District line passengers plan to demonstrate outside Wimbledon station on Thursday 17 September, calling on TfL to fix a branch the operator’s own paperwork admits was quietly written off six years ago.
The protest, organised by the campaign group Fix The District, will run from 4pm to 7pm on the station forecourt. It’s a drop-in event rather than a staged protest, organisers say, with people invited to come and go throughout the evening but with a group photograph planned for 6pm. Placards will be provided, children are welcome, and station staff and the British Transport Police have been told.
Fix The District describes itself as local passengers, not a political party or pressure group. Since February, its supporters have been logging delay reports – 256 of them – at East Putney, Southfields, Wimbledon Park and Wimbledon, and checked them against TfL’s own published status feed. Just under half, 48 per cent, were logged while TfL’s system said the line was running a “Good Service.” Separately, the campaign counted 35 separate days with a signal failure on the branch since February, 26 of which also appear in TfL’s own status feed.
Two Freedom of Information responses, obtained eight months apart, confirm the campaign’s central claim in TfL’s own words. A December 2020 decision, reported to TfL’s Programmes and Investment Committee and restated in 2021 and again in 2024, excluded the District line’s western branches from the Four Lines Modernisation programme resignalling the rest of the network. TfL’s most recent FOI response on the subject, published 7 April this year, confirms the practical result: “The 4LM project is replacing the signalling system as far as East Putney station.” Southfields, Wimbledon Park and Wimbledon, one stop further down the line, are not included.
What was offered in place of full modernisation was smaller: a fault-monitoring and customer-information upgrade, not a replacement of the branch’s ageing signalling. TfL’s own £500,000 version of that upgrade, announced immediately before this year’s Championships, failed three times inside the fortnight it was meant to cover.
TfL’s own timeline for even that smaller fix has already slipped. An FOI response from July last year said the key part of it, a new information link between Network Rail’s Wimbledon signalling centre and London Underground’s control centre, was “planned for early 2026.” Nothing had gone live by the time during that timeframe, so a follow-up request in March asked TfL directly when it would arrive. TfL’s answer, in April: the link is now “planned for the second half of 2026.”
Busy line
The branch is not a quiet backwater. East Putney, Southfields, Wimbledon Park and Wimbledon together see 29.3 million entries and exits a year, and because nearly every District line train starts its journey on one of the line’s western branches, a fault here delays services on the rest of the line too.
One reason previously given for leaving the branch out of modernisation was that National Rail’s South Western Railway also uses the track and its trains cannot be fitted with the new signalling. SWR has been in public ownership since May 2025, which the campaign argues removes the last practical excuse: the Government now controls both the operator and the money that would pay for the work.
None of this will be news to anyone who actually uses the branch. Passenger reports collected by the campaign, logged while TfL’s status board said the service was running normally, describe delays of thirty to forty minutes on a work commute, a service with “no announcements – nothing,” and being left stranded at Parsons Green.
The campaign is asking three things of anyone interested in the issue: come to the demonstration on 17 September, even briefly; sign its petition, addressed to TfL, the Mayor of London and the Secretary of State for Transport; and share it with anyone else who uses the branch, on the grounds that most passengers still have no idea it was left out of the upgrade at all.
More detail on the campaign’s evidence, including the documents it cites, is published at fixthedistrict.org/evidence. Its live delay dashboard is at fixthedistrict.org/dashboard.
Fleur Anderson, the MP has been useless on this subject , as with the train entrance/exit on Oxford Road….,……no doubt tried her best but the union (RMT) wins every time. She is more interested in Palestine judging by her twitter activity.
There appears to have been a change in east/City-bound line information displayed on dot matrices at Southfields. I did not travel yesterday to know since when but it is there today. The next 4 trains are shown on the describer regardless of whether these have left Wimbledon station or not which was the previous threshold. The destinations are accurate based on the train I boarded, compared to the inaccuracies of before. If permanent, and applied to Wimbledon Park and East Putney, this would seem to me to be substantial progress in provision of useful journey information at least – at long last – but need to see how it performs.
SMA12, which is the TFL name for the new signalling being commissioned between Fulham Broadway and East Putney, went live this past weekend. Sadly that’s the final bit of the upgrade as the section to Wimbledon was descoped. However, as a consequence, the signalling system is better at describing trains even on the section between East Putney and Wimbledon as this information is no longer fed from legacy and life expired National Rail architecture but from the central computers controlling the trains in the automatic area. Online information like Citymapper and TFL’s own website still need to catch up a bit though so not too useful to check as yet when setting off for the station.
Thanks! I was aware of the SSR signalling programme work at the weekend, and the faster train acceleration possible out of stations within the area but had no idea it would improve information further south than Putney Bridge. So thanks for the helpful explanation on why this has happened. Pity that’s all we’re getting around here. I use Tubestatus and it’s the same as you’ve described for the TfL website and Citymapper, it needs to catch-up.
I think Gavin’s criticism of Fleur Anderson is unfair. She, and her counterpart MP in Wimbledon, has long campaigned to improve the District Line. Unfortunately TfL, as they have shown in their role on our High St, shirk responsibility and lack transparency. It should not require FoIs to get basic information from them. The campaigners have a good point. Unless TfL are publicly pressurised they will continue to do nothing.
As regards Gavin’s point about the long muted 2nd entrance at Putney railway station. There is no business case for this. It would be v expensive and passenger numbers using the station have halved in recent years (11m in 2015 but only 5.64m in 2025).
Can you investigate what’s happening with Putney Bridge station improvements. The approval of the new stand at Fulham’s Craven Cottage had as a condition money set aside for station improvements paid by the club. That stand is now fully built and operational and Putney Bridge station hasn’t been improved and last I can see the money is unspent. Given nearly a decade has gone by, the purchasing power of the funds given by the club has diminished.