7/10 For Day Zero For The New Overground Lines
You might ask how I can give the 7/10 for the new Overground lines, when the service hasn’t officially started.
But I didn’t see anything wrong and there was a lot of positivity from staff and passengers. Here’s a few things I noticed.
1. Freedom Passes
Transport for London obviously know their passenger model and the Freedom Pass holder I spoke to who said she would use the line from Enfield at all times of the day, must mean that TfL know they can accommodate the extra passengers, who will turn up early in the morning and in the rush hour to go home.
Perhaps, the small modal shift say from vehicular transport to trains, will actually free up the roads.
I’ll just let the data do the talking, when passenger numbers are published in a few months.
2. The Deep Clean At Enfield Town
It looks like they’ve deep cleaned Enfield Town station for the launch and if this is indicative of the standard we’ll see at the piles of bricks, that double as stations, they’ve inherited from Abellio Greater Anglia, then the good burghers of East London will be pleasantly surprised.
To be hard on London Overground, choosing Enfield Town station for the launch was a bit of a cheat, as the station is naturally step-free and it was built in 1957, as opposed to the 1840s for most of the stations.
It is certainly built and cleaned to a standard, that few if any, would complain about.
3. Staff
The staff seemed positive in a lot of ways, just as they do in a typical Overground or Underground station.
4. Trains
The trains, I travelled in today were clean and one lady thought that Abellio Greater Anglia could have done more to keep them clean.
If London Overground follow the cleaning procedures they use on the North and East London Lines, where litter is regularly collected throughout the day, the passengers will be pleased.
5.Future Overcrowding
From experiences with the current Overground, I can see a small problem. And that is overcrowding.
But whereas on the North and East London Lines providing more capacity is a problem, on the Lea Valley Lines, all platforms can take eight car trains, as they do in the rush hour and you can always couple two Class 315 trains or Class 317 trains together. And as Class 345 trains are delivered for Crossrail, more of these will come available.
6. Future Investment
London Overground have acquired these routes from Abellio Greater Anglia, with all the skill of an East End trader who sold car aerials in Ridley Road Market.
They have similar costs to Abellio Greater Anglia in terms of trains, track charges and stations, but they get more of the revenue, as they are a not-for-profit organisation and don’t have external owners.
So they get the benefit of all the investment they make, provided of course it is sound! But Transport for London have said they are going to put £25million into the Lea Valley Lines.
But it won’t be just Transport for London putting money into the Overground. The proposed new station at Hackney Wick has a variety of sources of funding and I think we’ll see other stations built by external developers, so that their houses, offices or industrial units are more desirable.
In this section in Wikipedia, it says that the current trains will be replaced by thirty-nine new trains in 2017. New trains always attract more passengers, but unlike the current Overground lines, adding more capacity will not involve any expensive platform lengthening.
7. Everybody Will Want Overground
The only serious long term problem, they have is that if the Lea Valley Line takeover is as successful as the current Overground, then there will be a clamour for other lines to be taken over, or at least run on the same lines.
I have a feeling that there are going to be some very unhappy train operating companies, who lose some quite lucrative routes in the next few years.
Testing The Journey Planners
I’ve just tested the Network Rail and Transport for London Journey Planners for the first London Overground journey from Liverpool Street to Walthamstow Central tomorrow.
They gave the same time of 07:33. I’ll be on the train, if the barriers agree.
A First Glimpse Of The New Tube And Rail Map
There was a copy of this map at Enfield Town station.
Incidentally, I probably look at this map more than I ever look at the standard tube map, as I generally need it when coming home from an unfamiliar rail station south of the Thames.
One of these maps should be prominently displayed at all rail stations in at least the grester South East of England. This was originally said to me by a Virgin employee at somewhere like Coventry, as they’re always getting asked where unusual London stations are by passengers. So he thought one on the London-bound platform would be a good idea and passengers could look it up for themselves.
