Waiting rooms are often miserable places but some are jewels you genuinely don't mind hanging around in. This is the waiting room at Bruce Grove station in Tottenham, recentlyrestored, and it's one of the latter.
It's the original waiting room from 1872 which has been spruced up courtesy of Haringey Council, TfL, Arriva Rail London, Network Rail, ArchCo and the Railway Heritage Trust. It's now got a couple of fireplaces, fresh floorboards, vintage coving and plenty of ivory and green paint - the historic colours of the Great Eastern Railway. The finest features may be the handcrafted reproduction benches, each subdivided with plenty of room to spread out. As a modern nod the room also has a departures screen, because a period clock isn't much good unless you know when the next southbound train is due. The best time for a peek, obviously, is just after that train has left.
I think what I like best, as well as the gorgeous use of materials, is the sense of space. Often in a waiting room you feel uncomfortably close to your fellow passengers but here, even if all the benches are taken, there'd still be room to linger comfortably in the middle. And nextdoor is an even nicer room with an armchair, plants and a bookcase - the Community Room - but that's locked because it's a hireable space and not for mere passengers.
Imagine if all waiting rooms were like this, or even if waiting rooms existed at all stations with potentially windswept platform, but that's Victorian priorities for you. It also shows what a £35000 grant can do if well targeted and beautifully executed within a suitable space. And no this isn't really news, it was widely reporteda fortnight ago, all that's happened here is that I've been and seen it for myself. But you lucky folk at Bruce Grove, you might even be disappointed when the train turns up.
Metropolitan line extension news
I know it seems a bit late to mention this but bear with me. The Metropolitan line extension to Watford Junction was given the go-ahead in 2011 - fully planned, supposedly funded - but the groundworks mysteriously never started. In 2016 the new Mayor quietly killed the project dead, citing funding issues, and the old trackbed continues to become more overgrown as various politicians propose alternativepipedreamsolutions that'll never happen. This is not news either.
TfL's Programmes and Investment Committee is meeting next week and, in accordance with normal procedures, a 210-page infodump of procedural documentation has been released. Scroll down to Item 11 on page 145 and you'll find an update on TfL's Growth Fund, a long-term pot of money earmarked to help unlock housing and regeneration opportunities. Successful projects mentioned include the Barking Riverside extension and the Elephant & Castle roundabout, whereas "other projects have been paused, re-scoped or cancelled".
"An example of a scope change was the cancellation of the MLX project in January 2018. The £16m Fund monies allocated to the project were instead invested in an additional train which was ordered for MLX as part of the Four Lines Modernisation project contract for new trains. That train has been delivered and is in passenger service."
Admittedly the Growth Fund's £16m was nowhere near the full cost of building the Metropolitan line extension, merely a substantial contribution. But it does niggle somewhat to hear that instead of an Underground extension with two brand new stations, instead we got a train. One whole train. I'm therefore adding "re-scoping" - an upbeat term for the quashing of dreams - to my list of weasel words forthwith.
Other paused/cancelled Growth Fund projects: Beam Park Station, Croydon Fiveways, Old Oak Overground Stations, Vauxhall Cross Gyratory Removal, Wandsworth Ram Brewery Transformation, Rotherhithe to Canary Wharf Crossing, Morden Town Centre, Sutton Link, Barking Station, Erith Links, Bow Vision, Elmers End Tram Capacity Upgrade, Upper River Roding Crossing
More Overground news
Most Overground stations now have posters displaying the new name for their line plus a little background history. The posters are nicely done - just enough to educate the wider public - and all six are displayed in a TfL blogpost so you can see them too. The graphics also contain simplified route diagrams, another nice touch, but I wonder if you can see what's wrong with this one for the Mildmay line.
The names at the ends of the line are fine, but the junction in the middle is pointing the wrong way. It mistakenly shows that trains from Clapham Junction go to Richmond but they don't, indeed can't, they only go towards Stratford. And you can now see this error in ticket halls up and down the new Mildmay line, indeed from Stratford to Richmond and from Stratford to Clapham Junction.
Bus news
When I wrote about London's upcoming dead bus, the 455, no further information was yet available on the TfL website. But there's now a dedicated text-heavy webpage, which also includes links to four maps which try to convey the sheer complexity of the changes occurring in a week's time. This map shows mitigation for the 455...
The dashed black line is the expiring 455 bus route and everything else shows what you'll be able to do/catch instead. You can tell it's complicated because the key runs to 11 rows and they've had to add three extra textboxes to explain things. Assuming you can get your head around it it's actually a pretty good summary. Whereas this map, for changes to routes 470, S2, S3 and S4 is verging on mind-blowing...
The new bus, the S2, is the orange line. But it's been drowned out by three other routes which appear in three different colours and each of those in three different styles of line. My brain imploded trying to work out the difference between current sections, new sections, Hail and Ride sections and withdrawn sections, not to mention a superfluous star to show that route S3 doesn't run on Sundays. Up top the visual kerfuffle used to display a simple route-swap around Sutton Common station is a masterclass in bamboozlement.
I shouldn't complain that TfL's design team have produced actual bus maps, and all this in advance of an upcoming route change. They still haven't managed anything for Superloop route SL3, for example, and that launches tomorrow. But the design team's general obsession with showing old and new routes on the same map isn't always helpful - so many colours, so many styles, so many lines, so much brain fog.
What's more these four maps will all be deleted in a couple of weeks once the changeover's complete, whereas what'd be much more useful long-term is a map showing the final network going forward. To understand the bus network in Sutton and Croydon you really need a proper bus map showing all routes, but alas TfL binned those eight years ago and where London's buses actually go has become an ever-deepening mystery.
