NewsPosting wrote:

The Underground ETA boards don't currently cover the District line, so
there is no way of getting this information. Obviously at Earls Court
you won't get an ETA display either, you just get the destination of
the next train (or the train at the platform) - information about other
services comes at the whim of the station staff annoucing it over the
PA system.

Hmm, puzzling, I'm sure I saw the platform assistant at earls court
look at something that seemed to be indicating train positions on the
line. Unfortunately they didn't show it for long enough for me to see
what info it actually had.

Apols, I could've been clearer - there is no public access (via the
internet) to any District line running information of this sort. There
is of course an internal LU system to keep track of where the trains
are - so perhaps the platform assistant was indeed accessing this
through their PDA.


[BTW.. thanks for the tip about Chiswick Park, unfortunately it's hard
to predict when the next richmond train is to know when it's worth it.]

If Earls Court had modern dot-matrix ETA displays ('train describers'
in LU parlance I believe) that listed the next five or so trains then
one could of course make an educated decision with regards to this
option - but of course Earls Court offers no such luxury.

I guess that given the complexity of Earls Court and perhaps the lack
of certainty over which platform a train will arrive at then this isn't
as simple as it seems, though there could at least be train describers
for each direction (east and west) which only become platform specific
when the train pulls in. Another complication is the possibility of
District line trains changing their destination mid-journey if there
are service gaps on certain sections, but other stations nontheless
have train describers that manage to cope with this.

I suspect it's all being worked on at the moment anyway and something
like what I speak of above will appear in years to come. I'm sure I've
read somewhere that LU's aspiration is to have the public ETA system
operational on all lines - but it's better if they get it right first
before releasing it.