The Orange is Starting To Appear
Today, I took the Enfield branch of the Lea Valley Lines up to Enfield Town station, to see whether there was any signs of rebranding for the London Overground.
As you can see there were!
As one picture shows, they were changing what they could today for the start of service tomorrow.
Boris is coming to Enfield Town station on Monday, so they’ve obviously cleaned that station first. And very clean it was too, with lots of new shelters and seats.
The only problem was the new rubber floor had the smell of new rubber, but that will dissipate by Monday.
I chatted for a few minutes to a member of staff and to a couple of fellow travellers. All seemed very pleased and a fellow Freedom Pass holder was pleased that she could now use her pass before 09:30 in the morning.
London Overground: A Day’s Walk Around the Ginger Line by Iain Sinclair
The Evening Standard has a review of this book on their web site.
It looks like the book could be a good read for anybody who loves London and like me is seduced by the charms of London’s superb remodelling of the old railways into the London Overground.
Looking at the title, it would have to be a very fast walk to go round the Overground in a day, but one of the developments recently has been the opening of quality budget hotels like the Premier Inn in Dalston, close to me and virtually next door to where my maternal grandmother Upcott was born.
A Positive View Of The Overground Takeover
On Sunday, the London Overground will take over some of the Lea Valley Lines, that are currently being run by Abellio Greater Anglia.
I am optimistic, but don’t take my word for it, read this article in the Guardian. Even the title is optimistic – Clean, reliable and integrated: all change for neglected rail services in London.
This is a typical extract from the article.
Peter Austin, LOROL’s managing director, admits: “Change won’t happen overnight. But we’re determined to bring it up to the same standard. We’ll apply the same model to those lines: first to last staffing, new uniform, cleaner stations.
Austin confesses to having had doubts about the Overground’s potential when it started: “When we first went to Shepherd’s Bush we couldn’t believe how big the station was, we thought it was overengineered – but now we’ve just helped TfL open up a second entrance there … the increase in passenger demand has been phenomenal.”
Similarly, he says, on first visit he was sceptical of the immediate prospects for Imperial Wharf, a new station in west London built in 2009. “It has transformed beyond all recognition and a new [rail] hub has been part of driving that.
“Would urban regeneration have happened without the railway? Probably. But as successful, probably not.”
I think you can say that Peter Austin has been realistic, but then that is an attitude that means passengers are prepared to give the Overground a chance.
The last statement about urban regeneration is definitely correct here in Dalston. There is still the odd problem, but no-one seems to fear coming home late at night on the Overground.
Let’s hope that the improvement continues.
My only worry for the Overground is will Transport for London be able to find the budget to improve the terrible fifteen and the others that I let off, as being not-too-bad.
But the Overground has one thing going for it, that a train operator like Abellio Greater Anglia doesn’t! And that is that the boroughs like Hackney are prepared to co-operate and contribute to station improvements, as Hackney are doing at Hackney Wick station.
The High Meads Loop At Stratford
This piece started life as an investigation into a rail line connecting the North London and Lea Valley Lines at Stratford, but it ended up as more of an index to what is happening to trains around Stratford and up the Lea Valley.
If you travel on the North London Line from Hackney Wick station to Stratford station, you’ll see a rail line going off to the North side of the line under the Olympic Village.
High Meads Loop At Stratford Joins North London Line
If you travel up the Lea Valley Line, you’ll see the other end of the line.
High Meads Loop At Stratford Joins Lea Valley Line
This is the High Meads Loop and it is generally used to move freight trains. You can see it on this Google Earth image, as it curls round the western side of Stratford International station, starting from the triangular junction to the east of Hackney Wick station and the River Lea and eventually joining the Lea Valley Line between Stratford and the under-construction Lea Bridge station.
High Meads Loop
I walked around the area today starting from Stratford International DLR station and much of it is hidden under concrete in East Village.
