I was on the Central line the other day and there was a 15 minute gap between trains. You might expect this kind of thing at the extremities or late at night, but not at Bethnal Green mid-morning. "Sorry, we're going to be held here for 5 minutes," said the driver. "This is due to the service being completely screwed at the moment." He wasn't wrong.
The issue is motor failure, an increasingly prevalent problem with the Central line's 30-year-old rolling stock. Engineers are doing their best, indeed a rolling repair programme has been underway since 2020, but motors are failing faster than they can be returned to service. This has reduced the number of available trains and made the timetable impossible to deliver... so they're introducing a new one.
On Monday a new weekday timetable kicks into action - call it temporary, call it emergency, whatever - in an attempt to provide the least worst service for Central line passengers. It can be run with just 60 trains whereas the previous version needed 71 (and even that was a reduction from a more normal 77). That's quite a chop so the trains that do run may be rather fuller than normal, but at least the long gaps between trains should be evened out.
My graphic shows typical off-peak intervals between services up and down the line. 'Normal' is the service operating this time last year.
Previously, very roughly speaking, a 5 minute service on each of the branches combined to provide a train every 2½ minutes in the central section between White City and Leytonstone. From Monday the interval on the central section increases to every 3 minutes, on average, with a little extra padding introduced to allow for slower boarding of trains.
It's not as bad as it could be on the outer branches thanks to the cunning way the timetable has been constructed. Previously several trains terminated early, say at Northolt, Newbury Park or Loughton. But in the latest timetable they go all the way to the ends of the line, preserving throughflow on the outer branches. It might even mean a better service beyond Northolt or between Newbury Park and Hainault.
• West Ruislip-Epping (9 trains per hour)
• Ealing Broadway - Hainault (6 trains per hour)
• White City - Hainault (6 trains per hour)
» (central section 21 trains per hour)
The timetable is also deliberately flexible. If more than 60 trains are available they can add more in, and if the number of trains falls further they can cut it back to 58, 56, 53, even 49. That said, even 49 trains would have been problematic on some days recently, so things may get worse before they get better.
» So far this is only for Mondays to Thursday, although a revised timetable for Friday to Sunday is likely to be introduced later.
» It may be a worse timetable but if TfL can stick to it then they'll no longer have to display 'Severe delays' as a service status because the benchmark has changed.
» Things are so bad at the moment that TfL are running bus shuttles at peak times from Epping to Chingford and Loughton to Chingford, every 15 minutes.
» It's fortunate that Crossrail opened fully before the Central line collapsed, otherwise east-west travellers would have been in serious trouble.
Also, according to Ross Lydall at the Evening Standard the "machine that checks track has broken, meaning speed restrictions are in place and a “special” (ie Boxing Day) timetable will be in place this weekend." Eek! So best keep away if you can, the Central line really is completely screwed at the moment.
