When we last left the story of the Fleet line it had become the Jubilee. The GLC’s Conservative administration had been unsuccessful in their attempts to persuade the Labour Government to push forward with Jubilee stage 3 to the Docklands. A Conservative Government replaced Labour in the May 1979 General Election. Here we explore their efforts to persuade a government of the same colour to fund the planned Docklands extension and look at the politics (and people) that created the DLR when these failed.
Economy still poor
A letter from the Greater London Council (GLC) to Dr Richardson, the Transport Department’s (DTp)’s Assistant Secretary in charge of London Transport, on 4 June 1979 stated their view that almost all London area MPs supported extending the Jubilee line. However inflation, fiscal uncertainty and poor value for money of Stages 3 and 4, as well as pressure from non-London regions, made the new Conservative Government very wary of proceeding with any Jubilee construction at all. Not least because although the politicians in charge had changed, the officials were still in post and their professional views hadn’t shifted.
As a result, the new Conservative Government adopted a similar viewpoint to its predecessor in this regard. In the Ministry of Transport Press Release of 25 June 1979 (DTp was still a junior ministry within the Department of the Environment at the time), new Transport Minister Norman Fowler ran down the idea of funding an extension to the Jubilee line in a press release. He gave it only two paragraphs of description before dismissing it:
It is, I believe, common ground between us [Fowler, and Horace Cutler of the GLC] that to proceed immediately with Stage II and to begin to commit public expenditure for Stage III at this time poses great problems. I have therefore asked him to accept a pause while we examine together the possibilities of lower cost options.
At the same time, I have stressed my view that the GLC are absolutely right in attaching high importance to settling the basic transport infrastructure in and around Docklands. I believe that new initiatives and special financial provisions are needed for this and I am prepared together with the GLC to earmark resources for a continuous programme for the specific purpose of improving road and rail links in and around Docklands…
I hope these measures I am taking will indicate my own strong degree of commitment to getting the right transport links in and for Docklands.
However Fowler then expounded six paragraphs on the need for “getting the right transport links in and for Docklands”, being completing the North Circular and Southern Relief Roads with connections to the area road network. It is notable that Fowler did not mention any costs for these roads, which would cost almost double what the full Jubilee line would have, even though the Tube extension was rejected due to ‘high costs’.
In the end, the practical policy difference with Labour was largely that the Conservative Government placed less emphasis on industry and a presumption of more suburban business parks.
GLC relents on Jubilee line aspiration
The Report of the Minister of Transport, Norman Fowler, which commented on the London Transport Bill for the 1979/80 Parliamentary session, stated:
The Minister has no objection to the Bill. However, he does wish to make it clear that he is not persuaded of the case for the eastern extension of the Jubilee Line, or the construction of the Woolwich Tunnel as part of the present industrially-based strategy for the redevelopment of the Docklands [our emphasis]. His attitude toward the Bill in no way implies, therefore, that expenditure on the third stage as a whole, or on the Woolwich Tunnel, will be accepted in the future as eligible for Transport Supplementary Grant. The Minister has already expressed his intention of opposing those provisions in the Greater London Council (Money) Bill which contain financial authority for the start of work of the second phase of the Jubilee Line.
As the Bill made its way through Parliament, Fowler did not object to the Jubilee extension, but clarified in July 1979 that this was merely:
being sought so that there can be no danger of works being delayed should a decision to build be taken with respect to any part of the proposed line of route. The Minister’s view in no way implies acceptance of expenditure on any such works as eligible for Transport Supplementary Grant.
In January 1980, the Minister of Transport Norman Fowler then:
asked Sir Horace Cutler to accept a pause while there was a study of lower cost options for transport infrastructure in Docklands… In accepting this pause the GLC withdrew the Jubilee Line provision from the Money Bill.
GLC’s policy blinkers
Horace Cutler was the Conservative leader of the Greater London Council (GLC) between 1977 and 1981, after that party took control of the council from Labour in May 1977. He had been the last leader of Middlesex County Council from 1963 until its abolition in 1965. Under his direction, the GLC accumulated £100M to pay for Stage 2 of the Fleet/Jubilee line to go east from Charing Cross along the Fleet Street/Strand corridor as originally planned. So why didn’t this happen?
The arrival of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in May 1979 surely would give the ideal political moment for a self-funded Jubilee extension, initially to Fenchurch Street then poised for east and/or south-east London and the Docklands regeneration area.
