Passengers protested outside Wimbledon station on Thursday over a District line branch that campaigners say failed on 35 days between February and August, one day in five.
Wimbledon MP Paul Kohler joined them, along with local councillors from three different wards affected by the poor service – Max Austin, Sarah Golby and Jil Hall. BBC London and ITV News both filmed. The placards read “£0 funded to fix the branch”.
The branch runs on signalling installed in the 1980s. The 35 days are the campaign Fix The District‘s own count, kept because TfL will not release current figures. TfL’s figures for last year, prised out under freedom of information, showed 45 days of signal failure.
We put seven questions to TfL asking whether October’s weekend closures are for the new signalling, whether that signalling is working yet, and when TfL will publish the delay records it has withheld since March. TfL has answered none of them but one of its officials did give interviews to the television crews talking about its recent investment in the line.
TfL left the District line’s western branches out of its modernisation programme in 2020, and restated the decision in 2021 and in 2024. Documents show the obstacle is no longer an engineering but a government funding decision.
Two train drivers stopped at the campaign’s gathering during the evening, the campaigner and Putney.news member Mary Fitzhenry said. One told her the trouble was not the people driving the trains but a cheap system kept going on make do and mend. The other, a driver for Great Western Railway, told her he is late for his own train every day because of the District line.
Kohler said TfL wrote to him about 18 months ago accepting that the infrastructure on the branch is a century old. The campaign’s organiser, Max Barber, told him nearly half the delays passengers log are reported while TfL’s own status feed is showing a good service.
“It’s last century’s technology,” said Susan Cusack, another campaigner. “These sticking plaster fixes are just not working.”
There is one small improvement that TfL’s recent £500,000 investment has achieved: after decades of giving the wrong destination for half the trains – because the system couldn’t accurately relay the information – platform boards at Wimbledon and East Putney now show where trains are actually going and how long they will be. It may not seem like much for 2026 but it’s better than nothing.
The branch closes again on the weekends of 10 and 11 October and 24 and 25 October. TfL has until 9 October to answer Barber’s freedom of information request asking how much it saved by leaving the branch out of modernisation. Our complaint about the withheld delay records is with the Information Commissioner.
The campaign’s petition asks the Government, the Mayor of London and TfL to fund modern signalling between East Putney and Wimbledon and to publish a funded timetable. It had 1,471 signatures on Thursday morning. By Thursday night it had 1,649.
The petition is at fixthedistrict.org/petition, where passengers on the branch can also log a delay.
I’m sure it fails more than 1 day in 5. The District line is a nightmare, unfortunately the only way for many people to get to work. Trains to Upminister passing every 10 to 15 minutes every time they decide to send more trains to Edgware Road from Wimbledon, forcing people to change in an incredibly crowded Edgware Road on peak time. This changes everyday (you never know for sure what trains will go towards Upminister not even checking TFL) making the service unreliable. Every day is a guess. Same in the afternoons to come back from work. The SW railway train is not always an alternative.
Same congestion if you need to change into the Waterloo and City Line. I’m surprised people in Putney and Fulham have not complained more. The service is currently depressing.