please empty your brain below
Does this mean this record may never be broken given this change?
I expect the much less dramatic evening peak gain is to allow space in the timetable for event services to be slipped back in when required.
Given that the majority of exhibition attendees are probably from outside London, they won't want to cope with buses or tube then overground (because they'll have no idea how to make the journey, or which tickets are valid on which services).
I think that a person of less than optimal fitness would be very hard pushed to do the walk from Earls Court to Olympia in 15 minutes.
It won't disappear off of the tube map. They're only planning on culling the weekday service, at weekends when there are alway exhibitions it will remain in place. There's a rumour too that for major exhibitions (whoever defines those?!) then the weekday service will still be there.
Either way, there WILL still be a weekday service, but it's going to be something odd like two trains departing at around 6 and 7am to High Street Ken, and one departing Olympia at about 10pm to HSK... but none GOING there. Yeah, explain that one!
Re: World Record Breaking... indeed this will make it a pain in the arse, as it'd be better if LU really did remove the serice alltogether. Last time Guinness World Records were contacted they said the record couldn't be done on a Saturday because it was "too easy" with less people travelling on the tube. Will they chang their rules now? Anyone's guess ...
As Earls Court exhibition centre is due to be demolished in 2013 it is possible that more use then will be made of Olympia's exhibition halls, so maybe the service will go back to full time again.
Yup-seems about right.
Wouldn't it be fair to say that a lot of those trains to Olympia essentially carry mainly air now anyway? And if there are capacity problems around Earl Court, surely they are an easy, relatively harmless sacrifice? Especially given the frequent Overground connections to numerous parts of London now. And it's not as if anyone in their right mind would go by tube from HSK to KO anyway....
Surely changing at Shepherds Bush (even if not as convientantly or quickly cross-platform as at EC) will be OK too?
I am unperturbed by this...
One of the AM peak services was taken away a while ago to provide a congestion buster from Putney Bridge.
It's pretty hard to justify keeping the peak Olympia service now Overground is more frequent than the District branch ever was.
Plus, most people going to exhibitions are probably coming via central London - they are only at Earl's Court because that's where the service goes from. Shepherd's Bush is a perfectly good alternative route for many people.
I say all this as an ex-resident of Olympia!
And this wasn't rushed out this week ... Only the public consultation part was. They announced their intentions to do this a few months ago ...
What is the average profile of visitors to the Olympia and Earl's Court exhibition centres? Not from London, that's for sure. They can't be expected to know the Tube map off by heart, or be able to call upon an encyclopaedic knowledge of bus services, and certainly not to walk. All they can do is look at the Tube map, and if they see a dotted line marked "No service on weekdays except for exhibitions"... no, actually, they won't even read that far. They just won't use the service, full stop - regardless of whether it is actually running or not. Like it or not, if it's marked on a Tube map, it instantly becomes tourist-friendly. Withdrawing a regular service sends out the wrong signals, and requiring people to do even the slightest bit of research to find out whether it's operating is a non-starter - if they have to do any more thinking than looking at a map, it won't happen.
They'll end up far more confused than at present, and we'll likely end up with similar tourist conundrums such as the infamous journey from Bank to Mansion House. It doesn't matter how close they are to each other - people see only the Tube service. TfL is failing to acknowledge this basic fact, and in this misleading package of spin, they're relying on people's gut reactions to a little-used service being withdrawn (as exemplified by Dominic H above) in order to sneak past a cut which will have a detrimental effect both on the service and the venues it serves.
West Brompton is right next to the Earl's Court centre, but how many of you have gone there to see an exhibition? That's right, none - because only one station has Earl's Court in its name. Services can't have their futures decided by economics alone - psychology, and the study of benefits not directly attributable to people who actually travel in a train, must also play a part. The Olympia shuttle may not seem very busy, but you'll really notice when it's gone. One person notorious for such over-simplistic and deficient assessments of whether a service was really bringing any benefits to either its communities or the wider network was, of course, Dr Richard Beeching.
