St Pancras International Stations”, you basically have the 2 mainline stations and then KCSP which runs underneath and connects the two, 3 stations overall.

Since KCSP is its own thing, I figured we could get away with not showing all of its connections.

I thought about doing the same thing for Euston since Euston actually is 2 separate stations, one for the Underground and another for the Overground and National Rail, but the original diagram included the NR and Overground so I did too. “London Northwestern Railway” was way too big for the small box usually used for NR text, so instead of using the bigger one I just shortened it to the LNR like how Docklands Light Railway gets shortened to DLR.

The Caledonian Sleeper doesn’t actually have any further stops in London, it goes far beyond to destinations in Scotland, so maybe that one should use a more generic “Trains to Scotland” like the “Trains to Stansted/Gatwick/Luton” that Tottenham Hale and KCSP have, but I decided to just list all the companies for consistency.

Originally I also kept the Greater Anglia connection off of Seven Sisters, since it’s such a rare service 8 times out of 10 that connection doesn’t exist, making it an unhelpful direction, for the people that are using that service for the 2 times out of 10 it is actually there, it’s almost definitely going to be because they already know about it in advance, I thought that a good rule would be to show the services that are actually frequent (let’s say every hour or more) because those are the connections people making these quick decisions using the maps actually need to know about, but then I decided if TfL put it there so will I.

_{To go back to where the redesign left off, click here.}

---

Footnotes

#