On Tue, 9 Oct 2007, lonelytraveller wrote:

On 9 Oct, 16:44, Tom Anderson wrote:
On Mon, 8 Oct 2007, alex_t wrote:

...have a look at what Google thinks the DLR does north of Bow Church

Amazing, it's like 1930s all over again!

It got me thinking, though - maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to
resurrect that route.

There's a motorway on top of it.

It's an A road, and it doesn't take up *all* the space - there are little
bits of unused land, which look big enough for tracks to me. Maybe.

Yes, i know it was built as part of the motorway box.

The route from Bow Church to the Isle of Dogs is (i think) a former
railway route, so with a bit of work, you could turn the whole thing
back into an NR line, and send some or all NLL trains to Poplar instead
of Stratford.

I thought the NLL was being cannibalised - the north and west bits to
Dalston for Orbirail (including the far north bit of the ELL extension),
the middle bits from Dalston for the Chelsea-Hackney line, and the far
east bits beyond Stratford for the DLR?

The bit beyond Stratford has indeed gone to the DLR. The NLL is itself
part of the Orbirail plan (i hate that name), rather than being a victim
of it. There was a suggestion in 1995 for a cheapo Chelney that would
assimilate the NLL to Stratford, but that never got any further than a
line on a map - and recently, the safeguarding on the 1991 route, which is
in tube all the way to Leytonstone, was renewed. If Chelsea-Hackney ever
does get built, it seems unlikely that it'll be using the NLL (although
who can say, really). Moreover, the NLL as it stands is increasingly
popular, for some reason, and i can't see it getting broken up in any way
- quite the opposite, more trains, services extended to more remote
destinations, etc.

tom

--
It is a laborious madness, and an impoverishing one, the madness of
composing vast books. -- Jorge Luis Borges