Mind the Gap…. in Weltanschauung

Clapham Junction station is one of the busiest railway stations in Europe, it’s the busiest interchange station on the UK mainline rail network and it’s a critical interchange in South London, where three major services converge.  The station has changed little in the last 100 years and over the last 15-20 years passenger congestion has become a major problem.  Station operators regularly have to take action to maintain passenger safety, and the issue is forecast to get worse. This paper presents a novel and innovative Systems Thinking approach to finding a solution to the station’s congestion problem, based on the Soft Systems Methodology (SSM).  There have been several attempts to find a solution over recent years.  The SSM was chosen as there are many stakeholders involved in the problem and the primary challenge facing them was to agree “What” could be done to improve the current problematic situation.  This paper explains how the SSM was successfully applied to this problematical situation, how the approach was integrated with existing railway and governance processes, and concludes that the benefits may be more far reaching than the documented success thus far.