Pre 2007 East London Line.

It really wasn't a nice place to work on the track very damp and lots of inclines.

After the closure in the late 90's they spent a fortune on a signalling system for it that lasted approx 10 years then NR when they took it over ripped it all out, total waste of money.

I can remember the D stock running on the line in a 3 car unit don't think that was for very long due to the A stock being sent for refurb.

Cheers it is a waste of money D stock on the ELL interesting, the A stocks being put into DOO at the time?

Early memories was of seeing T stock with the oval cab windows at New Cross Gate! Then Q stock until that went, then CPs, 38TS...

That's what I thought but knowing Roy's knowledge put it down to a slip of the finger with T being rather close to F on the keyboard! T stock (rectangular cab windows) ran on the Metropolitan main line until replaced by A stock IIRC.

I can remember the F-stock from intermittent journeys as a lad from Camberwell, later Greenwich, to Dagenham, for Sunday lunch at paternal grandparents. This was from about 1957-1960, so aged 5-8.

Bus to New Cross, ELL to Whitechapel, change onto eastbound Met to Barking occasionally, but more usually eastbound District to there.

Always disappointed the ELL trains were not maroon & the District's green, but you never get everything you wish for, even from the tooth fairy!

Have to say the actual stations weren't something explored at that time, but they seemed to be pretty dingy from the train, and definitely remember Eau de Thameside odour at Rotherhithe, rising to a peak at Wapping, and subsiding a little at Shadwell.

My father was a Station Foreman at Wapping in the late fifties and early sixties. In those days the ticket collector/lift operator started and I think the only lifts then on the system had to stop it in the correct landing position. Because there was room for error the foreman was not allowed to travel in the lift in case the ticket collector overran the stop marks meaning the foreman had to handwind (by opening and closing the electric breakers in the lift room) the lift into the correct position. The cable was marked so he could tell the correct position for the lift.

This was the old station and the ticket office safe protruded into an alleyway and was stolen one year by hacking it out. When the top station was rebuilt I think the lifts still worked in the same way. My father took me up onto the roof and you could look out over the Thames. I used to annoy the booking clerk because he had to write a paper ticket for a composite privilege fare to Plaistow so I could get home. The Prospect of Whitby was nearby and the passengers used to come on to the platform and sit on the platform edge with their legs dangling over the edge.

The foreman's office was a narrow room down about four steps at the Thames end of the Southbound platform and on the late turn my father would spend all shift trying to get a radio to work attaching wires to metal water and drain pipes.

Because of the lifts there were three foreman at Wapping 5.15-13.15, 13.00-21.00, 16.45-00.45. Shadwell only had an early and late foreman the middle covered by the station master who in the morning would take the booking office takings of Wapping and Shadwell to the bank in the Commercial Road by walking through Watney Street market. He wore his station masters hat (which he was not supposed do when going to the bank) and everybody knew who he was and where he was going.

The Wapping foreman was sent to Whitechapel in the evening peak to look after the East London line platforms. This meant he (and I unofficially) could go into the signal cabin on the south end of the southbound platform. There was a small miniature frame of about 6 levers.

I started on the underground as an apprentice and spent my first nine months with the senior clerk at Whitechapel and would go up to Shoreditch on Sunday (then closed) by the track (no uniform, no hivi's in those days) to do the weekly accounts in the ticket office. Money was not kept there but the morning booking clerk took a float from Whitechapel and the late turn brought it back with the takings in the evening. Shoreditch was only open Mon-Fri rush hours. The station was often broken into over the weekend. There was a permanent foreman and ticket collector on split duties so they paid well and were sought after. Because of the manual ticket system they always had a different booking clerk in the morning to the evening from Whitechapel.

Whitechapel was always a good station to work, as the ticket office sold through tickets to the southern region, had a left luggage office. Years later I qualified for the signal cabin (it now controlled the east London line). the senior clerk was a master of the account books that culminated in the 12 week revenue book. I qualified in lift rewinding at Edgware Road (Bakerloo).

