London Infrastructure Plan to 2050

[davidp]

The recently published London Infrastructure Plans towards 2050 (see here for the overall plans and here for a PDF for the specific transport possibilities) contains several proposals for the DLR.

1. By 2022 - 30 additional railcars for expansion of services on routes serving the Royal Docks (longer trains and more frequent service from Woolwich or Beckton to Stratford International)
2. By 2026 - All services operated by 3-car trains. If the first option is taken up then only the Stratford and Canary Wharf would need to be enhanced.
3. By 2031 - Further increased frequencies on routes to Stratford from Lewisham, Woolwich and Beckton.
4. By 2024 - Replacement of B92 stock by "fixed-formation" trains (I'm presuming this means a train consisting of 1 unit of 6 articulated sections rather than 3 units of 2 articulated sections)
5. Ongoing station capacity improvements of the stations around Canary Wharf
6. Sometime in the 2020s. New station at Thames Wharf (between Canning Town and West Silvertown) to serve new residential developments
7. Ongoing off-peak service level enhancements to similar levels as the current peak level
8. By 2050 - Close Tower Gateway station to be replaced by a new underground station on the Bank line near the Tower. Apparently this could increase capacity on the Bank line from 23 to 30 trains per hour but I thought the constraint was the turnback beyond Bank, however ...

HIOI

David

[grahamhewett]

davidp - the interesting thing about the 2050 plan is how little it has to say about the DLR. As your summary suggests - just a bit more of the same, really. This is not perhaps surprising - the system is practically at the limit of what it can do in terms of both train length and tph. Any radical upgrade (say to 120m or even 160m trains) will become very expensive indeed. Looking ahead, the era of short trains for trunk haul is over and any trunk new lines need to be built to that higher standard. (Orbital routes may be a different matter, of course). This is doubly interesting because the 2050 plan has so little to say about the Thamesside corridor generally, despite it being an area of continuing high growth.

[davidp]

Graham, Yes I agree about how little DLR related stuff is in that document. It's also interesting that the long proposed extension to Dagenham Docks is not mentioned at all.

[Deleted]

And no mention of extending from Bank to Charing Cross via City Thameslink and Aldwych and using the old Jub Line tunnels from near Aldwych and the old Platforms at CX.