Yet More Planned Engineering Works

As you say 21146, the long term plan is for West Ham United to move to a location much closer to West Ham station - so any talk of 're-building' Upton Park station is a non starter.

As it happens, Upton Park has been discussed before - mind the dust - in this old thread.

I know they were there the previous weekend, ie Sunday 12th October, as I went past them on the C2C. Not sure if that was the first time they'd been used, but it possibly was.

and 20th / 21st September.

I noted one in the e/b at Hornchurch, the week after the link had been completed.

I note that the eastern end is closed for many weekends until May. How much longer after that ? It's even closed on the day of the London Marathon - well planned.

Weekend closures in the central London part of the line have started happening again, too.

I suspect patience is wearing thin for continual shutdowns with no end in sight and no obvious benefit to show for them.

Sorry for the late reply. I'm starting to wonder if this would be better in the "rant" forum ( ), but here's my thoughts ...

I do see what you're saying about all this, but the populace is growing very cynical about the merits of "pain today" for endless promises of "jam tomorrow" when that tomorrow never seems to arrive.

Take your final comment about the track being there for 25 - 30 years once the work's finished. Fair enough, but I fear the traveling public will never experience the benefits gained from this, as I suspect that - no sooner is the track work completed - and another long-term project will be announced which will also take in excess of 10 years. And when that's all done, it'll be something else. And then after that, it'll be time to do the track all over again.

And this is the bottom line - it's all starting to look very "forth bridge". We never actualy get to feel the benefit of these works - instead we continue to fork out rail-level fares to travel on buses stuck in endless traffic jams thanks to constant roadworks and showcase extravangazas/parties held in central London (hopefully less of those showcases now that Ken's been given the boot).

Travelling in London at weekends has now become almost impossible. There's now so much disruption to the transport system (both road and rail) that it might as well not be there and I'm seriously begining to wonder if it'll ever be any different again - with memoreis of times when the transport service ran normally at weekends being just a dim and distant legend told to children by old folks.

Still, the contractor companies must be making a nice sum.

The work doesn't even seem co-ordinated any more with work on the middle/east of the District co-inciding with complete DLR closures and/or shutdowns on the Central or Jubilee Lines in the Statford area. Yes, sometimes this work is associated but more often it isn't. They've even started doing work on the DR during West Ham home games which was a complete no no until recently. The District Line various Earl's Court/Embankment/Whitechapel weekend suspensions have literally being going on for years now yet with no appreciable affect on journey times, ride or frequency of signal failures and still no replacement bus service provided.

Indeed - hence my comment about it being almost impossible to travel in London at weekends now. And you rasie another interesting point: I can sort of understand the need for major works on ancient parts of the system, but the DLR and JLE are brand new peices of kit - yet they too are subject to increasingly frequent weekend shutdowns. Replacement bus services (throughout the system) often seem to fall apart as a result in getting bogged down in traffic caused London's marvelous on-going streatworks programe to replace: the gas, then the water, then the electric, then the telecoms, then the gas, then the electric, then the water ... ad nauseum, ad infinitum.

It's too much, going on for too long, delivering too little apart from nice dosh for the contract companies.


Yes, sadly, this is my experience too. The posters have also gone up gleefully declaring "further shutdowns will be announced for next year" or words to that effect. Just when will it end? It really isn't an unreasonable thing to ask after umpteen years of these shutdowns.

I wouldn't mind if they were doing something to resolve the dreadful mess that is the Earls Court junctions (responsible for an inordinate number of delays on the line). If they could assure me these works meant that one day my Distrcit line journey wouldn't take an age to trundle from West Kensington through to Gloucester Road, I might be in a more forgiving frame of mind. As it stands, I just find myself growing tired of this weekend-closures-without-end stuff.

I do see your point - but it's clearly gotten completely out of hand.

Maybe if LU publically stopped trying to make a virtue out of it (endlessly bigging-up closures up as "improvement works" that nobody seems to see any tangible benefit from just irritates people) and just laid the facts down on the table with a clear explananation along the lines of:

1. What work needs doing - and why. Just "planned improvement works" won't do as an explanation.

2. How long it will take.

3. What the tangible benefits will be when it's finished.

4. An assuarance of uninterrupted service (as far as practical barring emergiencies) for x x x number of years once finished.