London Banter - View Single Post

David Cantrell · December 1st 10, 11:23 AM posted to uk.transport.london

On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 03:12:45PM -0800, wrote:

The Croydon area seems to have been very badly hit.

It was. In Thornton Heath there was about 4 or 5 inches of snow on the
ground, versus a thin scattering just a couple of miles further north,
when I got home last night.

I had to use a cab, because there were no trains running between Balham
and Thornton Heath (well, not according to announcements at the station -
the departure boards and the online live departure boards disagreed, but
given that all three were saying different things I decided to trust the
station staff to know better) and my driver told me that he'd just taken
*two hours* to get from Croydon to Balham. I could believe him too.
Southbound it wasn't too bad, but there was a ridiculous amount of
northbound traffic going nowhere fast. And this was at 10pm.

There were buses running, but with no trains they were rammed, and in
any case, the service was very infrequent, presumably because so many
buses were stuck in traffic.

The weather in the afternoon was much worse than it had been in the
morning, and I'm not surprised at the delays, but I think the
information could, and should, have been better, both for the buses
and the trains.

Yes. I don't really understand how station departure boards and the
online live departure boards can be different. Surely they're driven
off the same data sources, but they were both utterly divorced from each
other and from reality when my journey started at Shepherds Bush, when
I changed at Clapham Junction, when I got off at Balham, and three hours
later when I left the pub and went back to Balham station.

--
David Cantrell | Nth greatest programmer in the world

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