What has always surprised me, is that this line doesn’t appear to have provision for a station, especially as it could connect to so many important places in the area.
But then it does seem to me that the design of the rail system in the area of the Olympic Park and Village didn’t put getting an efficient railway first. These questions must be answered.
1. Why was a fully-functional International station, built at Stratford International and has then never been used to run services to the Continent through the Channel Tunnel? This is answered partially in this section in Wikipedia about International services at the station. If Kent gets two stations at Ebbsfleet and Ashford International, then surely East London and Essex deserves one too!
2. Why too, is the link between the two Stratford stations, so much of an afterthought? Today, when I came back from my walk, there was the inevitable lost soul, who’d taken a train to Stratford International and needed to get a train to Romford. And his Narional Rail ticket wasn’t valid for the one-stop hop on the Docklands Light Railway. But this is East London and the Train Captain told him to ride Don’t get me wrong, I like the DLR, but surely for the Olympics we could have put a more spectacular or at least a better link between the two stations?
3. In some ways too, I often think that they used the high-speed service from St. Pancras to Stratford, just to give it something to do. For a start foreign day-trippers to the Olympics should have come straight into Stratford International on Eurostar. Why wasn’t this arranged?
4. I am pretty local to the Olympic Park and can get a train from Dalston Kingsland to Stratford. I went to the Olympic Park that way a couple of times, but to get home, the powers-that-be either sent you to Stratford International or West Ham. In one instance I walked to Clapton and got a bus home as everything was congested. The arrangements might have worked for getting to Central London, but they weren’t good for locals, who like me wanted to walk out of the Olympic Park and then probably get a bus home. One solution would have been to put more capacity on the North London Line, by extending the Class 378 trains to five cars, as is now being done. Why wasn’t this done on the North London Line in time for the Olympics? Especially, as the line has always been overcrowded compared to the East London Line.
5. Soon after the Olympics, I met a big cheese in the Docklands Light Railway on a train. He felt and I probably will agree with him, that the DLR overperformed in the Olympics and dear old Cinderella didn’t miss a beat. I suspect though that to many she has more than a touch of Minnie Mouse, but to East Londoners and knowledgeable visitors, she is the way to travel, where you get a grandstand view much of the time. So why wasn’t more use made of the DLR for the Olympics by designing it into the heart of the Olympic Park?
6. We also had the farce of if you went to the Olympics from St. Pancras, you had to go through the Eastfield shopping centre to get into the Olympic Park. Why? Was the Olympics about sport or shopping?
7. Look at this Google Earth image of the Eastfield shopping centre.
Eastfield
Notice how the DLR goes under the centre and emerges on the west side before curving round to get to the station at Stratford International. It has always puzzled me that no provision has been made for an extra station on this loop. It strikes me that the developers feel most shoppers will bring their cars or not buy anything heavy. I would use the centre more if it was easier to get home from say John Lewis with perhaps something weighing ten or twenty kilos. Why was this extension of the DLR designed to be never more than a timid link?
If I look at some of the rail designs of the last few years, I get the impression, that they are less timid and not designed to be easiest to construct. The London Overground in particular has been innovative in some of its infrastructure to design affordable and efficient railways. Look at the Clapham Kiss as just one example.
In any developments to improve Stratford, there is also a thundering herd of elephants in the room, which will probably have more effect on what happens than any politician.
And that is Crossrail!
What is planned now is only Phase 1 of Crossrail and future developments will give Crossrail a bigger share of London’s passengers and even more influence.
1. Crossrail has been designed to take slightly longer trains and with its massively long platforms, the capacity of the system is quite a bit bigger than what we’ll see when the line opens.
2. Crossrail can also take more trains through the core, so we’ll definitely see extra branches on the line. Ebbsfleet on HS1 is safeguarded and Tring on the West Coast Main Line is being seriously studied.
