London's Confusing Railways

Having more than 10 train brands in one city is bad.

Great Western Railway, Chiltern Railways, London North Eastern Railway, South Western Railway, Southeastern — these are just some of the many train operating companies that operate trains into and out of and around London. Now, it is perfectly charming that so many different train operators with so many different liveries operate in and around London town, but it’s also rather confusing.

Two South Western Railway trains.

Some train services have directional names, like “North Eastern” or “Southeastern”, while others have much less easy to interpolate names like “Greater Anglia” or “C2C”.

Sometimes trains from multiple train operating companies use the same infrastructure, but often without an easy-to-understand, passenger-facing integrated timetable.

And then there’s “National Rail Services”, which includes services from any of the “TOCs”, but also includes other services like the Elizabeth Line. The UK is famously good at marketing and branding, but when it comes to London train services (this is an issue beyond London as well, obviously) there is a lot of branding and little common sense.

National Rail logo at Queenstown Road station.

If this all sounds rather superfluous, it’s not — the balkanization of rail service provision has a lot of practical problems. One of the most obvious examples I could find was trying to go from Canary Wharf to Waterloo not using the Jubilee line — something you might just have to do if it was, say, not working! There were lots of possible journeys using the DLR in tandem with trains from South Western, or was it Southern… and Southeastern at either Greenwich or Lewisham or Woolwich, but trying to navigate the options was very confusing. For one, Google Maps breaks your journey options down based on the different operators, but the different operators also have various services that aren’t well defined. It’s also often the case that you might be looking for a trip that doesn’t exist from one station, but that does from another nearby. Suffice to say, trying to find a journey from one station to another more or less required going through every journey to see which would stop at what stations. Not good!

Now, the argument that will likely be made is that this is not how one is supposed to travel. Once you ride the same train into work every day for five years, you’ll know what stops it makes, where it terminates, and which platforms it uses… and maybe even the colour of the train! But the issue with this model of service organization is how brittle it is; the second you want to do something out of the ordinary, it becomes very challenging.

One of the game-changing elements of urban metros — first dabbled with on the tube, but really fully realized in later systems — was complete simplicity. Many of the world’s newest metro systems have few if any branches and usually only a single service pattern, and while this is obviously not possible or even ideal for a suburban or regional context, I think remembering that simplicity unlocks a lot of potential travel is important.

When you compare the way the suburban railways in London work to those in, say, Berlin, the distinction that’s perhaps most obvious is that in Berlin the railways are more or less all run by a small number of operators, and that services are given alphanumeric codes. This effectively flattens down the knowledge you need to make a journey and also makes distinguishing routes from one another much easier. Of course, this is a lot harder in a place like London with a ton of branches and intersecting rail lines — but that also makes a system for simplification more valuable!

A Regiobahn service at Berlin Main Station.

One possible avenue for simplification that I was hoping we would see a lot of is what I’ll call “TFL-ization” — essentially, TFL taking over more and more rail services from the “TOCs” (who might still operate the service) and bringing them into the TFL family with consistent wayfinding and hopefully also route names. This is sort of what we saw with the Lea Valley lines being transferred into London Overground from Greater Anglia. Now, while not every line is a good candidate for this approach, there are some obvious ones which would fit well, like the Northern City Line (which I visited with Geoff Marshall recently while travelling through London) as well as Thameslink.

You can also imagine that by integrating things like wayfinding and communications, you might also bring various railways closer to considering increased service integration. For example, imagine how much value could be unlocked for Heathrow Express and TFL if Heathrow Express trains could run into Central London on the Elizabeth Line, as happens with some services in Tokyo!

To be clear, simply making everything TFL is not going to fix London’s wayfinding woes, because I’ll be honest, even TFL’s network is becoming rather hard to navigate these days with so many different services, and a real divide between how services are branded on the Underground vs. the “subnetworks” of the Overground and the DLR. That being said, some sort of integrated scheme is obviously very interesting, and could make London’s transport network much easier to understand and navigate. Even without integration, clearly reform would be useful — the constant “Change for National Rail Services” is hilariously bad, because it does not drill down to provide useful information. I am pretty sure you can hear a “Change for National Rail Services” announcement on an Elizabeth Line train, which is itself a national rail service!

I’ll have more to say on this in the future.