Transport in London is shit

(and that's only from dec 13th)

I think there are commuter towns/villages in Kent that are seeing their number of trains into the City halved. Cannon Street services look like they're bearing the brunt of the cuts. Oh, and they've added more services through to Victoria meaning that people will have to pile on the Tube from there.

(Haha also way to piss off swing voters in middle class areas just before an election dudes)

i'm voting for the Civil Disobedience Party

Oh, and they've added more services through to Victoria meaning that people will have to pile on the Tube from there.

They really need to open a second down elevator and switch the entrance gates if they're going to be able to handle an influx of train passengers in that station, I think.

Until then I will continue to take the longer but relatively relaxed bus/tube journey.

london bridge tube station at rush hour is a vision of hades fwiw

Yeah that interchange is as horrific as virtually everywhere on the Jubilee/Northern lines is. And getting on the Northern Line there during peak hours is virtually impossible.

as i have had to do every weekday morning for nine weeks and they wonder why i've snapped

Have been hearing worrying reports of this from

http://twitter.com/ihatethameslink

I am so glad I have flexitime, so I can wait and bypass the helltimes.

As awful as both Victoria and London Bridge are to transfer, neither of them are as bad as ::shudders:: Elephant & Castle.

I read somewhere that the Northern Line is the busiest of all lines. If that's true I'm glad I rarely have to use it.

My morning tube journeys start either at Brixton or E&C, so at least I always get a seat. E&C is a total shithole (definite *shudders* -- I get a bus there on the way home and I rarely enjoy being there unless I can overhear grown men arguing about Jesus). I find the worst thing about interchanging at E&C for any service to be the way the station sprawls and the way it's so crowded all the time where the buses stop.

Hey, I actually quite love Elephant & Castle, as a place. But I recognise that it takes a certain kind of Sarf London grimness to appreciate it. (also, the Faraday Memorial! my ex was obsessed with that thing.) I admit that it's one of the Seven Hellmouths of London, but hey, I've got a soft spot for hellmouths.

I just hate having to transfer there, ESPECIALLY when they're only running one of the damn elevators like they were the other night.

I don't know how they manage to have so many different lines pass through there, pretend to transfer and actually be NOWHERE NEAR one another.

My morning tube journeys start either at Brixton or E&C, so at least I always get a seat.

Same, when I bother with it at all. The buses from Peckham/Dulwich have actually been fairly reliable recently and seem to (mostly) make it up the Walworth Road in relatively decent time so I've generally been able to avoid getting off at E&C to accelerate my journey. It still takes ages but at least it's relatively pleasant.

(Having said that, it's now guaranteed to be a fucker tomorrow and i'll still be a Camberwell at 8.30)

I could have sworn there was a thread about the Elephant and Castle on ILX, but I cannot seem to find it. :-(

hey, so you're in Peckham/Dulwich too!? I wonder if we've ever unknowingly shared a bus or a pub.

On the way home I sometimes take buses that go along Old Kent Road, which at the very least is a nice scenery change from Walworth, but I find the clog near Peckham is probably worse than Camberwell and cancels out any progress made on OKR compared to Walworth :(

I think It's pretty likely we've shared a pub or a 12 or a 176 or a 40 or a 37 at some point. Given up your seat to a bloke on crutches recently? was prob me.

On the other flip side to the upthread news yo: Overland trains to accept Oyster

Will a PAYG oyster still max out when you've hit the price of a day's travel card? Pretty great if that was the case tbh.

How much is "the price of a day's travel card" now, anyway? I'd guess about £8.50 or some stupid amount?

£5.60 for zones 1-2 without any railcard, I think. or maybe more now, I don't know, mine caps out at a lower rate.

xpost, haven't seen any dudes on crutches. I will be sure to get overly excited and post about it if I do, though.

I do Gipsy Hill-Victoria (then 38 bus)/London Bridge (then change for Char X) every day. The 17min gap between services at the time I'm most likely to get down to the station in the morning already sucks, so if it's about to get worse... (It goes 07:45, 07:51, 07:53, 07:57...08:14).

Today, you may be delighted to know, I passed out/threw up simultaneously on a 38. Just christening the new, shiny double deckers, y'understand. (Lovely woman from Charlton bought me a bottle of water and walked me to the station. Bloody child-borne stomach viruses).

I used to go through L Bridge, fucking horrible.

