Communications on Southeastern: where Red means stopped for two days, and Green means … stopped for four days
Credit: Southeastern
Over Easter London Bridge work will mean there will be:
- no services to London Bridge, Waterloo East and Charing Cross on Friday 14 April and Saturday 15 April.
- no services to Cannon Street on Friday 14 April to Monday 17 April inclusive.
Unfortunately the diagram in Southeastern’s poster is unclear. First, the map has a station marked at London Bridge on the Cannon Street line – even though Cannon Street services are not stopping at London Bridge at any time until 2018. Then, confusingly, the London Bridge station on the Cannon Street branch does not have a green “X” indicating that it is closed from 14 to 17 April.
It’s not clear why Southeastern have used a different map from, for instance, the map that they are using for this weekend’s engineering work. That correctly shows no station stop (open or closed) at London Bridge on the Cannon Street branch.
That’s a better representation of reality. It would surely be better to stick to one map that accurately shows the normal service pattern.
Going back to the Easter diagram, the use of colours is also odd. The use of magenta/shocking pink – very close to red – and green colours are also inappropriate – red is the colour of stop and green is the colour of go. But in the poster the “green” line is closed for twice as long as the “red” line, so the exact opposite of the intuitive signal!
Let’s hope there’s no confusion about the meaning of Red and Green signals on the railway itself.
PS: From Friday 14 April to Sunday 16 April inclusive there will be no trains between Sevenoaks and Tonbridge either.
Here we go again! Every Easter I try to get to Planet Thanet beer festival in Margate and usually fail, due to engineering works. One knows they are necessary, but over a peak holiday they usually mean the times I want to travel for pleasure rather than work often make it impossible.
@alan Yes, engineering works are necessary, but neither Network Rail nor Southeatern have the incentive to minimise the inconvenience.
Closing both the lines to Charing Cross and the lines to Cannon Street should now be unnecessary because the lines are completely separate from New Cross inwards – work on one line should not affect the other.
It may be too late to correct the printed posters, but there’s no reason why the online version should continue to have the same mistakes. It even claims that you can ‘Click, zoom and pan around the map’, but that’s not the case.