3. Crossrail lacks an easy and hopefully cross-platform interchange to high speed services to Europe and in the future to the North. An easy interchange to HS1 at St. Pancras and Stratford is impossible, but one at Ebbsfleet could be incorporated with the extension of Crossrail to the station.
So what do I think should be done to sort out the sins of the pre-Olympic rail system development in the Stratford area?
1. A Better Connection Between The Two Stratford Stations And To The Eastfield Shopping Centre.
Look at this Google Earth image of Stratford station.
Stratford Layout
The DLR branch between Stratford International and the core system passes underneath the rail lines, including Crossrail and the Overground , and the Central Line, at right angles.
The passenger connection between the DLR and the lines passing through above is not easy, although it is step-free. If you take the wrong tunnel from the rail lines, you end up on the wrong DLR platform.
As the two subways are one each side of the DLR lines, couldn’t something better be done to make this interchange easier? For a start how about a sign saying take these stairs from the through platform to get your DLR service to Stratford International?
I also think that there should have been a station on the DLR line underneath Eastfield. It would be interesting to know what the shopping centre thinks.
2. Will We Ever See International Services From The Station That Has The Word In Its Name?
If Crossrail extends to Ebbsfleet, this will take a big chunk out of High Speed passengers to Stratford and St. Pancras. If say you lived in East Kent and worked in the City or the West End of London, why would you not take a convenient service, High Speed or otherwise, to Ebbsfleet and then change to Crossrail for where you actually needed to go?
Stratford International also lacks an easy link to all of the other services at Stratford and especially to Crossrail, even if the DLR link is improved. But any cross-platform link is impossible!
Passengers will get increasingly fed up with second-rate stations, when they see some of the modern ones that work, like Reading and Kings Cross. St. Pancras may look spectacular, but it is A Fur Coat And No Knickers Station
So Stratford International, which I find an unwelcoming place, could become a massive white elephant, that had its brief moment of fame at the Olympics.
3. The Moans In North East London
Read the various Internet forums and web pages and some of the biggest complaints are about the poor transport links to and from places in North East London and the Lea Valley, like Walthamstow, Leyton and Tottenham.
Things are improving,
The transfer of the Lea Valley Lines to an operator who cares about passengers in London and the uprating of the Victoria Line later this year, can’t be anything but positive.
But more could be done!
4. A Shoreditch High Street Station On The Central Line?
After Crossrail has bedded in, will we finally see a connection between the Central Line and the East London Line at Shoreditch High Street? I think we will as because Crossrail is an effective by-pass for the Central Line from Stratford to Liverpool Street, the Central Line could probably be shut for several months under Shoreditch High Street, whilst the link is created without causing too much inconvenience to passengers, except for those using Bethnal Green. But even those would have the new Whitechapel Crossrail station a couple of bus stops away
5. Extending the DLR to Tottenham Hale
This was mooted a few years ago and a document called DLR Horizon 2020 talked about extending the system from Stratford International up alongside the Lea Valley Lines to Tottenham Hale station. This article on London Reconnections describes the proposal like this.
Extend the DLR from Stratford International to Tottenham Hale via the Lea Valley. The route would run alongside the current Lea Valley rail lines where possible and the line would serve the Olympic site and feature additional stops at Lea Bridge and Walthamstow Marshes.
It may be a worthy idea, but does it really make economic sense, when according to what you believe a lot of things may be happening in the area.
- A new Lea Bridge station and a new Hall Farm Curve are being created.
- A rebuilt Hackney Wick station is being planned.
- Crossrail 2 is being promoted and could serve the area.
- Transport for London will be taking their first bite out of the Lea Valley Lines in the very near future.
- There could be a a major upgrade in the Tottenham Hale area, which is described in this document on the Haringey Council web site.
- According to this Future section in Wikipedia for the Tottenham Hale station, funding is being sought to add extra tracks to the Lea Valley Line so that four trains per hour can be run on the line.