Now Bethnal Green to White City...fling myself onto a central line and it's 30 mins door to door. Changing jobs tho so I go to rush hour for first time starting tomorrow.

good luck with that, my memory of the central line at rush hour was of unmitigated hell, I used to get on a liverpool street and they would often close the platforms it was so crowded.

will be at 9 o clock so maybe not absolute worst. on way home is fine, always seats at white city.

Haha if there's one thing that consoles me about overground trains it's no longer having to go through the abject hell of getting on the Tube at rush hour. 9am will probably be alright though.

This may change when my comfortable always-get-a-seat train evaporates next month.

Central Line at Holborn is major hellmouth at rush hour - unless I'm disembarking, there's no way on Earth that I'll go there between 5 and 7 pm. The corner where the station sits - and there's only one way in -absolutely heaves with people. The only saving grace of having to use the station at that time is that I can usually insinuate myself into a seat because of the people changing trains.

The worst thing is there are two or three stalls plonked right outside the station making the bottleneck worse. The corner of Kingsway and Holborn could *really* do with an Oxford Circus style Japanese X-crossing.

no more tube/bus commute to work as of next week :) five minute walk bliss. (actually might still take the 29 up two stops)

^^^ Holy grail

many xposts, Those new 38s look like yachts on wheels. I saw about 4 drive by in a row at Angel the other day and marveled at their bright, clean insides. Hope all the bendies turn into swanky new buses like that..

i saw 5 38s in a row on friday night. clearly they sail in schools.

The new regime of the 38 double-decker doesn't seem like a total disaster and they are absurdly frequent now. Even though the bus station at Victoria now has the same endlessly-snaking queues you see at Waterloo opposite the Imax (due to the single point-of-entry thing), they're always moving and there's usually two or three buses stacked up ready to go. Spacious inside too - loads of legroom.

Sorry for barfing on you, new 38.

I don't think there was ever any question of the changeover being a total disaster, contrary to the predictions of some of the more pessimistic observers. True, they (38s) were Routemasters before, but there are large numbers of other routes in the areas the 38 passes through that use modern double-deckers (eg 19, 14, 341, 243 etc. etc.).

I've travelled twice on the new 38s now and was struck on both occasions by an unpleasant smell. The first time, I was convinced it was an unwashed passenger causing it, because the smell is very similar to that of chronically dirty clothes plus body odour, but it seems it's the upholstery of the seats that's to blame, because I noticed the smell again during my second journey.

Do you still smell it now, where you're sitting?

maybe dubmill was in the seat mike barfed on

I guess when he got on the second bus, he still had vomit on his butt.

Do you still smell it now, where you're sitting?

No, I'd considered the possibility you are implying, but on both oocasions I had showered and was wearing clean clothes. I also noted that the smell was absent when I transferred onto other buses after getting off the 38.

Heaven and Hell experience today - perhaps typical of London.

This morning - Hell - Roads snarled up and Vauxhall bus garage eventually completely shut and r because of an accident on the Albert Embankment. 70 minutes to travel by bus from Vauxhall to Westminster Abbey (approx 15 minutes walk/10 minute bus journey usuall). Do the police really need to delay hundreds of people over one accident?

This evening - Heaven - home in half an hour or less from stepping out of the Anoushka Shankar concert at Sadlers Wells via the Northern and Victoria lines.

Maybe there's a very smelly man who just rides the 38 all day every day.

i was riding the 38 the other day, and then a man came in and he said he wanted hackney. he was a smelly man. driver did not like him. driver said 'we didn't go to any hackney' .. and then the man just went!

omg omg I finally got to ride on a new Victoria Line train. it was clean! it was spacious! the Train Lady Voice told me which side of the train the doors were going to open at the next stop!

wait what

hang on wtf is going down out there

There's a file under the railway arches at Rotherhithe according to the TFL site, and it appears to have completely wrecked all the London Bridge services.

Wait hold on there aren't any railway arches in Rotherhithe. I suppose they must mean somewhere in Bermondsey. But I'm looking at the area right now and I can't see a fire. Maybe it's small, or extinguished. Or maybe something else is going on.

South Bermondsey, arch by Debnams Road.

apparently SE London has been cut off, which will really facilitate the journey in I was planning on taking now

I got in fine from Forest Hill this morning but I think I was lucky to get on the one non-cancelled train in the space of half an hour.

The DLR also appears to be closed at Lewisham now. Very strange.

Perhaps they should just give us an official South East London-only bank holiday every time there is a big fire in Bermondsey (ie about once every six months).

IT'S LOCKDOWN

commence bio-seeding procedure

http://blackheathbugle.wordpress.com/2010/03/03/no-trains-no-dlr-every-bus-is-full/