The Anonymous Widower

The Signs Of Bad Planning On The Gospel Oak To Barking Line Were There

This article in Rail Technology entitled J Murphy & Sons to carry out electrification of Gospel Oak-Barking route, was published on September 29th last year.

I reread the article to see if I could find any reference to the Wightman Road bridge, but there is none.

However, I did find this section.

But Glenn Wallis, secretary of Barking-Gospel Oak Line User Group (BGORUG), said at the time: “Our expert rail industry advisers tell us that for Network Rail to have taken three years to complete GRIP 3 [completed in March this year] indicates that they have not exactly been throwing resources at the job.

“The likelihood of Network Rail completing electrification of the line by mid-2017 is now said to be improbable.”

That looks to me like Network Rail didn’t get all their ducks in a row on this job.

Searching for Wightman Road bridge on the Internet led me to this article on Harringay Online, which is entitled Wightman Road Closure – What Will it Mean? The article was published on December 17th last year. This is said.

Whilst this work has been on the cards for a number of years, its programming to start in Spring 2016 has been driven both by the serendipitous coinciding of the signing off of the nearly £3M budget (from TfL and Network Rail) and the planned electrification works of the Gospel to Barking Oak line.

I find it interesting that in endless articles written about the electrification of the Gospel Oak to Barking Line, the reconstruction of this important road bridge is not mentioned once. This is especially surprising, as bridge reconstructions in Palmerston Road in Walthamstow and Upper Holloway, have been extensively reported.

There was also the major reconstruction of the railway bridge at South Tottenham in December 2014, which I wrote about in VolkerFitzpatrick Are Having A Christmas Party At South Tottenham.

The Palmerston Road bridge was rebuilt in 2014, but it doesn’t appear that any plans to rebuild the Wightman Road bridge surfaced until December 2015.

I think that any major bridge reconstruction would normally be done before the electrification work, as the masts, gantries and possibly wires, would get in the way of the heavy lifts needed for bridge replacement. Also, a sturdy bridge is a convenient place on which to mount the overhead wires.

So it looks like some seriously bad planning to me, that this bridge wasn’t replaced before the electrification started!

The only feasible alternative, is that because of a particular problem, the bridge replacement and the electrification need to be done at the same time.

But if that was the case, then you’d think that the bridge replacement would take place after the complete closure of the line on September 24th, 2016.

But as I said in Wightman Road Bridge Is Falling Down, the bridge should be fully open in September 2016.

Or was the rebuilding of the bridge, just forgotten?

June 13, 2016 - Posted by AnonW | Transport/Travel | Bridges, Driving, Gospel Oak And Barking Line, Project Management, Wightman Road Bridge