When the heavy rail expansion is sorted and the area between Tottenham and Walthamstow is developed as housing and a very large wetland and leisure area, the case for a Lea Valley Light Railway may be stronger.
6. Using The High Meads Loop For Passengers
Trains can use the High Meads Loop to pass across the northern side of Stratford Intergenerational station. This Google Earth image of the station, shows the lines passing round the North-Western corner.
Stratford International Station
Note also the Docklands Light Railway station on the northern side of the deep station box, virtually above the DLR logo.
I think with a will a station could be built on the High Meads Loop just to the north of the DLR station, which would allow trains to travel between the North London Line and the Lea Valley Line calling at a station close to the International station and possibly a station in the East Village.
But as with extending the DLR from Stratford International would it all be worthwhile?
Unless of course some developer wants to do a mega-development and pays for the trains and the infrastructure.
7. Conclusion
I think we should leave well enough alone and accept that Stratford International station is probably a shining white elephant.
In the meantime, we should make it easier to transfer between one station too many at Stratford.
The High Meads Loop is probably best left to sort out the freight that has to travel through the area until someone does the right thing and builds a proper freight line that avoids the North London and the Gospel Oak to Barking Lines.
Transport for London Serves Up A Delicious Turkey
The local media is starting to pick up East London’s train revolution, if this article from This is Local London entitled Lower fares for overground stops that include Southbury and Turkey Street is anything to go by. I’m pleased to say that I spotted this one earlier.
It will be interesting to see if traffic goes up at stations like Southbury and Turkey Street.
I think the Overground takeover will define one of the battlefields for the next London Mayor in 2016. Who can prove they can offer most lines might come under TfL control, will gain an advantage at the ballot box.
Westfield Gets Its Own Overground Station
Shepherd’s Bush, Kensington Olympia, West Brompton and Imperial Wharf stations are the four stations on the West London Line of the Overground, that also served by services between Clapham Junction and Milton Keynes.
Shepherds Bush station has just been updated with longer platforms and a second entrance.
As the pictures show, the new new entrance is by the Westfield shopping centre and there is a light-controlled crossing across the road.
It will be interesting to see how customers take to the new entrance. I go to Westfield occasionally and it is usually because I’m coming back from somewhere in West London and need to buy some food or have lunch. As the centre has a Waitrose and a Carluccio’s in the corner near the station, I would probably use the new entrance to get a train home, as it would be a shorter walk. I doubt I’d use the Overground to go to Westfield, as going by the Central Line is quicker. But for those south of Shepherd’s Bush, it would probably be the exit of choice.
The main reason for the station upgrade would appear to have been a need to accommodate the longer trains on the Milton Keynes services, but I do think that we might see new entrances created at the other end of other Overground stations. I’ve felt for a long time, that Highbury and Islington station could benefit from a second entrance.
I also wonder, if this updating is part of a bigger plan to make more use of the West London Line.
The current Milton Keynes service terminates at its southern end at Clapham Junction, but it used to go through to South Croydon. In fact in November 2014, I used the link to go from Wembley Central to East Croydon. From Clapham Junction, the route was by Wandsworth Common, Balham, Streatham Common, Norbury, Thornton Heath and Selhurst, I would assume the service has been cut back because of Thameslink work, but I do feel that quite a few people could have been inconvenienced by this. I have a friend, who lives in South London, who uses the West London Line to get to matches at Wembley. So he might not be amused by this cutback.
As Clapham Junction is such an important station in South London, perhaps if there was a better connection to Willesden Junction, then the service might find quite a few passengers come out of the woodwork.
If Crossrail builds the threatened station at Old Oak Common, to link to HS2, the current service will be totally inadequate for the demand I’d expect. This is a map of the favoured option at Old Oak Common.
Option C Proposal At Old Oak Common
One of the problems is the number of freight trains that currently use the West London Line. But surely with a good sorting out and after electrification is complete in the area, their level can be reduced.
The Anonymous Widower 