It was not to be. As
we have seen in Part 2 of this series, extending the Jubilee to Fenchurch Street didn’t achieve much in its own right, so Stage 2 depended on the case for extensions beyond that – well in excess of the £100m funding available, thereby requiring central Government funding and Parliamentary Bill passage support. The Transport Department consequently took the view that the tube extension merits weren’t proven whilst public finances were still tight. In relation to the available £100m, the Prime Minister ultimately took the view that there were other more important political priorities.
Even if the main Jubilee extension appeared poor value, the Woolwich Tunnel scheme could have been a legitimate use of some of the GLC £100m cash pot in order to underpin Docklands regeneration. It would have been hard for Government to deny the GLC that opportunity. Yet the Conservative-led GLC since 1977 had failed to rewrite the industrial focus of the Labour GLC’s Docklands strategy, which as we have seen undermined the business case for both the Jubilee and North London Line (NLL) cross-river extensions. This turned out to be the fundamental flaw.
The absence of a new policy game plan was despite Cutler’s previous sponsorship of the radical ‘Docklands’ reports of 1970-72, when a variety of development scenarios were considered. Even these though didn’t make full use of a tube’s capabilities.
Moreover, the Jubilee extension was aligned towards Thamesmead – one of the GLC’s own creations – and powers were being sought for that part of the line during 1979, even though much Thamesmead development had already taken place or was authorised. Objectively, scope there for stimulative impact from a Tube extension risked being too much railway, too late to make a difference. Thamesmead was originally planned to have 60,000 – 100,000 residents. Yet even in the mid-2010s Thamesmead is only on target for a final population of 50,000 (although there are local hopes that Crossrail will achieve more).
So let’s follow through the sequence that transpired after May 1979.
No.10 rules
The immediate result of the Conservative government’s election to office was that Fowler didn’t back Sir Horace over the cost-effectiveness of extending the Fleet/Jubilee line as a ‘Docklands Spine’ as his civil servants were unequivocal. This despite the fact that Parliamentary powers were being sought for the line towards Woolwich and Thamesmead.
We discussed the Docklands Spine
discussed in the first part of this series, including its struggle to demonstrate value for money. It came from the ‘Docklands’ reports mentioned already, which had been translated in the 1972-74 London Rail Study into a River Line proposal. In the years leading up to the 1982 Serpell Report (which will be discussed in part four), this spine could just as easily have been an arterial road similar to the Docklands Southern Relief Road scheme, or a ‘minitram’. All would have been pricey and out of kilter with the scale of redevelopment volumes then foreseen. That said, a main road would have conformed more closely to some of the prevailing policy thinking at the time.
The Conservative GLC spent the summer of 1979 trying to beef up their Tube extension case to what they hoped was a favourably aligned Government, politically speaking. The GLC’s full bid, published in Autumn 1979 in their 1980-81 Transport Policies & Programme budget (TPP), was £273m for the Jubilee extension to Docklands plus the Woolwich Tunnel, of which £24m was to be spent in that year for the start of Stage 2 works. The 1980 GLC (Money) Bill had £12m earmarked for Jubilee Stage 2 construction, and another £12m six months later for the same purpose.
It soon became evident, however, that high-level political clearance would be essential, given the declared dislike of the project by civil servants. A meeting between Sir Horace, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Tom King (Minister for Local Government and Environmental Services) was held on 3 December 1979.
The
formal record of the meeting at 10 Downing Street notes (bolding ours):
The immediate problem which he [Sir Horace] wished to mention to the Prime Minister concerned his capital fund. He was now in a dilemma, with the deadline approaching for the laying out of a budget. The GLC had now paid its debts (except on housing account) and was accumulating funds through the disposal of surplus assets.
He [Sir Horace] wanted agreement that funds recycled from under-used assets and the disposal of surplus assets could go into capital expenditure. He would emphasise with Mr. Fowler [Transport Minister] later in the day that he wanted no Government money for Stage II of the Jubilee Line. He already had £100m earmarked for this. He needed simply the authority to use his own funds. The Prime Minister asked why he wished to spend so much on the Jubilee Line given the enormous problems of regeneration of docklands. Mr King acknowledged that there was a problem of getting in and out of Docklands. [However] The Government had doubts on whether the Jubilee Line was the best approach to this issue…
Sir Horace Cutler pointed out that the Jubilee Line would cross the Thames five times: no road could be provided to meet the need in an equivalent fashion [our emphasis]. He [Horace Cutler] was concerned that if, in the difficult [election] year of 1981, the Conservative Group lost control of the GLC, then there would be a nest-egg left for an incoming party. The Prime Minister noted the problem. She said that she would prefer to see the money locked into mortgages. Mr. King said that the issue was whether to concentrate on housing or communications in dockland.
