On Jun 2, 8:47*pm, Mr Thant
wrote:
I took a [very long] detour on the way home today to check out the new
flyover. Trains to/from Beckton are using the bridge, meaning the
junction for the City Airport branch is finally grade separated.

For the Google Groups record, this work resulted in an extended
closure of parts of the DLR route for nine days, as detailed in this
excerpt of a DLR press release dated 07/05/2009:

---quote---
[Info about network wide closure on 10 May for Delta Junction works
snipped]
Later in the month, from Saturday 23 May - Sunday 31 May, a partial
closure will be put in place for nine days. This is to allow critical
junction work to be carried out at Canning Town, including opening a
new 'flyover' bridge.

Throughout the partial closure, stations from East India - Prince
Regent (on the Beckton branch) will shut. From 23 May - 29 May
stations between East India and London City Airport (on the Woolwich
Arsenal branch) will close.

On 30 and 31 May this closure will be extended from Westferry to
Woolwich Arsenal and Beckton stations. Rail replacement bus services
will run on all routes but not serve Woolwich Arsenal station as
passengers from there can use Southeastern trains.
---/quote---

Source:
http://pressroom.dlr.co.uk/news/details.asp?id=200

Note however that more recently the closure was advertised as lasting
an extra day - i.e. to Monday 1 June - see this Google cache of a DLR
"Planned works" webpage:
http://tinyurl.com/oa3j5f

FWIW, this can also be seen on the original and revised PDFs of the
closure leaflets:
Old:
http://dlr-admin.appius.com/uploads/...%20leaflet.pdf
Revised:
http://improvements.dlr.co.uk/pdf/SD...0revised.p df


Anyway, point being they seem to have decided there was a significant
enough risk of an over-run and played it safe by adding on a day -
however AIUI the DLR was in fact running a full service on Monday
morning (i.e. June 1st, the 'extra' day), and was perhaps a little
disingenuously explaining that this was possible as a result of "early
completion of planned engineering works"! Nonetheless it seems like
the right approach to have taken - well, I suppose the totally
faultless approach would have been to foresee the worry about the
overrun and advertise it as a ten day closure from the start, but
there you go.


One oddity is that trains from City Airport cross under the bridge
before using a mini diveunder to cross back.

I'm guessing that's perhaps best explained by the local topography, in
that doing it otherwise would have been awkward. An oddity nonetheless
though!


Another oddity is the points for the third platform at Royal Victoria.
For the sake of about 20 feet of track, there isn't a segregated route
in and out of it form the Stratford International branch, which I
thought was the whole point. Instead the track narrows from four to
two tracks, then promptly widens back to three, with no obvious
obstruction.

Initially I was going to say perhaps that's to keep out the way of the
Crossrail tunnel portal, but then I realised that's actually going to
be further east near Bridgeland Road.

Perhaps the benefit of a segregated route simply didn't outweigh the
extra complexity it'd bring to the signalling systems, perhaps because
the need for a segregated route was deemed to be low.

Anyway, I, er, hadn't even realised that Prince Regent was getting
another platform! What's the thinking here?


Both these features are visible in this diagram I was emailed ages
ago, but never posted to my blog:

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo...e-79atpI5tHYHQ

Thanks for the report and info.