james mckay dot net

A lot of people complain about the stress of the daily commute. Far fewer people research the different options that can make it less stressful however.

For example, travelling into London from Horsham, everyone piles onto the same train at 07:25, or at 07:29 at Littlehaven. It’s a reasonably fast train, getting you to London Victoria in only 50 minutes, but it’s probably the most overcrowded service on that route. I was once told (by a conductor on a different train to whom I once got chatting) that the Southern Railway staff refer to it among themselves as “the sardine can.”

It is possible to get a decent seat on it (i.e. a window seat at a table in one of the nicer carriages) from Horsham, but you need to know exactly where to stand on the platform, arrive in plenty of time, and exercise a streak of me-first hubris which doesn’t endear you to your fellow passengers. If you get on at Littlehaven, it’s even worse, because thanks to a short platform, you have to walk the entire length of the train, and even then it’s a bit of a lottery what kind of a seat you’ll get. On a typical day, perhaps a hundred or so people pile onto the train at Littlehaven, most of them through a single carriage at the end of the platform, which doesn’t endear them to the Southern Railway staff who are constantly nagging us to “please use all available doors.” As you can imagine, this is also a pretty high-stress exercise, and consequently I’ve generally tried to go from Horsham rather than Littlehaven, even though it’s the best part of a mile further and I have to leave the house ten minutes earlier.

Just the other week, however, I decided as an experiment to try a slightly different train, which leaves seven minutes earlier. It’s the stopping service which calls at almost every station between Horsham and Croydon, and it arrives ten minutes after the fast train, but it’s almost totally empty when it arrives at Littlehaven at 07:22, so you get the pick of the seats. The additional fifteen minutes also makes it much easier for me to get some extra sleep on the train (this makes a massive difference to my day, especially if I haven’t had too good a night’s sleep), and because it arrives in London Victoria at 08:30, it still lets me arrive at my desk by nine o’clock. All in all, it’s been such a resounding success that I’ve started making it my regular train.

And of course, this is also a win for people who take the sardine can, because it means that there’s one more seat available for them.

Comment on this »

Posted at 08:00 on 25 October 2010.
Tagged: commuting, London, trains

There is a sneaky back entrance to London Victoria station that I’ve taken to using. It’s near the end of Platform One, and it takes you out onto the corner of Hudson’s Place and Bridge Place. It avoids all the crowds outside the main entrance to the station and on Victoria Street, and because it’s much quieter, you also avoid those really annoying characters spamming you with the London Lite and other similar vacuous drivel wherever you turn on the way back in the evenings.

Obviously you still have to negotiate the crowds inside the station, but once you’re out, the twenty minute walk to Millbank up Vauxhall Bridge Road, Francis Street, Greencoat Place, Greycoat Place and Great Peter Street is about as pleasant and stress free as you can possibly get in central London during the rush hour.

Comments closed (1) »

Posted at 08:00 on 22 July 2009.
Tagged: commuting, London, trains, Victoria

The signs in stations on the London Underground direct you to platforms for a particular line heading in a particular direction — for example, the eastbound Circle Line, the northbound Jubilee line, and so on. The different lines are all colour coded — the Circle Line is yellow, the District Line is green, the Bakerloo Line is brown, and so on. With many platforms being shared by two or more lines, one would expect that the trains themselves would arrive indicating primarily which line they are running on, preferably with the same colour coding fairly prominent, right?

Wrong.

The trains themselves, and the notice boards on the platforms, indicate only which station is their final destination. There is no clear indication of exactly which line they are running on. When you are on a platform that is shared by two different lines, this can cause quite a bit of confusion if you are unfamiliar with the routes themselves, and, as is often the case on the Underground, you have only seconds to determine whether the train on the platform is the one you want or not before it closes its doors and heads off into the unknown.

Take what happened with the five of us who went up to MiniBar last night as an example. After some debate on the way back as to whether we should walk to Aldgate East or Liverpool Street station, we decided to head for the latter. At Liverpool Street, you head for the eastbound platform and take a Circle Line train. The Circle Line turns south then west after Liverpool Street and reaches Victoria after a dozen or so stops.

The train on the platform was the one for Barking. Okay, fine, where’s Barking? These trains stop for less than a minute, so rather than find a map and then look for Barking to see if this was the right line or not, we collectively decided to jump onto the train with only seconds to spare, and then ask questions.

We were halfway to the next station before we realised that Barking is, of course, at the end of the Hammersmith and City Line — i.e., heading in completely the wrong direction.

Not to worry, however. You get out at Aldgate East, cross over to the platform on the other side of the tracks, and catch the next District Line train heading west, arguing vigorously all the way about whose fault it was that you ended up on the wrong train in the first place.

The only problem is that you have the same problem on the other side. We had arrived on the platform and were scrutinising the map when a train came along. “Hammersmith via Kings Cross/St Pancras.”

The same individual who led us onto the wrong train in the first place now embarked on this one, and most of the rest of our party would have done so too, but for the fact that two of us had already figured out that this one was also operating on the Hammersmith and City Line, which does not go directly to Victoria, and would merely have taken us back to where we started.

Fortunately we managed to convince them to wait on the platform until we had determined which train was the right one before getting onto it, and eventually we ended up on the right train, but by this time, we were beginning to come to the conclusion that the game of Mornington Crescent bears a lot more resemblance to reality than originally intended.

Comments closed »

Posted at 09:06 on 21 April 2007.
Tagged: London Underground, MiniBar, trains