please empty your brain below
One is that the service on the working parts of the District Line is likely to be appalling. On the previous occasions when there have been suspensions as far as Whitechapel/Tower Hill the remaining 'service' involved colossal service gaps and unreliable information indicators. This is never mentioned by TfL.
The other point is that the entire Victoria line is also stuffed (again) this weekend (so long the case that I've now forgotten why) so anyone travelling from East London to, say, Victoria, will have a very long journey.
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/ticket...nd/
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Applications only open for another hour I think!
http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/se...52/
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"Trains between London Fenchurch Street and Barking will be retimed"
As predicted, the service pattern on the "good" part of the line is disgracefully bad. Every other District Line train is reversing a Tower Hill, not Whitehchapel...a bit silly given that the replacement bus service operates from Whitechapel. Only one of the platforms at Whitehchapel is being used for District reversers. The result is a 20 minute service gap. Yup, 20 minutes. That's 3 to 4 trains an hour. Goodness knows what tomorrow (Sunday) will be like.
And there's the replacement bus service. As the furious crowds crawl forwards through the exit barrier Whitechapel, staff are telling everyone to "turn right for the replacement bus". They mean turn left, of course, from where you have to pick your way through the market stalls selling Bollywood dvds and halal meat to the bus stop where only one poor sod had the job of explaning there being two services, replacement service "A" and replacement service "B". Which one goes to Bow Road? Which one goes to Stratford? Which one goes to Barking? No idea, because the front of the buses didn't say whether they were A or B and the poster was missing from the bus stop. Further to this, drivers were announcing they were going to Canning Town which of course sparked chaos because nobody would be expecting to get a bus to Barking via Mile End and Canning Town.
Total journey time Mile End to Victoria: one hour 20 minutes. Return: one hour 35 minutes.
Admittedly the one under at Mile End did cause extra problems but the lack of planning on the District was utterly inexcusable, not least because it leaves frontline staff to deal with (understandably) bloody furious passengers.
I caught my rail replacement bus at Mile End, heading east. Signs inside the station announced two services - A to Stratford and B to Barking - but failed to mention which intermediate stations were served by each. When the first bus arrived it wasn't clear whether it was an A or a B, and the small piece of card bearing the list of stations served was so low in the driver's window that both Plaistow and Stratford were invisible.
On hearing that the bus was for Stratford, a gaggle of local girls clambered on board rather than waiting for the next bendy 25. At the Bow Flyover, when the bus unexpectedly turned right, they started making puzzled noises. By the time they'd discovered the bus was going the very long way round (five miles via Canning Town rather than one mile direct) they were livid. You can probably imagine the language that lit up the bus's upper deck.
Biggest problems we had was the irregular District/Central services around Earl's Court, especially when the platform signage lies and you don't realise the front of the train is saying something different...
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