The New Beam Park Station
Beam Park station is a new station that is to support a large housing development of the same name, which will be built on the London, Tilbury and Southend Railway, between Dagenham Dock and Rainham stations.
This map shows the development, with the station numbered at six.
Beam Park
The station is the Westernmost number on the Southern boundary of Beam Park.
- It is possibly located where Kent Avenue crosses over the railway.
- Note that some sources call it Beam Reach station.
- With up to 5,000 new homes in the area, I would think that the station is needed.
I think it is interesting that London is getting two new stations; Barking Riverside and Beam Park, in the same area of London.
An Excursion To Shoeburyness
After I saw the Class 387/3 trains for c2c at Crewe, I thought that if the weather was nice, I’d take a trip to Shoeburyness. So as the weather was good on Sunday, I bought an extension ticket for under a tenner and went.
It is very much a trip into deepest Essex.
A few points.
- As I changed trains at Whitechapel station, it looked like they’re starting to fit out the passageways.
- I was surprised to see lots of disused space on the District Line platforms between Barking and Upminster. I guess that was so they could run long trains all the way to Shoeburyness.
- There are quite a few level crossings on the line.
- The Shoeburyness Depot isn’t small.
- The track to Tilbury Riverside station is still visible.
- There appears to be electrification gantries on the single-track leading to Platform 1 at Barking station, which Gospel Oak to Barking trains have used as a terminus for years.
- I came back via Stratford to do some shopping at Eastfield.
Unlike many other rail companies and possibly because they are a smaller franchise, c2c doesn’t seem to have too many published plans and ambitions, other than to keep satisfying their customers.
But then there is very little of an expansionist nature that they could do!
- In future years, there may be a need for a station at London Gateway.
- Would housing and leisure developments around Tilbury Riverside, make it worthwhile reopening the station.
- Much of the infrastructure work will be minor improvements for safety or to gain a few seconds here and there.
- There could be a program of level crossing removal.
- A new station will probably be built at Beam Park, to support housing development.
But there is no major project, like some proposed by companies like Chiltern Railways.
How Could The Twenty Mile Per Hour Limit Be More Strongly Enforced?
Where I live in Hackney, in common with some other London boroughs, there is a lot of twenty mile per hour zones.
20 MPH Signs In Hackney
As the picture shows they are well signed.
But this doesn’t stop drivers and motorcyclists rushing around, often quite a lot in excess of the allowed limit!
Councils have been criticised recently over using box junction cameras as cash machines, as this article on the BBC details. The title of London councils raise millions through box junction fines summarises the article well!
It may be an erroneous observation on my part, but as London gets more congested and the traffic slower in Central London, it does seem that when the traffic eases as it often does in Hackney, that drivers take more than a legal advantage.
Excessive speed also seems to have got worse in this area, since the 20 mph limit was brought in. Red rags and bulls come to mind.
Why can’t we set up a network of automatic number plate recognition cameras, that locate and timestamp vehicles in the 20 mph zones.
Computers would then check all the timings and issue tickets to those, who obviously got from A to B at over the speed limit. Just like cameras on motorways around road works.
It could be a very nice little earner for councils.
An Interloper At Euston
I took these pictures as I came through Euston on Saturday night, as I returned from Blackburn.
The engine is an immaculate Class 86 locomotive, which was built in the 1960s.
According to Wikipedia, Freightliner still have ten upwards of the locomotives in service and I recently saw two working together on a long intermodal freight service through Dalston Kingsland station.
They may have been bog-standard electric locomotives in their day, but surely if they can be restored and kept running, they are probably a lot more affotdable for main line use by charters, than anything else.
I would assume that E3137 had been hauling a charter into Euston. Long may it continue to do this.
The Anonymous Widower 