Passengers staged a District line Wimbledon protest outside Wimbledon station on Thursday, demanding urgent investment in a branch of the Tube line that the Fix The District campaign says failed on 35 days between February and August — one day in five.
Supporters at the District line Wimbledon protest gathered from 4pm, carrying placards that read “£0 funded to fix the branch”.
District line Wimbledon protest demands modern signalling
“It’s last century’s technology,” said Susan Cusack, one of the campaigners. “These sticking plaster fixes are just not working.”
TfL excluded the District line’s western branches from its modernisation programme in 2020, restating the decision in 2021 and again in 2024. The campaign says documents show the obstacle is no longer engineering but a government funding decision.
Wimbledon MP Paul Kohler joined the protest, along with councillors Max Austin, Sarah Golby and Jil Hall, who represent three different wards affected by the poor service. Both BBC London and ITV News filmed at the demonstration.
Kohler said TfL wrote to him about 18 months ago accepting that the infrastructure on the branch is a century old. The 35-day figure is the campaign’s own count, kept because TfL will not release current figures; TfL’s own figures for last year, obtained under freedom of information, showed 45 days of signal failure.
Campaign organiser Max Barber told the MP that nearly half the delays passengers log are reported while TfL’s own status feed is showing a good service. Two train drivers stopped at the gathering during the evening, campaigner Mary Fitzhenry said. One told campaigners the trouble was not the people driving the trains but a cheap system kept going on make-do and mend, while a Great Western Railway driver said he is late for his own train every day because of the District line.
The campaign’s petition asks the Government, the Mayor of London and TfL to fund modern signalling between East Putney and Wimbledon and to publish a funded timetable. It stood at 1,471 signatures on Thursday morning and had risen to 1,649 by Thursday night. The petition is at fixthedistrict.org/petition, where passengers on the branch can also log delays.
The branch closes again on the weekends of 10 and 11 October and 24 and 25 October. Putney.news put seven questions to TfL asking whether October’s weekend closures are for the new signalling, whether that signalling is working yet, and when it will publish the delay records it has withheld since March. TfL answered none of them, although one of its officials gave television interviews about its recent investment in the line.
TfL has until 9 October to answer the campaign’s freedom of information request on how much it saved by leaving the branch out of modernisation. The campaign’s complaint about the withheld delay records is now with the Information Commissioner.
One small improvement has come from TfL’s recent £500,000 investment: platform boards at Wimbledon and East Putney now show the correct destinations and waiting times, after decades of displaying the wrong information for half the trains.
The District line Wimbledon protest was first reported by Putney.news.
