Commuters on the District line faced a miserable start to the day on Friday after a points failure at Parsons Green brought severe delays to the Wimbledon branch of the Tube.
The disruption is affecting services between Earl’s Court and Wimbledon, with Transport for London warning of severe delays along the whole corridor. Passengers are being told to expect disruption throughout the morning peak, while services on the rest of the District line are running well, with a good service reported elsewhere on the route.
The cause was an earlier points failure at Parsons Green, one of the busiest stations on the south-western stretch of the line. Points are the movable sections of track that guide trains from one line to another, and when they fail engineers must inspect and secure them before trains can run safely again. Trains approaching the faulty points have to be held at signals until engineers give the all-clear, which is why a single failure can disrupt services across the whole branch for several hours.
For many passengers the timing could hardly be worse. The failure struck ahead of the Friday morning rush hour, when trains on the Wimbledon branch are at their busiest, carrying thousands of commuters from south-west London into the centre of the capital. Platforms at stations along the branch, including Putney Bridge, East Putney, Southfields and Wimbledon Park, were left crowded as services were held or cancelled.
Passengers caught up in the disruption are advised to check the latest service updates before travelling and to allow considerably more time for their journeys. Those who can may want to consider alternative routes, including local bus services and London Overground connections, or South Western Railway trains from Wimbledon and Earlsfield into Waterloo.
The delays are the latest blow for passengers on the Wimbledon branch, whose reliability has come under intense scrutiny in recent weeks. On Thursday night, campaigners from the Fix The District group took their protest to Southfields, staging a rally outside the station to demand action over what they describe as the branch’s chronic unreliability — even as a separate track fault at Southfields disrupted services on Thursday evening.
It was the campaign’s second rally, following a first protest outside Wimbledon station in September. The group’s central demand is modern signalling for the branch, which still relies on equipment dating back to the 1980s. Its data suggests there were 47 days with a signal failure on the branch between 11 February and 12 October — roughly one day in five.
TfL has responded with a £500,000 package of fixes for the branch, but campaigners and local politicians say it has not gone far enough. Putney MP Fleur Anderson told Thursday’s rally that the money “hasn’t proved to be the fix that we were promised”, while the campaign is now pushing for a feasibility study into full resignalling to be included in TfL’s plans for next year.
Friday morning’s points failure is not the only Tube disruption this week. On Thursday, signal failures hit both the Northern and District lines, with part of the Northern line suspended and the District line suffering severe delays. Earlier this month, a fault at Gloucester Road left three Tube lines with severe delays on a Friday morning.
For now, the advice for District line passengers is simple: check before you travel. TfL’s website and journey planner carry the latest service information, and with engineers working to fix the failed points at Parsons Green, passengers should expect the severe delays between Earl’s Court and Wimbledon to continue until the fault is resolved and the backlog of trains clears.
The branch is also due to shut for planned engineering work on the weekend of 24 and 25 October, meaning passengers face further disruption later this month.
