London Bridge Station evening rush-hour departures

This is a bit of an appendix to the previous post to show just how busy London Bridge Station could be.

I don't have copy of the passenger timetable for the period to show all trains in all directions, let alone a copy of the working timetable that would also show all the empty stock movements, but I did discover that I still had my old copies of the small versions of the departure posters.

I’ve copied the pages that relate to the trains to cover one hour of the evening rush hour (17:00 to 18:00)

There are a lot of trains, and bear in mind that these sheets only list departures in the down direction not actual train movements in the area which clearly has to include an equal number of arrivals in the up direction to provide the stock for a down service.

(Coulsdon North is crossed out as this station had been closed since the sheets were printed, passengers for Coulsdon North now had to use the adjacent station at Smitham on the Tattenham Corner.)

First off these are the departures from the Central Divison terminus platforms:

And these are the departures from the South-Eastern platforms:

For the period 17:00 to 18:00 I make that 34 departures from the Central side at London Bridge and 61 departures from Charing Cross and Cannon Street combined, 34 of which called at London Bridge, and 27 of which went through non-stop.

It's no wonder that the tracks and junctions to the west of the station were reckoned to be the busiest in the country if not the world. There are more trains at Clapham Junction, but then again there are also far more tracks at Clapham Junction as I'll explain in another post.