Little Joys on the Tube

Going the right way, even when the signs try to point you the wrong way (not acceptable at rush hour, but can save you a *lot* of time during the rest of the day).

Having a conversation, and then realising that you're providing amusement for everyone else on the carriage, as otherwise everyone just sits there in complete silence.

Finding exactly the right place to stand on the platform so that you don't have to walk at all when you get to your destination (and pondering where the optimal place to stand is when going to an unfamiliar destination station).

Waiting two minutes for the next train, and getting a seat instead of piling into a crowded carriage.

The sheer inanity of the announcements: "we're being held at a red signal", really? what colour do you use for "go"?

Young Person's Railcard Oyster Discount just got better!

My previous post on this question lamented the fact that lots of people don't seem to know that they can get discounts on travel on the London Underground network by loading their Young Persons Railcard onto their Oyster Card. Just take both railcard and Oyster card into any Tube station, and they'll do it for you. Well, now I'm lamenting it double, because things just got even better.

With absolutely no fanfare, TFL have extended the YPR discount to off-peak single fares, as well as the previous discount on the off-peak daily cap. See here for details. So now an off-peak zones 1-2 single will only cost you £1.25.

For those of you who are wondering, the off-peak daily cap applies as long as your first journey in the day came after 09.30. That is, you don't have to make all journeys in off-peak times in order for the off-peak cap to apply. For single fares, peak is 6.30-9.30 and 16.00-19.00. (For anyone who wants to stay out late, the "day" finishes at 04.30 the following morning).

For some reason, this seems to have been completely buried by TFL, I even had to edit the wikipedia page myself just now to contain the relevant information! My post, which comes from a relatively tiny blog is still in the top 10 hits on Google for "Young persons railcard oyster", for some reason. This information could be saving quite a lot of people quite a lot of money if they knew about it. Please tell your friends!

'Minor Delays'

I have spent a long time wondering exactly what is meant by 'minor delays' on the Tube. They have a fixed amount of track, and a fixed number of trains running on it. The only way for their to be delays is for the trains to slow down... how is it possible that 'a customer incident' which happened over an hour ago is still causing the trains to run slower?

I can just about see why there are delays at peak times (the trains run slower because they spend longer in each station) but how do 'delays' propogate through the system? I can see how there might be bunching, but 'delays' (or is that what they mean by delays?)?