London Banter - View Single Post

TheOneKEA · October 25th 06, 05:39 PM posted to uk.transport.london

wrote:
Its a great shame that a useful rail link is being closed. When I
travel on it, it often seems fairly full, certainly there are less well
used routes.

It's not useful. It has far too little capacity and runs through some
less than modern areas of southeast London. The DLR on the other hand
has far more capacity to run a proper service to serve the airport, and
has the advantage of providing a direct connection to the City and a
single-change connection to Canary Wharf, whereas the NLL only goes to
Stratford and beyond. The demographics of the area suggest that most
people want to go elsewhere in Docklands, not to Hackney.

The main problem is it has been ignored. The Canning Town interchange
hasn't been encouraged. The fact that Silver Town is almost on top of
the airport, was never really made clear (its closer than many stations
are to their airports in terms of distance).

The reason why is because Silvertown is a dump. No air passenger would
want to use Silvertown station to go to the airport, because the area
doesn't feel safe.

The replacement is a toy railway that resembles a switchback when
riding it (even the Victoria line is more comfortable a ride), which
does not have through routes to North London (useful for me and many
others), and which is rather slow. Not encouraging.

It's not a toy railway, it's an intermediate-mode transport system that
provides far more mobility, capacity and utility than a heavy rail
line. I for one am glad that the DLR went to King George V.