Pretty much every station in London gets at least a half-hourly service.
That's a pretty good transport offering.
Turn up off-peak midweek and you'll never have more than 30 minutes to wait.
Except that is at five unfortunate stations.
All of them on National Rail.
Trains run hourly
Sanderstead and Riddlesdown stations
Trains to Uckfield bear off the Brighton line at South Croydon, but only once an hour. Commuters from Crowborough and East Grinstead get a better service in the rush hour but off-peak they need to plan their travel carefully because trains are only hourly. Within Greater London the only stations affected are Sanderstead and Riddlesdown. In good news Sanderstead is really close to Purley Oaks and that has a half-hourly service (although in bad news, neither Sanderstead nor Purley Oaks stations are particularly close to Sanderstead). As for Riddlesdown, it may only be half a mile away from Kenley station but one glance at a map with contours should tell you it's not a walk to undertake lightly. Bad luck Sanderstead and Riddlesdown, you have the least frequent train service south of the river.
Sudbury Hill Harrow and Northolt Park stations
For a properly poor service by London standards you need to be on Chiltern. Their tracks out of Marylebone have to cope with fast trains to Birmingham, intermediate services and slow stoppers, so commuters within Greater London generally lose out. Only Wembley Stadium gets a half hourly service, and then not always. South Ruislip and West Ruislip get an hourly service but because they have an abundance of Central line trains their overall frequency is quite good. The two stations with a genuine hourly service are Sudbury Hill Harrow and Northolt Park, both of which are perched on the divide between Harrow and Ealing. The mouthful that is 'Sudbury Hill Harrow' at least has a Piccadilly line station two minutes up the road, whereas Northolt Park is somewhat adrift being a ten minute walk from South Harrow tube. But they're by no means the worst served in London, because that's the next station down the line...
Trains run less than hourly
Sudbury & Harrow Road station
Sudbury & Harrow Road is a ridiculously poorly-served station by London standards. It gets four trains towards Marylebone in the morning and three back, and that's all. Nothing inbetween, nothing against the flow and nothing at weekends. No other station comes close in terms of timetable abandonment.
Trains from SUDBURY AND HARROW ROAD
Eastbound (to Marylebone)
Westbound (to West Ruislip)
0702 0804 0910 1044
1639 1815 2011
(no trains Saturday or Sunday)
For those commuting into town in the morning the hourly spacing is almost practical, but timing the end of your working day for one of the three return services must be much harder. Amazingly it's not London's least used station, nor even the second least used, those places being taken by Drayton Green and South Greenford respectively. But whereas they both get 32 trains a day in each direction, Sudbury & Harrow Road only gets 35 trains A WEEK in both.
Again there's a Piccadilly line station to take the strain, the glorious Sudbury Town whose sleek boxy splendour is but a few minutes walk away. But whereas the tube is half an hour from the West End via a roundabout route the Chiltern service takes just 13 minutes to Marylebone so ought to be by far the more attractive option. Alas not. And this is no tumbleweed location - bus route 18 terminates immediately outside Sudbury & Harrow Road station and that's officially the busiest route in London. Step one way for packed buses, step the other way for empty platforms.
The entrance to the station is a tarmac funnel leading to two card readers and a posterboard. No electronic train indicator has been provided, only a dissected timetable, so the only way to find out if the next train's been delayed or cancelled is to head up to the platforms. A semi-glum passage leads under the tracks to a semi-precipitous staircase that climbs between the platforms, watched over at all times by CCTV because it's been years since anyone wasted cash on providing staff in the flesh. A stark blue shelter is provided as somewhere to wait, though nowhere you'd particularly want to linger for potentially two hours between trains. Trains occasionally rush by, far more frequently than they stop, so the yellow lines down eachplatform are important. The view is better than the service, and even that does not sustain.
A new timetable starts on 21st May, part of a complete reshuffle of Chiltern times and trains.
Trains from SUDBURY AND HARROW ROAD
Eastbound (to Marylebone)
Westbound (to West Ruislip)
0642 0812 0912 1019
1637 1737 1837 1933
(no trains Saturday or Sunday)
The gaps between trains will be better spaced, but the times of some services are so different to what's gone before that passengers may have to completely revise their commute. What's more there's a whole new extra train in the evenings, finally filling that pesky half past seven gap, which has got to make the station more attractive. And that makes eight trains a day rather than seven, i.e. a massive forty trains a week, a full-on 14% increase. But that'll still leave Sudbury & Harrow Road as by far the least served station in Greater London, adrift by a country mile, and no sign that e'er the twain will meet.
