please empty your brain below

Come to think of it, what exactly was the problem with the NLL from Stratford to North Woolwich. If Overground had come sooner, would TfL have been so eager to mess with it?

"Come to think of it, what exactly was the problem with the NLL from Stratford to North Woolwich"
How long have you got? Hopeless service frequency. Clapped out trains. Services cancelled at the drop of a hat - and cancelled way too often.

"If Overground had come sooner"
But if didn't.

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Meanwhile - Star Lane. Isn't that also handy for the huge post office sorting depot - that previously was all but impossible to reach except by car or bike? I remember having to slog my way there to pay some customs duty on a parcel - what a trek.

As a Londoner I'm always happy to see new bits of transport infrastructure, but with this stretch I can't help thinking that people in other parts of the country have a point: how can these shiny new stations every 200 yards parallel to the Jubilee Line be justified when the DfT routinely turns down requests for anything new beyond the M25? If I was a Liverpudlian denied my entire proposed tram system I'd be spitting at the screen about now.

Island resident, you are confusing the configuration of a particular piece of infrastructure with how it was run. If the considered solution to a rail link not being run properly is to spend a fortune on it to convert it to something else, no wonder this country is economic toast.

I lI liked the old NLL service to North Woolwich via Silvertown, and cannot see a lot of benefit in running this new DLR line alongside the Jubilee line. Perhaps it would have been easier to extend the Jubilee line to Stratford International.
Still once new stations are opened it often seems that other developments follow so in a few years those platforms may not be so empty.
As for the remaining bit of the NLL that went through the Conaught Tunnel and Silvertown, I think Crossrail is due to run along those old trackbeds.


Re: NLL, I believe the Connaught Tunnel had to be shut because the central iron section was badly corroded. Crossrail are spending a lot of money on rehabilitating it (as well as the tunnel in the other direction, which had been unsafe and out of use for years) before trains are allowed to run again. In addition, there's the King George V extension of the DLR, which was conceived as a direct replacement for the service, offering a better connection to the airport, hence effectively making North Woolwich and Silvertown redundant.

Re: Canning Town, the analogy I'm thinking of here is Earl's Court westbound while there was all that scaffolding everywhere and temporary train indicators which were brand new but pretending to be Victorian like the old ones. You know: shuffle, shuffle, check...

Jubilee has failed this evening, so the new service should get a good test...
I see I was wrong about that post office depot at Star Lane - it seems to be abandoned now.

"cannot see a lot of benefit in running this new DLR line alongside the Jubilee line"

Indeed, the Canning Town - Stratford section of the JLE is looking increasingly redundant, as the DLr for short distances, and Crossrail (for Stratford - Central London) would seem to do much of what the JLE currently does. (Not to mention District Line from West Ham to Central London, DLR via Bow Church for Stratford - Canary).

Instead of the proposed DLR extension, would it make more sense to divert the Jub to Dagenham?

Well, the Jubilee link from south of the river and central London to West Ham and Stratford is an incredibly useful - and incredibly popular - way to get to main line trains (be they c2c or NXEA) to Essex. When there are engineering works on lines in Central London all the more so, but even when there are none, it's still incredibly useful. Which isn't to say that a separate branch to Dagenham (and, why not, eventually, Thamesmead) might not be useful - indeed more useful than a DLR extension, perhaps, that far out of town.

Plus the capacity of the Jubilee line from Canning Town to Stratford must be several times that of the DLR.

And the reconstruction that would have been required to send the jubilee from Stratford to S'ford I'tn'l would have been immense - new tunnels or flyover from quite a way outside the station, and remember that the DLR can cope with much steeper gradients and turns than the tube.

I think the point is that this was essentially quite cheap, using a lot of existing infrastructure than only required relatively limited overhauls, and new DLR stations are much cheaper than tube ones. I'd expect there to be a fair amount of local travel on the new line (in some cases displaced from buses), but the Jubilee line will remain a much more major artery.

@ Timbo - the huge numbers of people using the Jubilee Line from Docklands to interchange with National Rail services will more than justify the retention of the eastern part of the route. I was very surprised at the numbers of people heading in to town at 1700 on Wednesday at West Ham - I expected the flow to be heavier in the other direction. There were also large numbers trekking across the main bridge towards the surface lines.

The less said about passenger volumes at Stratford the better - the place is bordering on insanity most of the time. I wonder where everyone comes from!

There are shortly due to be around an extra 50,000 jobs and 17,000 homes in the area around Stratford, plus lots of new homes in the Royal Docks, especially on the Airport line. There are fair plans for jobs around Star Lane and Stratford High St too.

So the benefit of DLR was never to replace the NLL exactly, nor the Jubilee line - that's missing the point. It's to connect Woolwich/SE London & the Royal Docks to all those new jobs up the Lea Valley & at Stratford.

As always, DLR comes first and people wonder why... But then some years later you get your Canary Wharf, your Millennium Quarter, or ExCeL, or Deal's Gateway, or Tidewinds, and the trains are full up and everybody wonders why DLR didn't make them longer earlier or run more of them...

Can i plug this video? I can! thx... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4V_hoK8GuZA











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