While Putney residents await the long-delayed rollout of modern Arterio trains promising more capacity and WiFi, and simultaneously despair about endless District Line delays caused by a nonsensical arrangement where Network Rail owns failing Victorian signaling while TfL controls the tracks and 99% of the trains, there’s one group who will be celebrating both the past and future next month.
It’s nostalgia, certainly. But it’s also a celebration of a key part of London’s transport history – and perhaps a chance to finally say goodbye to outdated arrangements that have outlived their usefulness.
The railway’s Volvo: reliable, unglamorous, essential
When the Class 455 trains first entered service on 28 March 1983, they represented a revolution in London suburban rail travel. Built at British Rail Engineering’s York workshop between 1982 and 1985, these trains brought sliding doors to routes that had relied on slam-door carriages for decades.
The impact was immediate. Sliding doors – three per side of each carriage – dramatically improved boarding efficiency and reduced dwell times at stations. Passengers no longer wrestled with heavy doors while trains waited. The 455s transformed the commuter experience on routes from Guildford, Twickenham and Windsor to Waterloo, moving millions of people efficiently through 42 years of service.
But the real story of the 455 is reliability. These trains have won multiple Golden Spanner awards – the railway industry’s recognition of exceptional dependability. They are, quite simply, the railway equivalent of a Volvo: unglamorous, practical, and built to last far beyond expectations. Even when fitted with outdated camshaft control systems that wasted energy through resistors rather than modern chopper technology, they just kept running.
As one railway engineer put it: “Only one thing mattered to Southern people – reliability.” The 455 delivered.
One last journey through history
South Western Railway and The Branch Line Society will run a special “Class 455 Farewell” tour on Sunday 21 December 2025, with 400 tickets going on sale at 11am tomorrow, Monday 10 November for £45.50 each.
The tour will visit familiar suburban routes including Epsom and Kingston, but also includes something special for Putney residents: the District Line’s branch between East Putney and Wimbledon, plus a run to Haslemere on the Portsmouth Direct Line.
This routing is particularly significant. The East Putney to Wimbledon line represents one of British railway’s most peculiar operational arrangements – and the farewell tour may well be among the final times a Class 455 traverses this historical curiosity.
All profits will go to The Alex Wardle Foundation, Macmillan, and The Railway Children.
The ghost line: 84 years of trains that serve no passengers
The line between East Putney and Wimbledon opened on 3 June 1889, jointly built by the London & South Western Railway and the District Railway. For a brief period, both operators ran services through the route, with the LSWR providing electric trains from Waterloo via what is now a rarely-used connection at Point Pleasant Junction.
But patronage was poor from the start. Despite 19-minute journey times from Wimbledon to Waterloo, the service was so underused that by July 1919, all trains were withdrawn except a handful of rush-hour workings. On 4 May 1941, the Southern Railway ended regular passenger services entirely as a wartime economy measure.
They never came back.
For 84 years, the line has persisted in a kind of operational purgatory. Today, South Western Railway runs just one to three scheduled passenger services daily through the route – all in the very early morning or late evening, all passing through East Putney without stopping.
The reason? Driver route qualification. Under UK railway regulations, drivers must traverse routes regularly or face expensive recertification. So these “ghost trains” run at antisocial hours – the Monday-Saturday service departs Basingstoke at 04:54, passing through East Putney at 05:56 – purely to keep drivers qualified on a route that exists primarily for occasional emergency diversions and empty stock movements to Wimbledon depot.
It’s a bizarre irony: trains running with no expectation of passengers, on a line that failed passenger service 84 years ago, maintained at ongoing cost simply to preserve theoretical operational flexibility.
Network Rail apparently views the route with similar disdain, describing it as “only used for shunting and a couple of trains a day to keep service rights” – seemingly oblivious that their Victorian relic sits at the heart of one of London’s busiest commuter routes.
When split control creates chaos: Signal W361’s century-long curse
The irony becomes painful when you consider what’s happening just above those rarely-used tracks at East Putney station.
While the Class 455s have proven their reliability over 42 years, the infrastructure around them tells a different story. The District Line accounts for 25% of all London Underground signal failures despite being just one of many lines, recording 1,192 signal failures between 2015-2018 alone.
