There has been discussion on here about presentation of London Overground travel info, in particular showing just one overall status for the whole network. Naming the individual lines may eventually help but not perhaps with the issue that I encountered on Sunday.
Rather foolishly, we decided mid-journey to head for Kew Gardens via LO from Highbury instead of continuing on the tube “because it’s nicer”. The Victoria Line on train info was telling us correctly that there was no service between Canada Water and Clapham Junction. Fine. The PA announcements told us that there was no service between Shepherd’s Bush and Willesden Junction. Also fine. But nothing told us that there was no service between Willesden Junction and Richmond, which we eventually realised on the platform at Highbury once we had internal access again. So back down the tube. Not crucial - and we still got there before our friends - but it could have been.
My question is why the Victoria Line train info was not giving us the most relevant piece of information about LO as we approached Highbury & Islington. More generally, how is it decided what is shown where about service disruptions, particularly planned ones, as all three closures apparently were.
@mjcarchive I worked for LOROL in the past and I did quite a lot of work on this for internal communications of problems.
You correctly point out that the Victoria Line has a lot of problems with the interface with London Overground as it interfaces with all of the different ones except for the Romford-Upminster line.
The other problem you highlight is the hidden nature of New Cross to Dalston Junction service, which is high frequency but totally missing even from the official diagrams. This service uses the (still TfL owned) “core” which was in a previous life the London Underground East London Line.
The problem here is how you actually communicate these kind of line issues, the District and Piccadilly also suffer from long branches at each end. The Northern line has it City and West End branches to confuse tourists and the Central line has a core between White City and Leytonstone.
I’m not sure if the London Overground has a unique problem here.
Here’s my best-go at sorting the Overground out
Looking in the code the sub-lines were…
const ELLCRYSTALPAL = 4004;
const ELLWESTCROYDO = 4003;
const ELLCLAPHAMJUN = 4002;
const ELLNEWCROSS = 4001;
const ROMTOUPM = 1008;
const LSTTOCHN = 1007;
const LSTTOCHI = 1006;
const LSTTOENF = 1005;
const GOB = 1003;
const WIJTOCLJ = 1002;
const RMDTOSRA = 1001;
const ELLCORE = 9999;
