Wandsworth Council has backed Fix The District, the passengers’ campaign for new signals on the District line through East Putney, Southfields and Wimbledon Park.
The campaign wants the 1980s signals between East Putney and Wimbledon replaced. A paper for councillors says the council will seek “greater clarity and commitment” from TfL and Network Rail, including on new signalling, and that backing local passengers is “wholly consistent with Council policy”.
The council’s Leader, Robert Morritt, and its Cabinet Member for Transport, Nick Austin, were at the campaign’s protest outside Southfields station on 15 October, along with other Conservative and Labour councillors and Putney’s MP, Fleur Anderson. Four weeks later, the council has put its support in writing.
The paper says a big part of the problem is who owns what. TfL runs the trains, but between East Putney and Wimbledon the signals and the power are Network Rail’s responsibility, because South Western Railway uses the same track.
If not intentional, the paper says, the apparent result is that TfL and Network Rail “pass responsibility onto each other”, with neither fully committed to investing in a railway it does not feel fully responsible for.
Guy Humphries, a Conservative councillor for Southfields, said much the same at the protest. “Everybody blames everybody else and nothing happens, and it goes round and round and round,” he said. “It’s so deeply frustrating.”
About 10 million journeys a year start or end at East Putney and Southfields, around 27,000 a day. Trains are meant to come every four to five minutes.
On the figures in the paper, from Tube Alerter, a site that tracks delays using TfL’s open data, the District was the worst Tube line over the past week and the past month. Those figures cover the whole line, not just the Wimbledon branch. In the morning rush, 7am to 10am, the paper says the District has been by some distance the worst line over the past two months.
TfL doesn’t publish figures for the branch alone, so Putney.news worked them out. Our analysis of roughly 96,000 TfL disruption records, released under freedom of information and with TfL’s own double-counting stripped out, found East Putney was the worst station on the Underground for signal failures in 2024: 147 hours, more than double the next worst. The three worst stations were all on the District line’s Wimbledon and Richmond branches, on Network Rail track.
TfL has announced better information for passengers and more resources to repair and look after the branch’s signals. The council says it is unclear whether any of that has happened, and that passengers “have not noticed any material improvement”.
When a track circuit on the branch fails, the signals turn red for safety and fewer trains can run until it is fixed. New signalling, the paper says, would fail less often and get the service back faster.
TfL is upgrading the line’s trains and signals, but the new signals stop at East Putney. “There is, however, no commitment to replace the signalling system south of East Putney,” the paper says. TfL has said in writing that it has no plan or money to replace the branch’s signals, and that the work will be assessed in the financial year that starts in April 2027.
Network Rail, which is responsible for the signals south of East Putney, told Putney.news in March that the signalling on the Wimbledon and Richmond branches is “not scheduled for full renewal”. It said it would keep monitoring the equipment and repair or replace parts if their condition or reliability changed.
What happens next
The council’s transport scrutiny committee discusses the paper at 7.30pm on Thursday 19 November at the Town Hall. The meeting is shown live, with the paper and the webcast link on the council’s website. Councillors are asked to back the passengers’ efforts, and to say whether they want TfL and Network Rail called to a later meeting to answer their questions in public. Max Barber, who chairs Fix The District, has been invited to speak at the meeting.
The campaign’s petition for new signals has more than 3,600 signatures, the paper says, more than 1,100 up since the Southfields protest. It is at fixthedistrict.org/petition.
The next Fix The District demonstration is outside East Putney station, where TfL’s new signals stop, on Thursday 3 December from 5.30pm to 7pm.