If communications were chosen, the money could not be spent by 1981, but could be tied up on tenders and contracts. The Prime Minister asked whether the GLC would get a better reception by using its funds on housing rather than the Jubilee Line. Sir Horace Cutler repeated that his problem was the restrictions on the form of his spending. The Prime Minister asked whether this should be examined in the context of the [then] Local Government Bill. Mr. King emphasised that the issue was not the ability to recycle funds, but the decision as to whether the GLC were to be allowed to use such funds. This was bound up with the issue of what would be the best use of the money. On the housing side, one could question whether significant amounts of private money might be waiting to come in. Sir Horace Cutler said that his credibility depended on the Jubilee Line Stage II being started next year. He emphasised the sound financial position now created by the Conservative GLC.
…
Sir Horace Cutler mentioned in passing that the GLC had been having discussions with Sir Peter Parker on a fully integrated commuter service for London, to be supervised by a passenger transport executive or authority.
The meeting record is a fascinating insight into Thatcher’s thinking at the time. As our first piece of bolding shows, housing and its political uses were foremost in her mind (
Right to Buy would arrive the following year).
It is unclear exactly why Sir Horace made the last point bolded point, but perhaps he was trying to demonstrate the consequences should approval for the Jubilee extension not be given – GLC support for fully integrated public transport, something that Thatcher was known not to be keen on.
Knighthood – relevant or not?
Horace Cutler had been knighted in mid-1979, in the Queen’s birthday honours. So was this December meeting at 10 Downing Street just a token gesture?
There was certainly a belief in some quarters of Whitehall that Sir Horace was offered his knighthood as an advance consolation prize for the Jubilee Line extension being turned down again. The reality was that GLC appreciated that most major decisions were being overseen closely by No.10, therefore the meeting was essential. It was hoped that political minds of the same party persuasion might remove the prevailing impasse within officialdom.
Despite protestations from Sir Horace that funds under control of the GLC couldn’t be arbitrarily used for other government spending purposes, the PM’s views, as usual, prevailed – at least during the meeting. Home ownership was more important to her than a Tube line which struggled to justify itself. The episode did at least offer one crumb of comfort – that lower cost transport options would be reviewed in place of a Tube extension, and potentially better aligned to the low expectations for return on investment.
Rejection of the Jubilee extension
After the meeting, the GLC managed to hold on to its £100m, which was not put into mortgages but was held and ultimately used to fund the initial DLR scheme (£77m) and Docklands road construction, as we shall see later.
The rejection of the Jubilee Line extension was deeply disappointing for Sir Horace, as he had put much personal commitment behind it. His reputation did indeed suffer, as the Conservatives were voted out of GLC control in May 1981. Transport shortcomings were definitely a contributing factor to this. He ceased to be the Conservative party leader on the GLC in 1982, and gave up politics altogether when the GLC was abolished during Thatcher’s second premiership.
Schadenfreude
It is ironic that in his early GLC period as Deputy Leader (1967-73), Sir Horace had been given the chairmanship of the Housing Committee, and instituted the aforementioned “Right to Buy” scheme to allow tenants to buy their own homes at a discounted price – later to become a main Thatcherite policy. In that period he also forcibly transferred much of the GLC housing stock to the London boroughs. As a result, the December 1979 meeting with the Prime Minister saw him unable to argue from a balanced position of the GLC itself having to choose between housing and communications. In a way, he was ‘hoist with his own petard’.
Cross-party consistencies
It will be obvious by now that the Jubilee’s problems amounted to two sides of the same coin:
a poor business case for a high-cost Tube extension, not helped by being advocated during a difficult period for national finances, and with London a high-spend zone for any significant infrastructure which therefore risked being marked down against an English expenditure norm per local authority area.
There was also a shared policy vision by both major parties and their civil servants, who anticipated low-density Docklands developments (though some details might vary). Number 10’s view of the world also saw the political benefits of stimulating more voters into ownership of their own homes. So the policy priorities during this period were fixated on providing roads for vans and lorries for new businesses in Docklands, and support for car-based commuting for such territory.
