After months of delays, cancellations and a broken escalator at Wanstead Station, local resident Tom Knock decided to dig into TfL’s own data, and found the Central Line is probably worse than you think
Last October, worn down by another week of delays, I asked TfL for the numbers. Was the Central Line genuinely getting worse or was I just being impatient? My Freedom of Information request covered 12 months: wait times, how often the line was marked as delayed and why and whether the decline was a deliberate timetabling choice.
What came back was a mess of spreadsheets. Thousands of rows of raw departure times across two branches, no analysis, no summary, nothing that answered the question in the form I’d asked it. So, I did what most people would do with a spreadsheet like that and a full-time job would do: I closed the file and promised myself I’d do something with it eventually.
Then in June this year, the escalator at Wanstead broke. Again. Only this time, it stayed broken, and it took the best part of a month to be told it “might” be fixed by late September. For me, that’s annoying. For my less-mobile neighbours and parents, 100 steep steps aren’t an inconvenience; they’re a barrier. So, I went back to the spreadsheets.
It turns out I wasn’t imagining how bad things are. On the Hainault branch, trains ran below TfL’s own published worst-case timetable on 98% of weekdays between February and October 2025. That is nearly every working day for nine months. This was not a steady decline. Compare the four months before February 2025 with the nine after, and gaps of more than 10 minutes between trains roughly doubled. Around one train in six stopped running.
The documents also show 60 trains running against the 77 a full-peak service needs. So, if you’ve stood on the platform wondering whether your wait was unusual, it wasn’t. And now you know why the carriage was so full when it finally turned up.
I couldn’t get a straight answer on how often the line has been marked as suffering “minor delays” either, because so much of it disappears into that vague “train cancellations” message we all know too well.
None of this has an easy fix. The Underground is the oldest metro system in the world and travel patterns have genuinely changed since the pandemic. The staff at our station are as fed up as we are and have been nothing but apologetic and helpful. This isn’t a go at them. My problem is the silence. TfL Access exists to keep disabled and less mobile passengers informed about exactly this sort of disruption, and its official X feed still hasn’t mentioned our broken escalator. I raised it. They replied saying they had posted about it. I showed them they hadn’t. Nothing since.
Fixing a Victorian railway is hard. Admitting it’s broken isn’t.
To read the full version of Tom’s article, visit thenlikemydreams.uk
