Gosh – it’s been a while, hasn’t it?
I have been a little bit preoccupied with work, and other things – and, to be honest, there’s so much ‘bad’ stuff happening at the moment I’m thinking if I just keep my head down it might be safer.
But life goes on, and the other week I went to London for 48 hours. It started with an All-Party Parliamentary Rail in the North Group meting in Westminster, ending with breakfast in a bakery in Holborn and had a couple of CIPR meetings plus the AGM – with the excellent Isobel Hardman – in the middle.
I’d planned on getting the Underground to Lambeth North and walking to my new favourite hotel, the Novotel Waterloo, opposite Lambeth Palace. Quite what made me think I would survive the 15-minute walk in this heat I don’t know, but… Anyway, all was going well until I got on the final leg of my journey, the Bakerloo Line. It wasn’t until I got on the train and looked at the line diagram that I spotted that Lambeth North is shut. No warning anywhere else along my journey – if I hadn’t looked at the diagram I’d have never known. So I had to get off at Waterloo and take a taxi.
I called TfL out about this over Twitter.
Which, as I said, wasn’t the point. I needed to know before I hit the Underground network, not when I was almost there!
At work we’re gearing up for a huge set of bus changes, mainly in Leeds. That’s a lot of timetables, and a huge amount of bus stops and road side displays to update. And we won’t have it done in time. But you’d think that with a planned closure such as this that at least the maps at stations along the Bakerloo Line would have been updated.
Goes to show that TfL isn’t any better at this than the underfunded rest of us.