London Reconnections with one post in the last 3 weeks (and that was on
the cable car - yawn!), Mind The Gap going down the loo, and scarcely a
thread of note on here in weeks - there must be something interesting
happening.

To stir some debate, any updates on the following?

- When will London Overground hit the stage where we have no more weekend
engineering? Isn't that due to be around now....? What are they actually
currently doing on the weekend works on the line?

- Also, is there any decent analysis on the usage on London Overground,
esp since the Highbury and Islington stretch has opened? I've used it a
few times recently in the evening peak, and it still seems pretty lightly
used.

- Jubilee Line - I know things have been messy on there to say the least,
but is there any update on when the signalling upgrade will be officially
complete, and there will be no further engineering and full usage of the
quicker times/more trains that it's supposed to achieve? There still
appear to be weekend closures for the next few weeks....

- Dare I ask about the DLR extension and when it might be open....?

In article ,
Paul Corfield wrote:


I have used it a few times at different times of the day and while it
has never been packed out it is pleasing to see people using the new
link. It has certainly got me to parts of South London I have not been
to for years. I suspect it is equally true that South Londoners have
been exploring bits of North London they've not been to for ages.

I don't know about explorers but the trains to/from Highbury are well
used now - I use Dalston Junction a fair amount and recently quite a few
carriages at the front or back (depending on which way) have no free
seats at peak times.

The other day I managed to get to Warren Street from my house in Dalston
in about 25 mins - if it wasn't for the awful Vic/Picc interchange now
at Kings X the Picc line would also be in much easier reach.

E.

I think if
anyone had predicted the current levels of usage back then they'd
have been consigned to a mental institution.

But then so would anyone who predicted levels of immigration even
approaching those seen in the nineties and noughties. And I suggest the
2 are not unrelated , esapecially if you look at the importance of the
NLL for Newham and Hackney.
--
Robin
PM may be sent to rbw0{at}hotmail{dot}com

In article ,
Paul Corfield wrote:


The other day I managed to get to Warren Street from my house in Dalston
in about 25 mins - if it wasn't for the awful Vic/Picc interchange now
at Kings X the Picc line would also be in much easier reach.

Use the old interchange - it's still there! I use it on the way to
work.

How do you get to it?

PS - the 488 might get extended to Dalston Junction in the near future.
A date of end May 2011 is suggested on London Bus Routes.

At last - it's driving us crazy not having the south entrance at DJ
open. I presume they've not been allowed to open it before the bus
arrives but it's been ready for about a year.

E.

On 01/05/2011 14:40, Paul Corfield wrote:
On Sun, 1 May 2011 12:15:29 +0000 (UTC), Martin Petrov
wrote:

London Reconnections with one post in the last 3 weeks (and that was on
the cable car - yawn!), Mind The Gap going down the loo, and scarcely a
thread of note on here in weeks - there must be something interesting
happening.

There isn't that much happening which is really big headline news. Much
as I like London Reconnections it seems to me to have become
increasingly reliant on feed from press offices.

The new Thameslink bridge at Borough High Street is ready to be swung
into position very soon. I took photos of that recently. Lots of
Crossrail related holes are starting to be dug - I noticed a lot of
activity near Westbourne Park yesterday as I travelled out of
Paddington.

To stir some debate, any updates on the following?

- When will London Overground hit the stage where we have no more weekend
engineering? Isn't that due to be around now....? What are they actually
currently doing on the weekend works on the line?

The Sunday NLL services are restored in three weeks time when the Summer
timetable commences. The all day, every day Stratford - Clapham Junction
service starts then as does the enhanced WLL frequency and the x15
Sunday GOBLIN service. It will be very interesting to see how patronage
builds given the vastly improved service levels. I am still surprised
at how busy the NLL and GOBLIN are given what they were like back in the
80s and 90s. I think if anyone had predicted the current levels of usage
back then they'd have been consigned to a mental institution.

- Also, is there any decent analysis on the usage on London Overground,
esp since the Highbury and Islington stretch has opened? I've used it a
few times recently in the evening peak, and it still seems pretty lightly
used.

I am pretty certain that patronage growth is running ahead of schedule.
I think I read in TfL Board or Panel papers that TfL is happy with the
way ELL patronage is going but that excluded the Highbury section. To be
fair it has only been open a couple of months and journey patterns for
new links take longer than that to build up. I am sure we will get some
sort of commentary in due course - Board and Panel meetings are due in
May.

