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Post by brooklynbound on Oct 20, 2020 15:32:34 GMT
I know that TfL don't like to admit Overground is really just another National Rail service but I was suprised at Highbury & Islington last week to see signs pointing to National Rail and others to Overground.
Adding to the confusion they were announcing there'd be no National Rail services from the station at the weekend when in fact only one of the Overground services would be shut - the H&I starters - along with the Great Northern Moorgate branch. If I hear no National Rail I would assume that meant no Overground whatsoever given it is National Rail.
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Post by quex on Oct 20, 2020 20:55:16 GMT
I agree it is confusing, especially to us types who understand the specifics of each term. The protectiveness of TfL and to a certain extent the Rail Delivery Group is not helpful. However, it's worth remembering a sizeable proportion of the travelling public don't even understand the distinction between the Tube and the Overground, let alone LO and NR. I used to think the different brands were important and had a well-recognised signifigance, but these days I think ultimately the general public don't care that much. The way they see it, they're getting on a Train, and whether it's a little one that goes underground, an orange one with the long seats in, or one of the other big long Trains that goes to places I've never heard of, most travellers will just see it as a box on wheels that takes them to where they need to be going. Fundamentally the only important difference they see is in the service patterns. If we apply this idea to your specific example, the signs should really say something along the lines of "Trains to Moorgate" and "Trains to Stratford", and the announcements should say "no trains to Moorgate or mainline stations from Finsbury Park". But you can see that's where my theory falls down! For one it's practically spoonfeeding the information, and for the other it's quite difficult to differentiate between no Northern City trains and no Victoria line trains towards Finsbury Park which leads to a complicated description.
So maybe the brands are useful, but not in their current sense. They need to be strong enough to make the distinction painfully obvious. You could create a 'high-frequency TfL rail service brand' that included Underground, Overground and DLR. Obviously this would lead to anomalies like inclusion of 2tph to Chesham and Emerson Park, and exclusion of high-frequency Thameslink, but it'd be simpler than the confusing and unnecessary proliferation of brands currently in use. After all, "London Buses" can mean anything from every 3 minutes down Oxford Street to 4-a-day in the North Downs.
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Post by superteacher on Oct 20, 2020 21:03:35 GMT
I’m sure most people perceive London Overground to be distinct from National Rail, with the use of the roundel serving to emphasise the point further.
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Post by johnlinford on Oct 20, 2020 22:46:20 GMT
I agree with superteacher - consider a station like Richmond where you have the District Line platforms, the Overground platforms and the National Rail platforms - as a person that's only used it a few times that way of running and signposting it is much more useful!
My suspicion is that most who go to Richmond will know they either need to get a District Line, an Overground or a SWR service. Arguably the problem is not the Overground but that National Rail branding is so vague - maybe it would be better if Waterloo said "alight here for South West Main Line and Suburban Services" and Euston said "West Coast Mainline, London Overground and Suburban Services" rather than "National and International Rail Services" that you used to get at Waterloo and now do at St Pancras.
Of course this would also add to the reasons why or why not TfL should run services like the Kingston Loop and other suburban rail lines.
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Post by brigham on Oct 21, 2020 8:02:22 GMT
It's quite simple from the point of view of a Northerner with a lifetime of visiting London.
'Underground' is London Transport, same as the buses, and 'Overground' is what they've started to call some of the BR trains.
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Post by quex on Oct 21, 2020 8:14:04 GMT
Perhaps I ought to make myself more clear. I don't doubt the majority of people know there are two brands called Overground and National Rail, and would cosmetically be able to tell you the difference in most cases.
The point I was trying to get across is that for the most part these distinctions appear pretty arbitrary, and fundamentally as far as passengers are concerned there is very little obvious difference between and Overground service and a National Rail service other than one's orange and one's red/white/green. The primary concerns of the travelling public are: - where the train is going, and which route it'll take to get there, and to a lesser extent
- how fast the journey will be and how frequent trains are.
Calling them 'Overground' or 'National Rail' is not really very helpful in telling you about these factors, so I can understand why passengers don't get the point of calling them different names. One the other hand, it's something the Underground does well - "the blue Piccadilly line goes through King's Cross and that's where I want to go".
The easiest improvement would be if TfL dropped their insistence on not differentiating Overground services as distinct lines (instead of the pointless "Highbury & Islington to New Cross, Clapham Junction, Crystal Palace and West Croydon route", I mean "Overground Line A") I think it'd help in making it clear what the Overground is supposed to be, i.e. a high-frequency metro system with specific lines, seperate from NR.
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Post by ted672 on Oct 21, 2020 14:23:53 GMT
I'm wondering if there's an age "thing" here? People of my generation (and older) always called the underground "the underground" while anything else local to London, such as the suburban lines through Clapham and later in and out of Liverpool Street, was called the Overground. When trying to explain to my wife how we could travel to Camden from Romford, using Crossrail/TfL Rail (eventually the Elizabeth line) to Stratford then the Overground to Camden Road, the comment was, "isn't it all the overground?". I've seen elsewhere there's been discussions about individual branding for what is now the Overground, and that to me would be sensible, once the names had been agreed upon, as "something line" is always associated with TfL.
