You couldn’t make it up. As protesters packed the space outside Southfields station last night to complain about the District line, passengers were being kicked off trains on the other side of the river.
The problem, according to TfL’s own status page, was “a track fault at Southfields”: the station the protesters were standing outside. TfL called it “minor delays between Earl’s Court and Wimbledon”. The passengers turned off at Parsons Green were told the fault was at Wimbledon Park.
It was the second protest by Fix The District, a volunteer passenger campaign, and it drew a crowd. The leader of Wandsworth Council, Robert Morritt, came, along with Nick Austin, the council’s cabinet member for transport, councillors from both the Conservative and Labour groups and Putney’s MP, Fleur Anderson. TfL staff came along unofficially to listen.
The campaign’s petition, which asks the Government, the Mayor of London and TfL to fund modern signalling on the branch, had 2,464 signatures by Thursday night, more than 800 up since the first protest at Wimbledon in September. The campaign said more than 500 people signed during the evening.
Its next aim is to get TfL to put a feasibility study, a first look at what could be done, into its plans for next year.
Anderson said people ask her whether the protest means TfL will fix the line next week, and that some realism was needed. The campaign’s organiser, Max Barber, said the money would have to come from central government. “TfL don’t want an unreliable District line, but equally they can’t afford it,” he said. “So the government will have to fund it, that’s obvious.”
TfL has said in writing it has no plan or funding to replace the signals on the branch through East Putney, Southfields and Wimbledon Park, which were installed in the 1980s. The work “will be assessed in the next financial year”, which begins in April 2027.
The campaign now counts 47 days with a signal failure on the branch between 11 February and 12 October, still one day in five. Nearly half the delays passengers have logged came while TfL’s status said Good Service. The campaign is also working on a way to put a figure on the cost of the poor service: the hours passengers lose, and from that the cost to the local economy.
The £500,000 fix
TfL’s answer so far has been a £500,000 fix for the branch. But Anderson says it’s not enough: “This £500,000 hasn’t proved to be the fix that we were promised. So it needs something bigger than that.”
One constituent, and she knows of others, came to her surgery to say they were leaving. “This is the last time you’re going to see me, ’cause I’m moving out of the area,” Anderson recalled being told. “Because it’s not reliable enough. I don’t know that I can get to work.”
The poor service also risks damaging London’s image as a cutting-edge city. One local Airbnb host at the protest spent a closure weekend getting guests from Poland, whose English was poor, around by bus. “It’s an absolute nightmare,” she said. “It’s two buses minimum.”
Guy Humphries, a councillor for Southfields, said he was pleased to see a grassroots campaign on a problem that has gone on for years. “Everybody blames everybody else and nothing happens, and it goes round and round and round,” he said. “It’s so deeply frustrating.”
The branch was left out of TfL’s signalling upgrade in 2020. “In a way it’s frustrating, because they take it out and it’s hard to get back in,” Anderson said. “But in another way, there is hope, because there is something for us to go back into.”
The campaign’s figures help, she said. “I go in and I talk to Seb Dance, the Deputy Mayor for Transport, I sit there saying, ‘Look, it’s awful, the service is awful,'” she said. “They love data in Transport for London, and understandably so. So this gives us the data to say how bad it is for people.”
Barber said the campaign was not trying to “heap blame” on TfL. “The better way forward, I think, is to have a more collaborative approach,” he said. He said TfL and Network Rail have a working group trying to improve things on the line, which he expects is behind the improvements TfL credits to the £500,000.
What happens next
South Western Railway’s trains share the branch’s track, and Anderson is meeting the company’s managing director, Lawrence Bowman, in two weeks. “It’s their trains that have to be adapted as well, which is part of the estimate,” she said.
Barber expects TfL to decide by 9 November whether it will release what leaving the branch out of the upgrade saved it, or treat the figure as commercially sensitive. He is already planning the next protest – this time one station further down the line, and one stop closer to Westminster, at East Putney.
The branch shuts again on the weekend of 24 and 25 October. The petition is at fixthedistrict.org/petition, where passengers can also log a delay.
To whoever runs the fix the district website, please put a link to the TFL refund page on your site so everyone can use it. TFL is also now much more trigger happy to terminate trains at Parsons Green from the City as don’t give a shit about people who live between Putney Bridge and Wimbledon. They also do this in a dumb way. It takes at least 5 minutes to clear a train at Parsons Green and meanwhile the ones behind still going to Wimbledon are delayed even more.
Also please get an itemised list of the work they do each weekend closure. I can see the line from my window and at the last closure last weekend didn’t notice one engineer’s train on the track or see any workers. The temporary speed restrictions at multiple places between Parsons Green and Wimbledon have been there since the start of summer and they’ve done 4 closures in that period.