On Wed, 2 Aug 2006, Mizter T wrote:

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"Provision is being made in the plans for a future station at
Silvertown, should this ever be required. This would not be on the
current station site, but instead would be further to the west. A DLR
City Airport branch station has been safeguarded very close to here to
provide possible interchange."
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What I do not understand whatsoever is the possible future Silvertown
Crossrail station. If the new station were to be to the west of the
existing station that'd place it (at least partially) underground - the
line starts a steady incline down into the Connaught tunnel just west of
Silvertown station. The tunnel mouth is just south of Hart Rd.

That would also put the platforms on a slope, which i believe HMRI will
not allow.

The other possible option for a Silvertown Crossrail station would be to
use the existing station site. Problem is whether 12 car platforms could
be fitted it - to the east the alignment is tightly sandwiched between
two roads (Albert Rd and Factory Rd), neither of which have pavements on
the railway side, and I'm not sure if there'd be enough extra space
either side of two running lines to accomodate platforms.

My thought was that the platforms could be extended to the west (since
they'll need to be extended anyway), towards the DLR station; that would
involve taking land from the industrial estate on the south side of the
line and using it to rearrange the formation to make room for platforms
(perhaps by moving the yet-to-be-built up line south a bit and putting an
island in between). You could perhaps even move the whole station west in
this way. You could then connect the Crossrail and DLR stations by taking
another strip of land from the industrial estate and using it for a
walkway, or even putting a walkway on top of the Crossrail line - a
lightweight thing sitting on top of reinforced OHLE gantries.

This whole idea might fall foul of the platforms-on-a-slope problem,
though. Unless extending an existing platform doesn't count, in which case
it might be a clever dodge ...

The 'passive provision' mentioned could be the act of placing the new up
line so that there's room for an island platform, and leaving space for
other station-associated gubbins.

tom

--
For the first few years I ate lunch with he mathematicians. I soon found
that they were more interested in fun and games than in serious work,
so I shifted to eating with the physics table. There I stayed for a
number of years until the Nobel Prize, promotions, and offers from
other companies, removed most of the interesting people. So I shifted
to the corresponding chemistry table where I had a friend. At first I
asked what were the important problems in chemistry, then what important
problems they were working on, or problems that might lead to important
results. One day I asked, "if what they were working on was not important,
and was not likely to lead to important things, they why were they working
on them?" After that I had to eat with the engineers! -- R. W. Hamming