Saturday 26 April 2008

DLR improvement works

I've been emailed  a document that includes several interesting bits about DLR current projects, mainly regarding service changes during it.


Royal Mint Street Junction remodelling. This is where the Tower Gateway and Bank branches split. Currently the route to Tower Gateway is a single lead design which limits capacity, and the two tracks west of there are used bi-drectionally to reach each platform, rather than one for eastbound and one for westbound. Hopefully these two problems will be fixed - they'll have to be given Tower Gateway will in future only have one platform.

Single-line working south of Crossharbour. For two months starting this June the Stratford-Lewisham service will terminate at Crossharbour and the Bank-Lewisham service will terminate at Island Gardens, with cross-platform interchange to an Island Gardens-Lewisham shuttle, as well as parallel bus services. These services will only use one track, enabling the platform extension work to take place on the other.

Canning Town junction rebuild. The new junction for the Stratford International Extension is going in east of Canning Town. From 21 April trains from King George V go to Tower Gateway and trains from Beckton terminate at Poplar. From 30 June trains from King George V switch back to Bank, with Beckton services cut back further to Canning Town. This doesn't seem to reduce the number of trains over the junction, but whatever.

Bank station closing. For 5 weeks starting Christmas Day 2009, Bank will be closed for works relating to the three-car project. This appears to indicate a delay in the start of three-car running (scheduled for late 2009).

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

christmas day 2009? shouldn't all the work be completed by then? :S

JN said...

May I ask where this email came from?

Anonymous said...

Thanks, very interesting detail. This does correspond with the info now on TfL's site, albeit they have been vaguer about the operational details:
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/livetravelnews/realtime/dlr/dlr-all-future.html

Anonymous said...

DLR staff at Tower Gateway recently handed out a leaflet on the forthcoming disruption – which included a lot more information than can be found on the dlr/tfl web sites.
Concerning the ‘parallel bus services’ during the period of single line working south of Crossharbour, I don’t see how the buses can be truly parallel. The replacement bus on the Isle of Dogs can run from Mudchute via Crossharbour but then cannot reach South Quay. Marsh Wall (the road running past South Quay) is now single direction – eastbound only – ironically enough the restriction is to facilitate construction works for the new DLR station at South Quay. Therefore the replacement bus will have to take some other route – presumably running via Manchester Road to Billingsgate market and then into Canary Wharf. Meanwhile, south of the river, the replacement buses will run to North Greenwich. So I suspect both replacement bus routes are going to be an awful lot less convenient than a direct DLR train journey.
Given that the Lewisham to Canary Wharf section is choc a block in the rush hours – I think 30 June will be an interesting day….