No precedents
Part of the problem with regenerating the Docklands was that there were no obvious precedents either in terms of scale or transport infrastructure. The latter point was especially difficult in London. The Local Authorities had no experience of public transport infrastructure, nor had their mentor, the ex-Ministry of Housing and Local Government (MHLG) side of DoE, and nor had any (ex)-New Towns staff. None of the New Town Development Corporations were on a scale to require investment in anything other than roads (and the Runcorn busway).
So part of the reason the case was not robustly made for high-density development in Docklands was that those responsible were overwhelmed at the size of the task (in acres and in magnitude) facing them. Furthermore, the geography of the Docklands made the area terra incognita for many Londoners, as its winding river bends forced main roads and most rail lines to avoid the area.
Unplanned territory
Docklands transport infrastructure as of 1980. LDDC
There were then parallel moves on both the transport and the Docklands policy fronts during the next four years to 1983, with some policy crossover between them. Ultimately it was the Docklands policy changes which had the bigger impact, but this wasn’t foreseen at the time. Meanwhile, the transport aspirations and actual investment decisions also contributed to the eventual turning of the corner on the case for a Tube line. This was happenstance rather than a structured plan, as we shall see. Let’s start with the transport schemes which were proposed in response to the Number 10 discussions.
Spineless?
The Department of the Environment, Ministry of Transport, GLC, Docklands Development Organisation and the London Transport Executive compiled and released
A Study of Lower Cost Alternatives to the Jubilee Line in Docklands in early 1980, which provided five alternatives to the full Jubilee Line buildout to Docklands (and Lewisham):
- Express buses running between Aldgate East and a loop around the Isle of Dogs, then a dedicated busway from Canning Town to Beckton (£15m)
- Buses in mixed traffic between Aldgate East and a loop sharing roads around the Isle of Dogs, then a dedicated busway from Stepney to Beckton (£24m)
- A street tram from Aldgate East to Beckton, some on dedicated right of way (£40-60m)
- An Automated Light Rapid Transit (ALRT) system from Aldgate East to Beckton on dedicated right of way, with a branch from West India Docks to North Greenwich (£120m)
- An interim Jubilee Line from Charing Cross to Beckton, with no stations at Aldwych, Ludgate Circus, St Katharine Dock, a simpler Cannon Street station, and no Thamesmead branch (£200m)
In comparison, the full Jubilee Line buildout to Docklands and Thamesmead was then estimated at £325m. The GLC still had its £100m nest egg which might be a source of funding. Interestingly, the GLC did not press the case in this study for an early Woolwich Tunnel, although a branch from West India Docks to North Greenwich was considered.
Had the GLC lost its nerve on the Woolwich scheme, which formally had nothing to do with JLE Stage 2, which is what the government fundamentally objected to? Or was a railway river crossing there considered too remote from the then perceived heart of Docklands renewal which was still the upstream area?
Certainly, the GLC failed to respecify the area development elements which might have underpinned a Woolwich Tunnel. Transport modelling was (and still is) often weak in valuing adequately the impact of entirely new transport links as opposed to marginal changes in existing service patterns.
London Transport performs its own Docklands study
The 1981 LT Annual Report listed two of London Transport’s own proposals to extend the East London Line (ELL) to serve the Docklands:
- Branching the ELL from south of Rotherhithe east with stations at Isle of Dogs and Millwall, estimated at £70m.
- A western branch from Wapping to Tower Hill, estimated at £40m.
Even minimal plans require infrastructure
Now we need to catch up on the planning policy front. What began as a Conservative Government policy in favour of minimalism led to a sense of urgency once a new Docklands administrative structure was in place to expedite regeneration. At least there was some consistency of policy alignment – as a happy accident – between national Government, its chosen delivery authority in Docklands, and a recognition of investment in transport infrastructure as a necessary and early priority.
Ironically, the Labour and Conservative Governments of the day were quick to put down the GLC’s required ridership numbers for Stages 2 to 4 of the Jubilee Line as an ‘act of faith’, whilst maintaining their own beliefs about the most realistic development strategy. That policy aligned with the GLC density numbers, but was itself still an ‘act of faith’. Moreover, the Governments’ preferred course of action was itself not a free market choice, even during the Thatcher period, but represented Whitehall’s view on preferred development styles. This ran the risk of being self-fulfilling by reinforcing the likelihood of upstream Docklands remaining as low-density sprawl, with the river’s geography constraining accessibility and development to a series of peninsulas.
