East London Line: The Future
BCer Monkeyboy has spotted this treat in Rail Technology Magazine, an interview with Huw Edwards, head of programme delivery at London Overground. Edwards says that all those rail replacement bus services we've had to put up with mean that they have been able to compress the project timeline from 3 years to 18 months, as they race to keep up with demand.
The first longer train enters service on the East London Line in late 2014. In total, 29 trains are being extended on the ELL, one a week for just over half a year.
Edwards said: “The insertion of the fifth car will happen at New Cross Gate, unlike when we went from three-car to four-car a few years ago, when it was done at Derby. To reduce outage time, we’re going to take the unit out of operational service for a week, insert the fifth car, fully commission, fully test, and send it back out into operation.”
“When compared to a traditional DfT or Network Rail programme of work, the pace of delivery here is significantly faster. We’ll bring in the first fifth car at the end of 2014, when we didn’t gain board approval to do the work until February 2013. I often say it’s a three-year programme of work delivered in 18 months.”
Looking forward, he says that the Overground will have to grow even more, with new, even longer trains the most likely solution. He says South East London is the main driver of demand for capacity and will be the priority:
Edwards acknowledged that over a 20 or 30-year timeframe, the five-car extension alone will not be nearly enough to offer the capacity required, although Crossrail will help from 2018.
But the Class 378s can’t be configured to run in six-car formation, so Edwards said the next opportunity for serious capacity improvement after this extension would be at fleet renewal time in the mid-2020s.
Until then, LOROL could run additional train services – going from 16tph on the East London Line core to 18tph, for example. Going beyond that would require ATO (automatic train operation),
“If we stretched and sweated the fleet, we believe we could be running an 18tph service between Shoreditch and New Cross Gate. But the reality is, that’s not where demand is – the demand is south. The demand is for bringing passengers up from the Crystal Palace, West Croydon areas into the central core. So therefore [we are in a] tricky position; that’s where the demand is, that’s where the business case is – unfortunately that’s not where the paths are…so the next discussion to be had with the industry is ‘can we sweat two additional paths south of New Cross Gate’.”
