I have been making spot checks on the accuracy of the system I set up to generate stop and route databases from the weekly XML timetables. There seems to be an anomaly with this stop. Routes 77 and 87 both have Wandsworth Road Station southbound but the only correponding northbound stop is given as Pensbury Street. The database of every stop in all the XMLs for last week has only one entry for Wandsworth Road Station and one for Pensbury Street.
https://tfl.gov.uk/bus/ shows both routes with Wandsworth Road Station each way and finds both Wandsworth Road Station stops but fails to find Pensbury Street. Oddly it shows both routes with the southbound stop point as ->S instead of B. The current Greater London (490) NaPTAN listing has all three stops with Wandsworth Road Station as B or L and Pensbury Street as ->S. FWIW Google Street View confirms both Wandsworth Road Station bus stops are present with stop points B and L!
Why would the TfL working timetables use the wrong name for a stop (or is there a peculiar error in my extraction of the data)?
Forgot to mention that both the XMLs and NaPTAN show the ATCO 490010921S for Pensbury Street. A request for predictions using that ATCO gives a response shown as Wandsworth Road Station (B)! The NaPTAN listing for Wandsworth Road Station Stop B gives its ATCO as 490010921W.
It would appear that the unified API (both /Line/Route/Sequence and /LineTimetable), the TFl TxC file, the TNDS TxC feed and the BODS GTFS feed all consistently use 490001310A (StopCode L) for the northbound stop and 490010921S (StopCode ->S) for the southbound stop.
However, the unified API uses the name Wandsworth Road Station for the southbound stop while both the TxC feeds and the BODS feed use Pensbury Street. The Naptan feed also calls this stop Pensbury Street.
The only appearances of 490010921W (StopCode B) are in the Naptan feed and in a TNDS route with a LineId of ‘m’, running between Clapham Junction and Canada Water. I suspect that this is a London Overground rail replacement service.
I can also confirm that the actual stop used has a StopCode of B.
My suspicion is that routes 77, 87, 452 and N87 are using the wrong stop throughout and should be using 490010921W. I believe that 490010921S is the stop that was used only by the 452 when it used to terminate at Wandsworth Road Station.
It is interesting to note that Google Maps and the London Bus Checker app show the stop as Wandsworth Road Station (Stop B) and show arrival predictions for all the routes. I’m guessing that this is coming from the Countdown feed, which, presumably, differs from all the other data sources
Thanks for the analysis. I found the anomaly by chance and was concerned in case it indicated a generic flaw in my data extraction. I have made a manual correction to my databases but that is not practicable If errors like this are widespread.