The area of declining economic activity and derelict land in the Docklands totalled almost 22 sq.km – a potentially enormous blight, close to Central London, and certainly needing positive political action. A genuinely uncontrolled free market would have highlighted the proximity of very high density, high-value Central London, with the economic chasm adjoining it to the east, and would have pointed to the likelihood of a fairly radical shift in densities and land values over the following years in inner East London.
As we shall see, this is what actually happened as a consequence of Thatcherism when applied locally to Docklands planning – and with no thanks to the 1976 London Docklands Strategic Plan (LDSP) which had dammed earlier opportunities for that differential in values to turn to advantage, and in turn damned any business case for a Tube extension. The next policy changes breached that dam.
From the beginning, the 1979-1983 Conservative Government was committed to a minimalist approach – which meant minimalist planning. This was perfectly illustrated in the 1980 regional review and priorities for the South East – all very high level and all
only three pages long. Radicalism then entered the agenda, from right-of-centre. To address Docklands’ shortcomings, the DoE, by then led by Michael Heseltine as Secretary of State, shut down the Docklands Joint Committee (DJC) which had submitted the disjointed transport planning in the 1976 London Docklands Strategic Plan (LDSP) described in Part 1 of this series.
Heseltine gained political support for a radical new development authority to be overlaid in upstream Docklands – rather like a New Town Corporation but with more freedom of manoeuvre – and to remove planning approval controls from the GLC and local boroughs for the designated area. The London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) was the Government’s preferred administrative solution. The conventional local authority process was considered to be failed, although peculiarly their ‘plan-making’ powers were retained, which led to large complications where this was apparently contradicted by later priorities. The backcloth gifted to the LDDC was a tabula rasa, right down to the infrastructure, and its task was greatly complicated by the serpentine wending of the Thames.
Visionary stimulus
Reg Ward, the first LDDC Chief Executive
Reg Ward, with a strong background of unconventional thinking within local government, was appointed by Heseltine as the new London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) chief executive in 1980. Indeed for nine months he was its only employee, until it gained full powers.
This CAPX profile gives a large insight into the man, his motivation and the consequences for LDDC. He was a deal-maker, he passionately wanted a quality Docklands, and he led the visionary thinking. Rapidly gaining a reputation as a dynamic leader for change, he appointed a similarly motivated team of planners and let off their leash. He also relied on a high-calibre small team of officials to get him out of trouble if he exceeded official and governmental norms. As the introduction to the Thunderbirds series might have said, ‘anything can happen in the next half decade’. It did, in some unexpected ways.
LDDC’s Docklands remit area compared to central London. LDDC
Tabula rasa
The LDDC fully came into being on 2 July 1981, with powers and functions that included expropriating land and assembling land parcels for developers, and the creation of a ‘free market’ Enterprise Zone (EZ) in the Isle of Dogs to regenerate the centre of the depressed area, plus a 10 year rate holiday.
There were genuine worries, however, that most of the Docklands would lie undeveloped for decades, so the LDDC was grateful for any development, no matter how sprawling, in such a relatively vast and isolated area.
One of the first buildings developed (and still extant) from the early LDDC period is the low rise Billingsgate Fish Market, relocated from the City in 1982 to beside the then barren North (Import) Dock of the West India Docks. Ironically this low-density exemplar of the LDDC’s low expectations still survives, juxtaposed across the dock from the new Canary Wharf Crossrail station and the epicentre of Canary Wharf.
Billingsgate Market 1982 LDDC building with Canary Wharf epicentre and Crossrail station ironically behind. Crossrail Ltd
Billingsgate Market is indicative of the scale of development envisaged for the entire Docklands area before Canary Wharf came along – definitely not tube material!
Docklands Rail Study and Public Transport Provision for Docklands Report 1982
The initial thinking was still about low-density affordability, but Reg Ward was clear about the need to embed quality rail-based links within the Enterprise Zone, given that London was a railway-minded city. One of the first steps the LDDC performed was to commission LT in early 1981 to develop a Docklands Rail Study, which was issued in September 1981.
Based on that study, the Docklands Public Transport and Access Steering Group was then set up by the GLC, the Docklands Boroughs, London Transport Executive and the LDDC, in association with the (by then) Department of Transport, Department of Industry and Department of the Environment to study feasible transport schemes, costs and benefits. The Group issued the ‘Public Transport Provision for Docklands’ report in June 1982. The simplest benefit of the report was that all the necessary partners who would need to agree a way forward were now party to the same document, unlike all previous studies.