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Post by Tom on Oct 21, 2020 14:54:18 GMT
Mod note: duplicate post deleted.
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Post by John Tuthill on Oct 21, 2020 15:11:55 GMT
I'm wondering if there's an age "thing" here? People of my generation (and older) always called the underground "the underground" while anything else local to London, such as the suburban lines through Clapham and later in and out of Liverpool Street, was called the Overground. When trying to explain to my wife how we could travel to Camden from Romford, using Crossrail/TfL Rail (eventually the Elizabeth line) to Stratford then the Overground to Camden Road, the comment was, "isn't it all the overground?". I've seen elsewhere there's been discussions about individual branding for what is now the Overground, and that to me would be sensible, once the names had been agreed upon, as "something line" is always associated with TfL. I'm 73, and when I was a kid, Mr Brunel said... no, when I was a kid and even to this day 'The Underground' to me meant a red train, tube or sub-surface. operated by London Transport. My granny, on the other hand, always referred to it as 'The Tube' whether it was or not, and living in Shepherds Bush she used both the Met, as was, or the Central. If we went anywhere by non LT services, it was always 'We get the train from...' (whatever BR station it happened to be.) I think it's a generation thing, I had an uncle who worked at Acton, and he always referred to the 'Circle Line' as 'The Inner Circle' he being of an age when he could remember the 'middle circle' which ran from Latimer Road via Olympia to Earls Court, before the link was bombed during the war. |
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Post by norbitonflyer on Oct 21, 2020 18:05:52 GMT
Unfortunately, the term "Overground" already had a meaning as any train that was not part of the Underground These posters from the 1970s certainly didn't relate only to suburban services either, although their inclusion only of services to/from London suggest they were aimed at a London audience (They appeared in the London evening papers and on London stations)   (I don't know the exact date, but the "Inter City" brand was introduced in 1966 and the London to Brussels/Paris "Night Ferry" last ran in 1980.The dates attributed to the sleeper one, 1985, is evidently wrong) |
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Post by Dstock7080 on Oct 21, 2020 19:05:35 GMT
More recently was “on” or Overground Network from 2003, where several stations on the former Southern system, including my local Feltham were fitted with “on” alongside the double-arrow logo.   |
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Post by brigham on Oct 22, 2020 7:43:16 GMT
The BR poster was a 'spoof', remember.
There was a series of such satirical posters, depicting the BR 'Inter-City' network in a Beck-like form.
It was not the intention to change the name of the Nationalised network to 'The Overground'.
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Post by ijmad on Oct 22, 2020 10:34:09 GMT
I've heard a lot of Londoners say something like 'take the overground' when they mean National Rail services. That said, I feel like a lot of people North of the Thames don't realise the suburban rail network even exists - or at least don't think about it until they need to go somewhere in the South-East corner of the city.
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Post by norbitonflyer on Oct 22, 2020 12:46:23 GMT
a lot of people North of the Thames don't realise the suburban rail network even exists - or at least don't think about it until they need to go somewhere in the South-East corner of the city. When I bought a flat near Clapham Junction, some of my friends asked me how I'd manage the commute to work when the nearest Tube station was so far away. |
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Post by Chris M on Oct 22, 2020 14:59:28 GMT
Many people think that the tube map shows the whole rail infrastructure in London. It's why campaigners for lines like the Goblin really wanted it included (this is before it was Overground of course).
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Post by ijmad on Oct 22, 2020 17:56:35 GMT
a lot of people North of the Thames don't realise the suburban rail network even exists - or at least don't think about it until they need to go somewhere in the South-East corner of the city. When I bought a flat near Clapham Junction, some of my friends asked me how I'd manage the commute to work when the nearest Tube station was so far away. When I first arrived in London I lived in Chiswick - fortunately worked in the same area and mostly walked to work, but my housemate who worked in the city was shocked to discover the train station (which was nearer our house than the District Line stations) could take him in to Waterloo in 25 minutes and then down the drain. This after spending a year taking the District Line in to Monument! |
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Post by zbang on Oct 22, 2020 20:26:28 GMT
The primary concerns of the travelling public are: - where the train is going, and which route it'll take to get there, and to a lesser extent
- how fast the journey will be and how frequent trains are.
As someone who only has the chance to visit every couple of years, I'll add one more: - can I touch on/off or do I need a "paper" ticket?
In recent visits and other than inter-city rail (e.g. Bristol or York), I think I only bought two "paper" tickets (Bedwyn and Whitchurch) and used touch card PAYG the rest of the time, including Teddington, Rochester, and probably some I've forgotten. Surely, I do know the difference between the systems, but that doesn't matter in the grand scheme unless I want a particular stock or route.
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Post by stapler on Oct 22, 2020 20:55:59 GMT
I think the term "overground" was unknown until the Wombles:
Underground, overground, Wombling free
The Wombles of Wimbledon Common are we
Making good use of the things that we find
Things that the everyday folks leave behind
So perhaps the term had its origin in Tobermory or Bulgaria?
