TfL sent out a £500,000 Wimbledon tournament “readiness plan” for the District Line at 3pm yesterday afternoon. At eight o’clock that evening, passengers were told of severe delays and advised to take buses instead.
A signal failure at Parsons Green had taken out the Wimbledon branch. It was the same fault, in the same place, that has struck repeatedly in the past fortnight – and for years before – and is precisely what a planned and postponed upgrade was meant to prevent.
The release was sent by TfL’s head of press and represents the first time the organisation has briefed proactively about the worst line on the Tube network land sets out the work done to prepare the District Line for the Wimbledon Championships.
Network Rail has installed heat-protective coatings on signalling equipment, upgraded communication systems for earlier fault detection, and upgraded track circuits. Travel Ambassadors will be at Southfields throughout the fortnight. Claire Mann, TfL’s chief operating officer, said the organisation was “determined to do all we can to support customers travelling to and from the Wimbledon Championships.”
While the release indicates that TfL is taking the District Line problems more seriously, what it does not say is whether the specific upgrade that was meant to reduce precisely this risk (switching on the new fault-monitoring system) was ever completed. As we reported on 15 June, TfL postponed that work on the weekend of 13 and 14 June, citing “last-minute technical issues.” No new date was given. The engineering weekend of 20 and 21 June, the last before the Championships, listed no District Line works in TfL’s published schedule. TfL has not publicly confirmed the switch-on happened.
What the release leaves out
The release concedes that “customers using the District Line experienced a significant level of disruption, largely caused by signalling issues” during last year’s Championships. What it does not say is that reliability fell to 69 per cent, the worst figure in over a decade, or that the Mayor of London apologised. Putney.news has asked TfL three times under freedom of information law to release that figure. TfL has refused every time. A complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office is outstanding.
The release puts the investment at £500,000. Meeting notes we obtained and reported on 15 June recorded TfL’s commitment as a package of between £200,000 and £300,000. TfL has not explained what accounts for the difference, or whether the two figures cover the same work. The £500k is a claim; the question of what it covers remains open.
The Mann quote does not address any of this. Nor does it address TfL’s June 2024 board paper, which states the Wimbledon branch will “not be re-signalled.” As we reported in May, that board paper (a formal statement of strategy, not a planning document) means the real fix, a full replacement of the signalling system, is structurally off the table. The £500,000 is maintenance investment on 1980s equipment, not modernisation.
What you can do before the fortnight is over
Both local MPs are on record on the branch. Fleur Anderson, the MP for Putney, and Paul Kohler, the MP for Wimbledon, have each engaged with TfL and Network Rail on the reliability problem. Residents can write to either or both to ask what assurances they have received that the monitoring system is now operational.
You can support Putney.news – we have an outstanding complaint to the ICO asking TfL to release the reliability figures it has refused three times so we can continue to dig into the issue and use real figures rather than rely on incomplete press releases.
For live updates during the Championships, TfL Go and the Journey Planner carry real-time service status, as does the TfL live feed, which on Thursday evening confirmed severe delays between Wimbledon and Edgware Road due to “an earlier signal failure at Parsons Green.”
The hardware is in the ground. Whether anyone has switched it on, TfL still has not said. The tennis begins Monday.
and it’s failed again this morning…
Currently failed all day June 27. Trains crawling eastbound from East Putney onwards. Stopping for ages at each signal, presumably to get a manual clearance to proceed. Each train then whistles as it crawls off before stopping at the next one. This is at a real service frequency of ten minutes so no hope of running a normal peak hour service under this arrangement.