I noticed at Canonbury that the signal at the east end of the westbound
track on the NLL is always indicating a double yellow, even though
trains are coming in from the east. Why is that?

Track 4 of Dalston Junction also has a northbound signal that always
indicates single yellow.

Also on track 4 at Dalston Junction, there appears to be a diverging ROW
that looks like it is headed east. Does anybody know what that is for?
Is this to stable trains in the future or for eventual eastbound turnout
onto the NLL? IMHO, that it looks like that would be for prospective
service movements, rather than for revenue.

In article ,
Paul Corfield wrote:


At last - it's driving us crazy not having the south entrance at DJ
open. I presume they've not been allowed to open it before the bus
arrives but it's been ready for about a year.

Well I can understand that. I assume that London Buses will control the
bus station and therefore they need to make it operational. There's no
point if there are no buses to serve it!

Thanks for King's X info.

re DJ south entrance - there's a lot of point for accessing the trains,
not the buses. Apart from the extra walk, the pavement round the corner
of Dalston Lane and Kingsland road is narrow and uneven, so diverting
some walkers would be useful.

Incidentally at that corner I see the ghost bike marking the poor guy
killed there recently has been moved - and I see now this is because the
council is reportedly going to redesign this dangerous junction. But I
can't see how as there just isn't much space.

http://www.lfgss.com/thread64141.html

E.

wrote in message
...

I noticed at Canonbury that the signal at the east end of the westbound
track on the NLL is always indicating a double yellow, even though trains
are coming in from the east. Why is that?

Track 4 of Dalston Junction also has a northbound signal that always
indicates single yellow.

I'm pretty sure the above features are because much of the signalling is
bidirectional. Something said in uk.railway a while ago reported that the
aspects displayed for the wrong direction movements don't just show
permanent reds until a train happens along.

Also on track 4 at Dalston Junction, there appears to be a diverging ROW
that looks like it is headed east. Does anybody know what that is for? Is
this to stable trains in the future or for eventual eastbound turnout onto
the NLL? IMHO, that it looks like that would be for prospective service
movements, rather than for revenue.

It is definitely future proofing to allow a future single track South to
East curve, but as you suggest it doesn't seem to allow for a regular
service, there'd probably be two many crossing conflicts (at the DJ throat
and also on the NLL at a potential eastern junction) to timetable a regular
service.

Paul S

"Martin Petrov" wrote in message

London Reconnections with one post in the last 3 weeks (and that was
on the cable car - yawn!), Mind The Gap going down the loo, and
scarcely a thread of note on here in weeks - there must be something
interesting happening.

To stir some debate, any updates on the following?

Here's another rumour/suggestion:
The May edition of LURS Underground News has a letter from a regular
correspondent, now based in Tasmania (!) reporting a proposal to divert
new S stock deliveries over the next year from the Met to the H&C and
District to replace C stock earlier than planned. There would be several
advantages:

- Olympic venue stations (eg West Ham, Southfields) would benefit from
the higher capacity, air-conditioned comfort of S7 vs tired C6 trains
- Amersham commuters would get to keep their higher seating capacity A8
trains for a year or so longer
- More Londoners would get to travel on the new air-conditioned, higher
capacity S stock trains in the run-up to the 2012 mayoral election. No C
stock user is likely to complain about the switch, unlike users of the
1967 and A stock trains, who see their new trains as mixed blessings.

This would probably be achieved by temporarily removing one car from new
production S8 trains, so these early S8-1 stock trains would have some
transverse seating, unlike the planned eventual S7 stock trains intended
for the inner city routes. The editor, Brian Hardy, comments that the
early users of S8-1 stock trains with transverse seats may not be best
pleased when these are later replaced by all-longitudinal seating S7
trains.

If this is confirmed, C stock trains will start being scrapped while
much older A stock trains remain in front-line service.

Incidentally at that corner I see the ghost bike marking the poor guy
killed there recently has been moved - and I see now this is because the
council is reportedly going to redesign this dangerous junction. But I
can't see how as there just isn't much space.

http://www.lfgss.com/thread64141.html

E.

As you mention that, I always had a plan in my head that they could have
helped out Dalston Junction tremendously by removing the solicitor's
office on the NW corner of the junction and using the space behind it to
expand the junction - while it might not have been "safer" for cyclists
(or maybe it could be!) it would have surely helped out the congestion at
that corner which gets pretty bunged up with buses. Though once they
built new apartments behind the solicitor's office in the space, there
seems zero chance of it happening. (I appreciate that there wasn't any
chance anyway, but *I* thought it would be a great idea....!)