Shoreditch was a very poor area (like Notting Hill). Club Row (Sclater Street, Brick Lane and surrounding streets) market was for Londoners set amongst bombed out buildings and bombsites. It had a notorious dog market where I bought a Cavalier King Charles who lived for 14 years. Petticoat Lane (Middlesex Street) was for the tourists; not that there were many. Britain was bankrupt after the second world war and bomb sites like the Barbican took 10 years to build finishing in 1975. Shoreditch had to wait nearly another 20 years.

When the East London Line became a line in it's right the ticket office staffing was taken from Whitechapel to Surrey Docks.

1970 was a pivotal year. The buses lost there status as the senior service within LT, the underground was in decline with shortage of all grades; the fares link with the buses was broken meaning the underground became relative to the buses became expensive.

Yep, fat finger syndrome, F stock!

Unlit compartments at night certainly provide an evocative experience. Experienced this for the last couple of years on the Severn Valley Railway diesel gala, behind a Deltic too! Shame they've moved it from October now I believe.

Vic Mitchell's book on the ELL gives 1963 as the end of the F stock there. (Can't find any more detail but that must be close to the final withdrawal date for the stock). Apparently 10x 4 car sets were allocated but with only 5 in service and one spare - not clear what the other four did, although out on the far reaches of the |Met, we sometimes saw F stock even when not normally scheduled, especially to Uxbridge.

whistlekiller2000 - I had a very soft spot for the ragged District formations in Q stock days, with the flared Q38s marshalled along with the antiquated Q27s. I guess the answer to your implied question is that the technology was much more basic -no problems of incompatible software, very simple control systems, and so on. [More strategically, one does sometimes wonder what the advantages of sixty years of radical technological change in the rolling stock field really are, and more importantly,whether they have been worthwhile - alittle while ago, when I dealt with such things, and NSE was contemplating buying a large programme of Networkers, the Board Chairman asked me to look at the cost of buying their predecessors. In the '50s. we bought a 4 car suburban unit for £125k (about £500k at '90s prices); in the '90s, their replacement cost around £ 4m. Same capacity, somewhat better performance, more complex and therefore more expensive to maintain, aircon (maybe),same life. As he said when I showed him the figures - "What have we bought that is worth 8 times as much?"

Like First generation DMUs, Underground stock up to Standard Tube stock and Q stock were not in fixed units but could be formed in almost any combination of vehicles (as long as there was a cab at each end of the train!)
In modern units, the individual cars are much more inter-dependent, and it is not usually possible to mix vehicles of different builds in the same train. On the Undetground, the 1938 stock and the O and P Metadyne stocks were the first examples.

Getting back to the ELL itself, my memories come from a time when Surrey Docks station actually served, wait for it, Surrey Docks, with a workforce servicing----a working docks.

On the council estate whence I spent my first years in Camberwell, there were 24 x 12-flat blocks, the ones nearest to the then still-extant Surrey Canal being those we might now designate as rough as rats, and containing most of the Surrey Dock workers on our estate. Oh, and any of the flats now sell for £250k+.

Even when moving to East Greenwich aged six, in the typical 2-up, 2 down terraced streets (all now long gone) behind the High Road, the one nearest to where we rented had a couple of Surrey Dock workers living there, too-up to 1963, when we moved out of London. The flat we rented, btw, no longer sits on top of the spares shop for the plant engineers where my Father worked, it's now on top of a sex shop.

I can't remember for certain, but I think the decline of Dockland in earnest began in the later part of the 1960's, with the adoption of containerisation and by the mid 1970's, that had produced a serious effect not only on the docks, but in the condition of the ELL.

Actually, that was when I last visited Camberwell in 2009, so it may well be considerably more by now.

I suspect the GPO might have employed more prior to the NHS, but certainly not many others would have matched the PLA.

The difference between the types of shop would simply be the inability of one type to provide new or replacement parts for what had previously worked well and now refused to start.