The Thameslink is odd. Very odd. It runs regular services right though the centre of London, yet remains obscure to many. It includes the only station to have entrances on both sides of the river (Blackfriars). You can get direct services between such unlikely bedfellows as St Albans and Woolwich.
It's nicknamed the BedPan line, for Pete's sake.
We've been Thameslink regulars since the old century, and have seen an oddity or two in our time. Here, then, are 14 times the service has left us stroking the chin in puzzlement (after taking a photograph).
Traditional rules of space and time are not valid on Thameslink services
Imagine being on the team that calculates Thameslink's service schedules. You have to factor in the many temporal anomalies that blight the line. For instance, it's perfectly possible that your next train will arrive 1,117 minutes after the one that follows it...
That's a relatively mild paradox. Twice a year — at the spring and autumn equinoxes — a particularly fiendish time rupture afflicts the Mill Hill tunnel. Services are likely to terminate early, or else face delays of up to a week...
Thameslink gets round these temporal quirks by inserting an additional "25 O'Clock". These are good services to catch if you're one of those busy people who find there are never enough hours in the day.
Even the stations move around
If you're lucky enough to dodge the Mill Hill anomaly and the Great Time Slip of Loughborough Junction (not pictured), then you might fall foul of another peculiarity of the line. Stations can (and do) swap location without warning. Take Elstree & Borehamwood, for example. This Zone 6 stop to the north of London has the disruptive habit of suddenly shifting itself to Dartford. A "reorientation team" must be on standby at all times, to make emergency changes to station signage.
Teleportation also affects Kentish Town, and even explains its curious name. Every two weeks, the station disapparates to Kent. It swaps places with Bat & Ball Thameslink station in that county, so named because of its habit of bouncing around.
The stations are full of oddness
Get off at any Thameslink stop and you're sure to encounter something idiosyncratic. It might be the rainbow cow at Cricklewood, the high-class vending machine at West Hamsptead, or the kissing arch on platform 1 of Kentish Town:
You only have to travel a couple of stops down the line to move from kissing to pant-dropping... the following are at Farringdon and City Thameslink:
And one stop on at Blackfriars, this ticket machine appears to have wet its pants...
Meanwhile, back where we started, and Kentish Town has its own special viewing platform for goats. Glance out of the south-facing windows just west of the station, and you can often see these bearded fellows staring back. We kid you not.
It's all quality entertainment. As, indeed, is this incomplete set of Inspector Morse, yours to take from the Elstree & Borehamwood bookswap:
And finally, we've mentioned it before in these pages (see A Short History of Dogs on Escalators), but the strangest Thameslink station of all has to be London St Pancras, whose escalator safety rules take a dim view to dog grooming.
The trains themselves are relatively normal, but...
Like any rail service, Thameslink attracts a wide range of characters. There's the chap, for instance, who never goes anywhere without his wooden companion...
And then there's that troupe of avant garde artists, who decorate their bay with biros, woodchips and pasta salad. Every. Time.
The trains themselves are a vast improvement on the old 319s, which were retired in 2018. Gone forever are the comedy carriage doors and seats that looked like thumbs denuded of nails. Still, we have a strong nostalgia for the time when the only information you got about the next station looked like this:
What crazy business have you seen on the Thameslink? Share all in the comments below...
All photos by the author, except the top image which is public domain. None of the photos have been manipulated.
