Bank branch closure - 15 Jan to 15 May 2022

That makes a lot more sense. Still interested to hear about the rest though.

32tph at the most intense part of each peak period, 30tph at other parts of the peak, 24tph off-peak and weekend.

peak:
Battersea- either Edgware/Barnet/Mill Hill every 10min
off-peak:
southbound
Mill Hill-Moorgate 2tph
Mill Hill- Morden 3tph

northbound
Battersea-High Barnet 4tph
Battersea-Mill Hill East 2tph

I hope that the Oystercard software has been updated/checked to enable what may previously have been "irregular" methods of getting round the closure to be accepted.

The obvious way for me to get to London Bridge would be to get the Northern to Waterloo and change on to the Jubilee. However, I'm reasonably sure that the Jubilee will be unpleasantly busy, so I plan to get off at Charing Cross and take a national rail train to London Bridge.

I'll be mightily hacked off if I get charged for two journeys.

Aren't Oyster PAYG fares for the mainline more expensive though?

Thameslink is an exception. Most NR routes (other than Overground) charge a higher rate - and the difference is growing because whilst TfL has frozen its fares for the past few years the DfT has indexed NR rates. There is thus a north/south divide in fares in London



In fact it's even worse because if you want to travel beyond your London terminus (e.g Bromley South to Green park via Victoria) you pay even more.

And to make it even more unfair, the Zone boundaries are skewed - Woodford and Kingston are both 10miles from Charing Cross as the crow flies, but Woodford in=s in Zone 4 and Kingston in Zone 6.

This closure of part of the Bank branch has been planned for months, so I’m not clear as to why there was no service between Charing Cross and Battersea Power Station, or between Kennington and Stockwell on Saturday 15 Jan. Service over these sections resumed the following day. Has anyone insight? Also, not so long ago, when the southbound platform at London Bridge was also resited, AFAIK the northbound trains remained in service for the three-and-a-half months the southbound services were curtailed between Moorgate and Kennington. Why isn’t this possible now?

I took a photo of the Morden-Stockwell shuttle reversing on the crossover (7a/b) on the original station site on 15 Jan. Good to see 130-year old infrastructure being taken advantage of!

Spot on - alterations to the signalling system in the Kennington area as part of the protection arrangements for the closure. As both parts of Kennington are on the same computer, there is no way that these works could have been carried out whilst also running via Charing Cross.

Not all will be reversed. Some of it was about improving headways into the NB Charing Cross platform at Kennington as I understand it.

I was on the Northern line yesterday, some of the Dot Matrix Indicators were showing 'Edgware via Bank'

Access to the DLR is being improved. The stairs to/from the lower levels are between the Northern line platforms.

Let's see how much I can help clarify this. In the interests of full disclosure, the final LU approval signature on Thales' commissioning documentation was mine.

The alterations were made on Vehicle Control Centres (VCCs) 2 and 9 - VCC2 controls from a point north of Old Street to south of Oval, and VCC9 controls the Battersea Branch.
Until the works took place, a number of points at Kennington were designed to Auto-normalise if they were not required reverse. This was removed for the closure and will not be reinstated.

Once the VCC software was loaded, which took most of the available Engineering Hours, VCCs 2 and 9 were transferred from the 'Revenue' System Management Centre (SMC) computers (the ones the operators use to run the service) onto a Test SMC to allow testing of the alterations on the Bank branch at Moorgate to be tested with a train under Thales' control.
It's not possible to control a VCC from both the Revenue and Test SMC at the same time - this effectively prevented running a through service via Charing Cross, and while the alterations at Moorgate were being tested, the entire VCC is considered to be under test - it's simply not permitted to run trains with passengers on over or using a bit of untested infrastructure.

Only once the train testing at Moorgate was complete could the alterations in their entirety be considered tested. This was done by Saturday evening, but you can't transfer control of a VCC from the Test to the Revenue SMC or vice versa during Traffic Hours when the Revenue VCC is controlling train moves - hence it had to wait until Saturday Night.

In terms of timescales, I was present for the night shift when VCC9 was commissioned and VCC2 was modified to commission the connection to the NLE for Trial Operations. Despite there being sufficient staff and it having been planned for months, it still ran very close to the wire - in fact the first train from Morden was delayed by about three minutes whilst Thales' team undertook the final bit of setting up for the next day's service. The idea that using software makes a change easier and quicker to implement than with hardware is true, but it's still not quick. It's very much swings and roundabouts - the London Bridge diversion was potentially quicker to commission (and certainly, implementing a closure south of Moorgate as happened in the late 1990s would have been faster under legacy signalling, but to have commissioned the NLE in a mid-week night shift would have been impossible - it would have probably needed a full weekend!

Thank you, Tom, for the time you took to write your reply. The easier but not necessarily quicker point is well taken. Perhaps there’s a debate to had with the Northern Line, whether there should be an everywhere to everywhere possilbe versus a series of single routes e.g. Morden-Edgware via Bank and Battersea Power Station-CX-Finchley and beyond. Or maybe that debate’s come and gone and flipped and flopped over the years. Heavens, if the Moorgate-Ally Pally / -Bushey Heath services had happened there’d have been fun programming that into the mix!



Is there a public link to the various VCC areas? My infrastructure charts are pre-ATO. and I'd like to understand the philosophy behind the VCC boundaries.

I must say I'm impressed at the speed Dstock7080 laid his hands on this, I only knew where the VCC2 boundaries were until today!

Perhaps in another thread there’s an explanation why Angel and Kings X were included in VCC6 and not like Euston in VCC3. I’m sure Thales had very good reasons for the roll out. But that’s another story. Anyway thank you DStock7080 for Figure 12. (Now what was in Figures 1 – 11!?). I’m also just wondering if the pedestrian access works connecting DLR and Northern at Bank might have impinged on the DLR leading to the Mudshute diversions over the last few days.