Today I'm having another go at enlarging my My London clickbait portfolio.
I rode the secret rail replacement bus to the tube's least used station
I'm aware that previously I claimed the tube's least used station was Roding Valley and today I'm claiming it's Kensington Olympia, but that's because I'm picking and choosing my data to fit my headline. I'm aware that officially it's a tube replacement bus, but that's not as alliterative. And I'm aware that normally when journalists say "secret" they mean "something I know but you don't, please click", but in this case I intend to put forward a coherent argument that this is indeed a secret bus, and therein lies the problem.
TfL withdrew weekday District line trains to Kensington (Olympia) in 2011, other than seven outlying services at very unhelpful times. This'll make the rest of the line more reliable, they said, and you can always take the Overground instead. But TfL can occasionally be persuaded to run a weekday service if Olympia's holding a big enough event, a list which these days has thinned down to just the Ideal Home Show. That's been cancelled for the last two years but this March it's back... except the trains aren't, hence the need for a rail replacement bus. Not that they want to tell you about it.
The thing about the Ideal Home Show, especially on weekdays, is that it's attended by a lot of retired couples from the shire counties. Not for nothing did the Daily Mail create the show and sponsor it for several decades. And if there's one thing people from outside London know, it's that if you want to go to Olympia you need to aim for Kensington Olympia station. And so they head to Earl's Court, like they always have, and attempt to catch the special shuttle service... except it isn't running, and there are no signs directing them to the replacement bus.
There is a tannoy announcement, but not terribly often and only on one pair of platforms and barely audible if you're standing anywhere else. There are permanent signs around the station saying "Take the first Wimbledon train and change at West Brompton for the Overground" but that's quite complicated for out-of-towners, plus you don't need to this week because there's a bus. There are also lovely staff who'll tell you about the bus if you ask them, but only up at the ticket gates. One dear old bloke asked the staff at the eastern exit how to get to Olympia and was duly directed all the way across the station to the western exit, which he could have gone to directly if only there were signs, which there were not.
On reaching the Warwick Road exit I noticed a surprisingly high number of people trying to catch a secret bus. They can't all have asked the station staff, I thought, maybe they knew in advance. The Ideal Home Show website knows nothing of buses, I checked, it merely says that the tube runs a limited service at weekends. The Olympia website is similarly tight-lipped, and the TfL website merely says that the District line is running a Good service. It's possible that attendees received travel advice with their tickets, but far more people were heading for Bus Stop C than I was expecting. "Look, it's over there," they said, crossing at the lights and walking up the road.
And at Bus Stop C the secretness continued. "Rail replacement bus service stops here" flag - good. Replacement bus service panel above the timetables - yes. But on the electronic Countdown display there was nothing at all, just the arrival times of the four normal buses ticking down, which were the only services that ever turned up. And this turned out to be because the rail replacement bus didn't actually stop here, it stopped 100m up the road.
There's no room to park a bus at Bus Stop C, especially when it might be hanging around for several minutes, so instead a separate bus stand operates the other side of Philbeach Gardens. All that potential passengers see is the bus sail by and park up the road with its hazard warning lights flashing, then not go anywhere. Do they risk walking up to it, given it could drive off at any time, or do they carry on waiting at the bus stop where they were told to wait? A notice in the shelter might have made it obvious, but of course there wasn't one.
In good news a blue-jacketed steward was waiting at Bus Stop C directing everyone up the road. In less good news the steward also got to dispatch the bus, which he could only do while standing next to it, and this left Bus Stop C unmanned for several minutes at a time. And from my personal experience sometimes there was no steward at all, just an ever-growing crowd by the shelter and a distant bus that nobody knew was theirs. What's in operation here is a sign-free system that only works if helpful people are in the right place, and creates a secret bus whenever they're not.
And then I rode the secret bus to the least used tube station. It was surprisingly full. My fellow passengers weren't used to this kind of thing, they looked like they drove everywhere, and only deigned to use the seats upstairs when those downstairs were full. "I haven't been on a bus in ages," said one silver fox, and I don't think he was looking forward to eventually getting another one back again. The traffic lights were on our side, it only took five minutes.
My word the Olympia exhibition centre is in a mess. They're rebuilding most of it at present, including gaping voids and extensive worksites and flappy sheeting and hi-vis armies and seriously, it's amazing there's any room left inside to host any kind of major exhibition. We were turfed off the bus under some scaffolding and the assembled retirees headed towards the entrance, unfolding their printed out tickets as they went. I checked around the corner and yes, those who'd thought to come by Overground had a much easier time of it.
I also caught the bus back, which surprised the driver because normally nobody's ready to come home until early afternoon. It was a much longer return journey thanks to the vagaries of the local one-way system, first passing West Kensington station, then West Brompton station and finally reaching Earl's Court station after 12 minutes. Any tube traveller with any sense would have got out at West Kensington, but provincial retirees would probably have stuck to what they know and hung on to the end. I bet it takes hugely longer in the rush hour.
It turns out the secret bus is operated by at least four vehicles going round in a big anti-clockwise loop, starting two hours before the exhibition opens and finishing two hours after it closes, and departs eight times an hour. That's a phenomenally good service for a bus route nobody can be bothered to advertise, and which seems to rely on word of mouth to attract its clientele. If you've decided to save money by not running trains to Olympia, maybe spend a tiny fraction of that cash pointing the right way out of the station, directing people to the correct boarding point and essentially telling them the secret bus exists.
