Trivial Data: Compass point affixes in stations

When an area has various train stations, it's often easy to designate them with a compass points to denote roughly where the station is relative to the area. In South London, for instance, you have West and East Croydon, which is a good indication to commuters as to where you'll end up in Croydon when you commute by train.

However, there seems to be an inconsistency in how these cardinal directions are applied with station names. Sometimes, like with East Croydon, the compass point acts as a prefix. Yet in the case of Penge West, the compass point is a suffix. I suppose a good question may be which one wins out in the end. 

Some areas, like Acton and Dulwich, prefer the compass point to be a prefix, whereas other areas, like Chessington and Clapham, prefer it to be a suffix. Sifting through all the stations on the London Rail and Tube Services map, I've collected this data:

/	North	South	East	West	Total
Prefix	7	15	7	19	48
Suffix	5	6	8	5	24
Total	12	21	15	24	72

Which is very clearly a victory for the prefixes, no doubt about it, as they have over double the stations compared to the south. Admittedly, I've included all three of West Hampstead's stations as separate entities, since they are - there's no interchange between them aside from walking between them on the road - and some stations, like East India, don't really match what I'm looking for. East India refers to the East India Company's docks in the area, not to a physical place known as India (that place is thousands of kilometers distant), so East India doesn't necessarily have a geographical designation.

However, something I found curious was that no places shared a prefix or suffix designation, i.e. there wasn't an instance of North X and X South, which I suppose makes sense. Yet this still doesn't answer why there is such a variety.

My first theory, as always, is down to operators. When you notice stations with compass points as prefixes, they often lie on the same line; it's only thus reasonable that a railway operator would have decided to have a naming scheme and stick to it, hence why the affix positioning can differ. However, this theory starts disintegrating when you have different railway lines that aren't connected, like at Dulwich where West Dulwich is operated by Southeastern, yet North and East Dulwich are operated by Southern.

So the next theory is that these designators simply denote where the station is respective to the place. I know that sounds washy, so I'll give an example:

• With Bromley, the compass directions are given as suffixes. This is to show that the stations serve different parts of Bromley, but are still within Bromley.
• In the case of Acton, the compass directions are prefixes. The stations can also be quite far from each other, and perhaps the areas themselves could be described as separate areas with different identities - West Acton is closer to North Ealing than it is to East Acton by nearly two kilometres, after all. So in this case, the station name merely indicates to passengers "you'll get somewhere close to Acton, but you may not necessarily be in Acton".

But I reckon this is more coincidental than anything, because I doubt the transport planners of their day were this logical. More likely, they thought it sounded nicer or they decided to continue with whatever arbitrary designation they had already come up with. As often happens in life, as I often mutter about on this blog. 

Yet again, absurdism is the answer to all our pointless queries. 

 

 

(And if you want proof that sensible railway operators can avoid these inconsistencies, look no further than Singapore (mainly because that's as far as you can look, really), where all their MRT stations opt for directions to be suffixes, including all their future stations. New York's Subway admittedly isn't particularly great at naming stations anyways, yet even they almost get their cardinal directions entirely right - they're all prefixes, aside from Bronx Park East for some reason. London, with its mere 2/3 majority, is far from perfect).