London Banter - View Single Post - Zone 6 conquers ten further Southern stations

Martin Underwood · November 13th 05, 04:56 PM posted to uk.transport.london,uk.railway

Roland Perry wrote in
:

In message .com, at
13:11:43 on Thu, 10 Nov 2005, Mizter T remarked:
Also I read a story on the Kingston Times website that says SWT are
considering extending Zone 6 out to "stations such as Esher, Hinchley
Wood and Claygate" [3].

Those three stations are all within the extended urban sprawl that is
London. And Hinchley Wood even has 020 phone numbers (to the east of
the railways line). To that extent they "deserve" to be in Z6 just as
much as Thames Ditton and Hampton Court.

The next stations out, however, are outside that sprawl (just).

The real anomaly is the Tattenham Corner line: because of the way the
Greater London boundary is routed, you can travel further out of central
London to Couldson, but then when you turn back north again, ending up
closer to London than you were before, you are outside the boundary.
Similarly Epsom and Epsom Downs are a lot closer into London than Coulsdon.

In these cases, I wonder whether I'm being cynical in thinking that it's
done like this make visitors to Epsom racetrack pay as much as possible ;-)

You'd think that it would make sense for the boundaries between one "county"
and another to be moved from time to time to take account of any urban
sprawl of a city on the boundary, so as always to avoid splitting that city.
The conurbation of Reading is split between Reading, West Berkshire and
Wokingham, when it would be much better for the boundary to be moved so it
runs through sparsely-populated areas between Reading and the surrounding
villages. Likewise for London - though where you (literally!) draw the line
between London and its surroundings is a more difficult one!