Coronavirus Implications For London's Transport

Forgive this drift off the face covering subject. The sequence of destination then next station has been debated on and off for many years. S stock started with 'next station' then 'destination and on the Met, stopping pattern'. Now this has been reversed to 'destination and on the Met, stopping pattern' then 'next station'.

Originally the sequence was felt to be best for those making a shortish central London trip and had worked out their journey start and finish so might know what the next station should be but probably had no idea where say Upminster or Amersham were!

The drive for this latest change is to reduce disadvantages of the station and train systems for visually impaired passengers. A particularly good example of how this helps is to consider a visually impaired passenger starting a journey from Great Portland Street westbound platform. To avoid the need to change trains at Baker Street and trek over the bridge between platform 6 and the Met main platforms it is convenient to wait for a Hammersmith bound train or any Met line train depending which way your destination lies. For those of us who can read the platform indicators this is easy.

Visually impaired passengers who cannot easily read the platform DMI have another method. When the train arrives, they can stand on the platform adjacent to a doorway and listen to the train's announcement. Now, all they need at this point is 'is this train going on to the Met line or is it going towards Edgware Road and Hammersmith'? The answer to that helps decide whether to board or not. Reversing the sequence as described means there is a better chance of getting to that important nugget of the announcement before the doors are closing.
Similarly for Earl's Court WB and some others just before diverging junctions.

Overall a benefit for the group I've described and not much disbenefit for everyone else...?

Back to the face cover messages, all Met line trains now enabled on train and at service control I understand.

Examples of the new announcements are in the below tweets:

I’ve merged the recent item about face coverings on Met trains with this existing post as it’s best to keep CV stuff to one thread only on a transport forum. Thanks. 👍

Just had an email informing that the Circle and Metropolitan lines will be suspended in their entirety and the District line have no service High St Ken to Edgware Road on Sunday 21 February due to staff shortages. Several lines have been grappling with heavy rates of cancellations for some time but it looks like it really is starting to bite now in common with most of the UK transport industry.

No point in running an additional service pattern when the Circle line covers all stations concerned in the scenario you describe. This has the added benefit of keeping Moorgate available for service recovery as opposed to having space taken up by duplicated services.

Further staff shortages at Hammersmith SCC this weekend necessitating the winding down of the Circle, Hammersmith & City and Metropolitan line service from 18:30 and full suspension of the service from 21:00 as well as no District line between High St Ken and Edgware Road from 20:15. Start of traffic on Sunday across the combine will also be 45 mins later than billed. Also no Chiltern service via Amersham after 20:00 on both days either.

I got an email from TfL about it yesterday afternoon.

In a message in the SSR Resignalling thread a reference is made to the lifting of lockdown on Monday 8th March so that we can travel on the trains again, even for 'non-essential' journeys.

I knew that some schools were opening on that day, but not about the relaxation of travel restrictions. Is this really so? (I've quite literally 'lost track' of the forthcoming changes and when this was going to happen!)

Yes, even then restrictions only properly start getting down graded from 12th April at the earliest.

The answer is probably in this thread somewhere, but what was the last day the night tube ran?

Services last operated on morning of Sunday 15 March 2020

I suspect that in addition to financial etc., resources being available it will also partly depend on whether the Mayor of London (whoever that is when the decision needs taking) wants Night Tube to be reinstated.

There is a huge backlog of training - almost a years worth as we only managed a small window of training late in 2020.

So the Mayor can make all the decisions they like regarding bringing night tube back but the fact remains that due to staff movements over the past year there wouldn't be enough night tube staff to restart the service particularly quickly, and the training of new drivers (which takes around 16 weeks by the way) will initially be prioritised to day time services where we get a full weeks worth of train driving moving a larger number of customers per train.


That would require a change to the framework agreements and I can't see that happening.

Currently earliest book on's are 0445 (with local agreements for a few minutes earlier at some locations) and latest finish is 0130. Frankly, I'd rather not be starting earlier than 0445 or finishing later than 0130 thankyou very much!

The fact remains that training people for a two nights a week service is a lower priority than training people to repopulate and maintain our main 7 days a week service.