The worst culprit? East Putney, where Signal W361 – a piece of Victorian-era infrastructure sitting at the junction where South Western Railway’s ghost trains meet the District Line – has become the single biggest transport nightmare in southwest London.
The problem is structural. While TfL owns the track between East Putney and Wimbledon and operates 200+ District Line trains daily, Network Rail controls the signaling through systems installed in the 1970s. When those signals fail – as they did for over nine days in 2024, causing crush-loaded platforms and service cuts to 33% of normal frequency – hundreds of thousands of TfL passengers suffer delays because two organizations must coordinate repairs rather than one operator fixing its own equipment.
District Line drivers experience this dysfunction daily. Approaching East Putney from central London, their train drives itself through state-of-the-art automatic systems. At East Putney station, they must suddenly switch to manual operation and navigate century-old signaling for the rest of their journey to Wimbledon.
It’s like switching from a Tesla to a horse and cart mid-journey.
While the rest of the District Line received £5.4 billion worth of modern Communications-Based Train Control systems, East Putney was deliberately excluded due to “complications from Network Rail’s signaling control.”
The Mayor promised in 2018 that signaling problems would be “ultimately remedied when the current signaling system is replaced and upgraded, by 2018.” Seven years later, Signal W361 continues its regular failures.
Time to celebrate, then move on
The Class 455 farewell tour offers a rare opportunity to experience both pieces of London transport history simultaneously: the reliable workhorse trains that transformed suburban rail, and the ghost line that represents everything inefficient about maintaining Victorian-era infrastructure arrangements.
The line does serve one genuine purpose – providing depot access for Wimbledon Traincare, one of the UK’s busiest maintenance facilities. Empty coaching stock movements use the route regularly. But the infrastructure has degraded dramatically since the flying junction at Point Pleasant was reduced to single bidirectional track in 1991, and the route’s utility as a diversion has been severely compromised.
Meanwhile, the split control arrangement persists: TfL owns the track and runs 200+ District Line trains daily, while Network Rail controls the signaling through systems that fail with predictable regularity. When Network Rail signals fail, hundreds of thousands of TfL passengers suffer. When Network Rail staff strike, District Line services can only operate to Parsons Green because no signaller is available to authorize passage beyond East Putney.
This is the operational reality that makes a mockery of the theoretical value of maintaining SWR’s ghost service for “emergency diversions.”
A transit system fit for 2026
This December’s farewell tour should mark more than just the retirement of the Class 455 fleet. It should represent our willingness to celebrate history while embracing necessary change.
The new Class 701 Arterio trains arriving on South Western Railway’s suburban network bring modern amenities that 1983 technology simply couldn’t provide: better capacity, WiFi, passenger information systems, and improved accessibility. They represent progress.
Similarly, it’s time to rationalize the East Putney route. If the line serves genuine operational purpose for depot access and diversions, maintain it properly for those purposes. If it exists purely to satisfy route qualification requirements through early-morning ghost trains that Network Rail dismisses as “a couple of trains a day to keep service rights,” acknowledge that this is an expensive anachronism.
And for the signaling? Transfer control to TfL. When 99% of trains on a line are operated by one organization but another controls signals they don’t prioritize, you’ve built in delays and dysfunction. The District Line’s chronic reliability problems – 25% of all Underground signal failures on one line – won’t be solved until one operator owns both tracks and signals.
Every transport expert, every rail forum discussion, every frustrated passenger reaches the same conclusion. Extend modern CBTC signaling to the Wimbledon branch, eliminate the Victorian-era equipment, and bring the entire line under unified control.
The Class 455 has earned its retirement celebration. After 42 years of reliable service moving millions of passengers, these trains deserve their moment of nostalgia.
But nostalgia works best when paired with progress. Celebrate the history, ride the farewell tour, take photos at East Putney as a 455 passes through one last time on tracks that haven’t served regular passengers since 1941.
Then let’s move on. New trains are here. Bring an end to the ghost service, transfer signaling responsibility to the operator who actually runs the trains, and build a transit system fit for 2026 – not 1941.
Tickets for the Class 455 Farewell tour go on sale Monday 10 November at 11am via the Branch Line Society website. The tour departs London Waterloo on Sunday 21 December 2025. Final route details will be confirmed closer to the date.
What a brilliant article. Well done!