Passengers on the District line’s Wimbledon branch are used to old technology spoiling their journeys. At East Putney, the screen that tells them when the next train is due is now stuck behind an error box.
Putney.news reader Sasha Yusufali photographed the screen last night. It was stuck in time, quite literally: its clock said half past four in the morning on 3 October, two and a half weeks earlier, and the list permanently promises Wimbledon trains in 1, 6, 12 and 17 minutes.
The box is an Internet Explorer script error, politely asking whether to “continue running scripts on this page”. It offers a choice of Yes or No. Nobody had picked either.
East Putney is already top of one list. TfL’s own figures made it the worst station on the Underground for signal failures in 2024. It recorded 147 hours, more than double the next worst. The signals on the branch date from the 1980s, and TfL says it has no plan or money to replace them.
The error also shows what the screen runs. Internet Explorer is outdated. Microsoft ended support for Windows 7, and for Internet Explorer on it, in January 2020. It retired Internet Explorer 11 on some versions of Windows 10 in June 2022. Which of those this screen runs is a question for TfL; neither is good.
The box should not be there at all. Internet Explorer shows error boxes when the browser is set to announce every script error – this is normal for every day use but screens in public places are normally set not to display errors. This one announces it to the whole station.
The box itself warns of an “Unterminated string constant”, which is programmer language for a line of code that opened a quotation mark and never closed it. By the screen’s clock, something went wrong at half past four on a Saturday morning, which has the look of an overnight change gone wrong. If it is one missing quotation mark, that is a small thing to stop a station’s train times from being updated.
Sasha says the screen has looked the same since 3 October, and that nothing had changed when he checked again on Wednesday evening. Trains are permanently 1, 6, 12 and 17 minutes away. That will sound like real life to some passengers on this branch, though we understand some trains have run in the meantime.
Sasha used to rely on the screen to check he would catch his train. It hangs on the right-hand wall as you walk in, he says, just past the last ticket machine, and his verdict on the technology is brief: “It’s ancient.”
The branch has a bigger question waiting. Documents released under freedom of information in May showed TfL dropped it from its signalling upgrade after a recommendation in December 2020. The work “will be assessed in the next financial year”, TfL says, which starts in April 2027.
TfL spent £500,000 on the branch before this year’s tennis championships and told passengers it was ready. It then failed three times in the weeks that followed.
The terrible service has sparked a grassroots campaign, Fix The District, which counts a signal failure on 47 days between 11 February and 12 October, and says 47 per cent of delay reports come in while TfL’s own status says Good Service.
Sasha notes that the frozen screen “illustrates nicely the sorry state of affairs involving all things District Line”.
TfL’s general contact routes are the Tube and stations comment form on its website and its customer line, 0343 222 1234 (call charges may apply). The campaign’s delay log is at fixthedistrict.org.
The next Fix The District protest is at East Putney itself on Thursday 3 December, from 5.30pm to 7pm, in the area at the front of the station. The screen is inside. Will it be showing the right time by then?