I also hoped that when they knocked down the shops at Graham Road/Mare
St, they were going to widen the junction, but they just built more
ridiculously small shops (and flats) on the same spot.

London Reconnections with one post in the last 3 weeks (and that was on
the cable car - yawn!), Mind The Gap going down the loo, and scarcely a
thread of note on here in weeks - there must be something interesting
happening.

There isn't that much happening which is really big headline news. Much
as I like London Reconnections it seems to me to have become
increasingly reliant on feed from press offices.

Aye - I'm not personally that fussed about "which company receives which
contract", and for someone pretty well plugged in (like yourself) I could
imagine that you'd read very little stuff on there that you wouldn't find
out about already - though it does form a nice single place where someone
else has done the hard work of sifting through guff, and "reporting" any
nuggets of interest. U Thant used to do an excellent job of that, where
he'd read it all, and find the single sentence in a 40 page doc that was
of genuine interest.

The new Thameslink bridge at Borough High Street is ready to be swung
into position very soon. I took photos of that recently. Lots of
Crossrail related holes are starting to be dug - I noticed a lot of
activity near Westbourne Park yesterday as I travelled out of
Paddington.

Again, this is probably the "problem" at the moment - there's obviously
shedloads going on for Crossrail/Thameslink, but it's so far into the
future that the's not so much to excite for now. The bridge at Borough
does sound interesting though - I went past Borough Market recently and
was noticed that the pillars to hold up the new stretch of bridge were
looking good. Re Crossrail holes - we're still quite a while from the TBMs
going into the ground though, aren't we?


To stir some debate, any updates on the following?

- When will London Overground hit the stage where we have no more
weekend engineering? Isn't that due to be around now....? What are they
actually currently doing on the weekend works on the line?

The Sunday NLL services are restored in three weeks time when the Summer
timetable commences. The all day, every day Stratford - Clapham Junction
service starts then as does the enhanced WLL frequency and the x15
Sunday GOBLIN service. It will be very interesting to see how patronage
builds given the vastly improved service levels. I am still surprised
at how busy the NLL and GOBLIN are given what they were like back in the
80s and 90s. I think if anyone had predicted the current levels of usage
back then they'd have been consigned to a mental institution.

When I lived in Hackney, I gave up getting the NLL during the rush hour,
as the experience was so unpleasant, it felt better to get the bus to
Bethnal Green and crush my way onto the Central Line than get the NLL to
H&I. However, I got onto a train recently at 6:15 at H&I to Hackney, and
it made all the difference to have the extra room (and probably a more
even timetable). Given such a wretched service (and this was only 6 or so
years ago) I can believe that the 80s and 90s didn't have good usage.

- Also, is there any decent analysis on the usage on London Overground,
esp since the Highbury and Islington stretch has opened? I've used it a
few times recently in the evening peak, and it still seems pretty
lightly used.

I am pretty certain that patronage growth is running ahead of schedule.
I think I read in TfL Board or Panel papers that TfL is happy with the
way ELL patronage is going but that excluded the Highbury section. To be
fair it has only been open a couple of months and journey patterns for
new links take longer than that to build up. I am sure we will get some
sort of commentary in due course - Board and Panel meetings are due in
May.

I have used it a few times at different times of the day and while it
has never been packed out it is pleasing to see people using the new
link. It has certainly got me to parts of South London I have not been
to for years. I suspect it is equally true that South Londoners have
been exploring bits of North London they've not been to for ages.

I still suspect that people *really* don't know about it, nor what it
could open to them. And I also think that it suffers from not QUITE going
to places (eg, not QUITE going to Canary Wharf, and not QUITE going to
the City) - but even if numbers don't grow as quickly as planned, they do
have one trick up their sleeve, being that they could reclassify
Shoreditch High Street as zone 2, and a marketing campaign on a number of
places to advertise the savings that could be made if you work in the
City (or even Canary Wharf) could build up a bit of extra patronage?

- Dare I ask about the DLR extension and when it might be open....?

I think the view seems to be Summer, about a year before the Olympics.
The DLR site has a short update saying this dated 13/4/11. I would
expect a date in July given that the major work to get three car working
on the Beckton branch is now complete and efforts can be turned to
getting the final stages of testing sorted out.

So was getting 3 car running on the Beckton branch a deal-breaker in
terms of opening up the new section then?