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Post by brigham on Oct 23, 2020 8:01:06 GMT
'...Wombling free'?
I always took that to be '...wambling free'.
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Post by MoreToJack on Oct 23, 2020 22:27:27 GMT
Back on topic please folks, there is evidently no connection between the Wombles and the subject at hand.
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Post by Jerome H on Oct 24, 2020 13:16:52 GMT
Wanted to share a different perspective on the this. Found a TikTok video (which is pretty well done if you ask me) with a caption that reads “that one person that falls asleep on TfL”. Not the tube, not the underground, not the overground, TfL. vm.tiktok.com/ZMJaTuJ7e/Maybe the general public have a better perception of TfL and the services that we give them credit for. |
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Post by AndrewPSSP on Oct 24, 2020 17:25:12 GMT
People I talk to call anything with a roundel "TfL", except when they're doing journey planning or talking about a specific previous journey.
Mainline services are just "the train", with TOC names mentioned, again, when doing journey planning or talking about a past journey.
Some people don't even distinguish between them, thinking it's all "TfL"!
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Post by patstonuk on Oct 26, 2020 8:19:51 GMT
I'm wondering if there's an age "thing" here? People of my generation (and older) always called the underground "the underground" while anything else local to London, such as the suburban lines through Clapham and later in and out of Liverpool Street, was called the Overground. When trying to explain to my wife how we could travel to Camden from Romford, using Crossrail/TfL Rail (eventually the Elizabeth line) to Stratford then the Overground to Camden Road, the comment was, "isn't it all the overground?". I've seen elsewhere there's been discussions about individual branding for what is now the Overground, and that to me would be sensible, once the names had been agreed upon, as "something line" is always associated with TfL. There are even some of us who differentiate (non-pedantically, we simply do) by using 'Tube' and 'Underground', as in 'deep' and 'SSL'. As for identifying Overground services, I cannot for the life of me see what is the seeming aversion to the Parisian RER's 'alpha' descriptions or Berlin's numeric S-Bahn system. For lines shared by differing services, I'd plump for numeric. It's easily-understood and clear as long as you take the trouble to determine which service number is needed. I suppose that may be too high an expectation of some, though. |
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Post by John Tuthill on Oct 26, 2020 10:18:51 GMT
I'm wondering if there's an age "thing" here? People of my generation (and older) always called the underground "the underground" while anything else local to London, such as the suburban lines through Clapham and later in and out of Liverpool Street, was called the Overground. When trying to explain to my wife how we could travel to Camden from Romford, using Crossrail/TfL Rail (eventually the Elizabeth line) to Stratford then the Overground to Camden Road, the comment was, "isn't it all the overground?". I've seen elsewhere there's been discussions about individual branding for what is now the Overground, and that to me would be sensible, once the names had been agreed upon, as "something line" is always associated with TfL. There are even some of us who differentiate (non-pedantically, we simply do) by using 'Tube' and 'Underground', as in 'deep' and 'SSL'. As for identifying Overground services, I cannot for the life of me see what is the seeming aversion to the Parisian RER's 'alpha' descriptions or Berlin's numeric S-Bahn system. For lines shared by differing services, I'd plump for numeric. It's easily-understood and clear as long as you take the trouble to determine which service number is needed. I suppose that may be too high an expectation of some, though. Isn't there something similar with the New York Subway lines? |
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Post by Dstock7080 on Oct 26, 2020 11:19:52 GMT
Isn't there something similar with the New York Subway lines? Two Divisions IRT (trains are slightly narrower and shorter cars) IND/BMT |
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Post by John Tuthill on Oct 26, 2020 12:04:42 GMT
Two Divisions IRT (trains are slightly narrower and shorter cars) IND/BMT I was thinking for about the line names e,g, "The 'A' train?" |
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Post by Dstock7080 on Oct 26, 2020 12:55:19 GMT
I was thinking for about the line names e,g, "The 'A' train?" Indeed, IRT Division numbered lines IND/BMT lettered lines |
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Post by John Tuthill on Oct 26, 2020 14:40:11 GMT
I was thinking for about the line names e,g, "The 'A' train?" Indeed, IRT Division numbered lines IND/BMT lettered lines Thanks for that  |
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Post by trog on Oct 26, 2020 17:15:07 GMT
I know that TfL don't like to admit Overground is really just another National Rail service .................
When TfL took over the Euston -Watford DC service their safety people went as far as to try and insist that Network Rail staff accessing the line to do track maintenance work should sign in at the station according to the Undergrounds rule book and instructions. The argument apparently went to quite a high level. Until one of the high ups at Network rail sent TfL's safety people an email setting out the procedure to be used.
Which was roughly as below.
Network Rail COSS says to TfL station staff "We are just going on track to do some maintenance."
TfL Station Staff says "OK."
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Post by Tom on Oct 26, 2020 20:19:32 GMT
I was thinking for about the line names e,g, "The 'A' train?" Indeed, IRT Division numbered lines IND/BMT lettered lines What about the Times Square shuttle, isn't that an IRT line with a letter? |
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