In short, by being "reduced", the Olympia shuttle is effectively being cut. An irregular service is just as much use as no service at all, precisely because of all the people who don't pay attention to the public consultations, and don't carefully research their journeys before setting out, and don't post on comment threads like this one. They'll simply stop using the service, and attendance at Olympia will inevitably suffer from the lack of impulse tourists lured by the prospect of a train service - because, let's face it, nobody finds themselves at West Brompton or Shepherd's Bush unless they actually had business there.
And, eighteen months from now, when TfL sees the disastrous consequences of their actions, will they put the regular service back? Of course not - they'll just cut it altogether, because not enough people are using it, and they're blind to the reason for that being that they cut it in the first place. Closure by stealth, it's called, and it's happened before at Ongar, and ironically it's happened in reverse on the very West London Line which is supposed to be replacing the latest victim. In 1991, this service was twice a day, not beyond Olympia, and nobody used it. Then it was extended to Willesden and the frequency progressively extended to four times an hour, and voila - people used it. The passengers were generated by the regularity. It's particularly appropriate that this whole episode unfolded right on the District line's doorstep, making TfL's deliberate ignorance all that much easier to point to.
And what are we getting for this? Six extra services in place of 51 admittedly not very useful ones? If it is necessary to reserve space in the timetable anyway so that a service can be run to Olympia on exhibition days, then what the hell are those gaping holes in the timetable doing when it isn't running? "Improving reliability"? Maybe TfL could implement two alternative weekday timetables, one with Olympia in and one with it replaced with conventional services? Except I can just imagine commuters' response to that - even though the service has actually been increased from the norm, it will automatically become a decrease from the new norm whenever an exhibition's on, which TfL probably know all too well. Olympia isn't costing anything except one train and a few timetable slots, neither of which have anywhere else they could possibly go anyway. The only advantage an irregular service could possibly hold is, of course, the fact that it will drive away passengers and therefore lay the foundations for the service being cut altogether and replaced with commuter trains. Neither Olympia nor Earl's Court will be very happy about that, with good reason.
There won't be "holes" left in the timetable for the exhibition service, there will be a separate "Exhibition Day" timetable in which a few trains will go to Olympia and slightly fewer trains than usual will go to other destinations.
The Overground is on the Tube map, so why will visitors to London not be able to work out how to get Olympia? Most of them coming from central London will just change at WB instead of EC.
The map could be altered to make the connection look less circuitous (as indeed it is!) by moving WB up a bit nearer the horizontal District Line - if necessary moving West Kensington a little to the left to make room.
As for the special "Exhibition Day" timetable, the catch in that is the "slightly fewer trains than usual will go to other destinations". In practice, it'll be exactly the same number of trains as now, but try telling the commuters that. It'll just become another excuse to attack the whole idea of an Olympia service at all - and, potentially, another excuse used by TfL to close the line by stealth.
@Sourav: Yes, you know that, and I know that, just as we both know it's a very short walk from Bank to Mansion House. But we aren't the majority of people who are going to be disadvantaged here, who are unable to countenance the idea of a non-railway service (or indeed a bus service) between anywhere! Maybe DG's 'It's quicker to walk' Tube map should become official?
And, DG: there's a bug in the new Preview function. Every time you click it, you get an extra set of newlines, caused by the <br />s being inserted but the original newlines not removed, so they get converted into <br />s once for every time you click 'Preview' or 'Publish'. Oh, and character entities (such as those above) get interpreted, and therefore void, so you have to type them out again every time.
dg writes: Newlines? Ah. We're working on it, thanks.
There are more passenger trains stopping at Kensington Olympia than *ever* before. And they are better used than ever, too. That's one of the reasons for the change.
Those who are knee-jerk arguing that this is a just a "TfL cut-back" have the luxury of detachment from the reality of what's happening here - a sensible realignment of capacity with demand.
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