• DLR to Thamesmead approved says Mayor (From the Murky Depths)
• Stansted Airport to accept London’s contactless tickets (IanVisits)
• £7bn East West Rail plan ramped up in design rethink (Construction Enquirer)
• Full train services resume on Isle of Wight after £3.5 million investment (Rail UK)
• New line passenger forecasts ‘should be based on previous successes’ (Rail Magazine)
• Milton Keynes’ plans for mass rapid transit system gain momentum (Traffic Technology Today)
• The History of London Trolleybuses: Video (Ruairidh MacVeigh)
• Speed on stilts: How do hydrofoils work? (Incautious Optimism)
• Onboard the world’s largest sailing cargo ship: the future of travel & transport? (The Guardian)
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Will the new/modified EWR stations get contactless readers/gatelines from the start (i.e. similar to project Oval), to support PAYG travel and season tickets on ITSO compatible passes across a Cambridge commuter catchment and onwards travel to London/Stansted (and longer term, similar for MK and Oxford catchments and onward travel).
Re. new use exceeding forecasts, does this apply to East Linton and Reston? Non-rigorous sampling suggests that both are barely used.
“DLR to Thamesmead” – but nowhere actually useful, like um, Belvedere?
Trolleybuses: I didn’t actually weep, but .. what a completely stupid waste of time & money in replacing Trolleybuses with smaller, smelly, noisy Routemasters! I was 16 when the last one went.
“Mass Rapid Transit” is a very grand name for 3 bus routes with a daytime frequency of 10 minutes
Greg T,
Regarding trolleybuses, there are various factors that prompted the decision beyond that mentioned. One also has to consider attitudes at the time and not look at the past with the sentiment of the current day.
Two major considerations were not mentioned at the start. The trolleybuses and the supporting network were worn out and needed wholesale replacing. Obviously, World War 2 led to a maintenance backlog and austerity in the 1950s made things worse. There was basically no way the country could afford to update the trolleybus networks dotted around the country. Even if one could, it was questionable whether it was what cities really wanted at the time.
Another, often forgotten, factor is the rise of one-way streets and revised traffic schemes to cater for the rise of the motor car which would have made the continuation of trolleybuses very difficult – and not just in London.
When your refer to Routemasters as smelly, you are doing so with modern attitudes. By the standards of the day, the Routemaster was relatively clean and by far the biggest diesel culprit was lorries. It is only now with modern attitudes to tailpipe emissions that one could reasonably denigrate Routemasters exhaust output. Even then, it is perhaps unjustified with some of them re-engined and even ULEZ compliant.
The Routemasters were seen at the time as a saviour and futuristic despite being, in many ways, very similar to its predecessor, the RT. I worked on them in 1975 and still thought of them as modern and far better than any subsequent London bus up to that time.
I would argue that, long term, it has done no harm. If trolleybuses were still around today then I am sure people would argue they were rather pointless when an electric bus is basically a trolleybus without the encumbrance of overhead wires.
“DLR to Thamesmead” – but nowhere actually useful, like um, Belvedere?
I am mystified as to how you can actually write this. Thamesmead has been long recognised as an example of a large community lacking decent transport. In fact, until the trams came to New Addington, it was probably the worst case in London. You also seem to be making the error of thinking of Thamesmead as is – not Thamesmead as it would be once the DLR is built and the new homes are built. Finally, as always, you are concentrating too much on viewing this from a transport perspective rather than looking at the bigger picture and viewing it from the housing perspective with transport being an enabler.
The reference to Belvedere is also strange. You know perfectly well that Belvedere as a station which is perfectly satisfactory. The problem is the lack of trains. As Muddy Depths points out, this could be largely fixed simply by having Thameslink call there rather than pass though the station. Thameslink does not call, despite being on the same timings as SouthEastern, because it needs to hit the core Thameslink section on time so additional recovery time is built in. Slicker operating or reassessing which stations are most important could well sort that out. You don’t need to extend the DLR to achieve a better service at Belvedere. In any case, building as far as Thamesmead doesn’t prevent an extension to Belvedere though the benefit is questionable.
I was told, many years ago, that one factor in the replacement of Trolleybuses by diesel buses was the possible need to evacuate people from London in the event of nuclear war threatening. This has a certain possibility about it especially the way those in charge used to think in those days.
As one who has worked on Routemaster development in the 60s I have a soft spot for them although they were out of date by then and I regret the failure of the FRM, probably because of the attitude of Leyland.
Just to round it up I have spent a few years in looking after operational Trolleybuses at a transport museum since and really like them. Visit a modern system abroad (eg Salzburg, Lucerne) to see what might have been.