Artist’s impression of Metro-Cammell’s proposed minitram to Docklands.
The following table lists the studies undertaken by various entities to address the blank spaces for Docklands transport, each taking the prior study’s work into consideration.
| Published |
Author(s) |
Plan Title |
| Early 1980 |
Department of the Environment, Ministry of Transport, GLC, Docklands Development Organisation and the London Transport Executive |
A Study of Lower Cost Alternatives to the Jubilee Line in Docklands |
| 1981 |
LT internal study |
Summary in 1981 LT Annual Report |
| Sept 1981 |
LT, commissioned by LDDC |
Docklands Rail Study |
| June 1982 |
Docklands Public Transport and Access Steering Committee |
Public Transport Provision for Docklands Report |
Table 1: Docklands initial transport studies
The last two studies evaluated:
- improving bus service and implementing express bus routes,
- branching the East London Line from Surrey Docks station, under the Thames to serve the Isle of Dogs, but the cost of over £100m was considered too rich.
- constructing a Jubilee line extension to serve the Docklands, at an estimated price tag of £450m. The Study recognised that nowhere near that amount of funding was available. Moreover, any Tube extension was feared to be an ongoing revenue draw, given the low-density Docklands urban form then envisaged.
- building lower cost and risk options such as a mini-tram or surface light rail from Mile End and/or the City to the Isle of Dogs (LT’s preferred option was surface light rail from Mile End).
Faced with these conclusions, Reg Ward decided that the required chemistry for a high profile development stimulus wasn’t a conventional tram or subterranean scheme, but the very opposite.
He told LT he wanted a visible transport spine – not least as LDDC had freedom of manoeuvre to approve elevated lines within the Enterprise Area, cheaper to build than an underground line, and there were plenty of disused and semi-redundant rail lines available for re-use. So the surface light rail became the automated Docklands Light Railway (DLR) partly on viaduct.
As a result, the last study (Docklands 1982 Transport) recommended the construction of a new automated light railway along east-west and north-south axes across the Docklands, at an estimated cost of £65m. It would tie into Central London via Tower Gateway near Tower Hill, and also tie into Stratford rather than south of the river (unaffordable within budget, and not part of the LDDC area), which was another rail planning precedent by giving an early high profile to Stratford interchange.
Docklands Politics
The decision to proceed with the DLR wasn’t made by the Secretary of State for Transport – as the LDDC was DoE’s creature, not Transport’s. LDDC’s wish to promote its “own” self-contained transport system mostly unconnected to the rest of London was considered by some as a silo mentality. The reality was different, however, as we shall see.
Heseltine was convinced by a helicopter trip over the Docklands that a Light Railway was required to stimulate development. He announced the DLR proposition at the October 1982 Conservative Party conference. Around this time there was Cabinet discussion about the need for the DLR, and was where Nicholas Ridley made his first objection to the scheme, in his position then as Financial Secretary to the Treasury.
The first round of this challenge was concerned more with the principle of the DLR, but Ridley did not miss any opportunity to needle Heseltine, whose personal animus was mutual. Ridley argued for a bus-based system, to be privately-financed. It was eventually determined that the DLR should be allowed to proceed. This is because the then-recent studies and development thrust pointed to that being a more appropriate solution for Docklands.
All this suggests that the Party Conference came after this first ministerial joust; it wouldn’t have been necessary to have more than an agreement in principle to make the public announcement – as we see with many contemporary projects such as HS2.
The DLR No.1 Bill started wending its way through Parliament in November 1982, but ran into tactical trouble with capacity relief proposals at Tower Hill station. So DLR No.1 Bill was not passed by Parliament until 1984.
Heseltine was succeeded in January 1983 as Environment Secretary by Tom King, who understood the merits of a low-cost alternative to the Jubilee extension from his attendance at the fateful 1979 No.10 meeting, and subsequent events. If King’s presence in the first half of 1983 was helpful at the helm of the DoE, he had a further beneficial opportunity after the General Election in June 1983 when he was moved to become Secretary of State for Transport. King was only in Transport for three months, but the drafting of the second DLR Private Bill (Poplar towards Stratford) made progress under his tenure.
King was then moved to Employment in October 1983 to make way for Nicholas Ridley as Transport Secretary. It was then that the DLR faced a further test, with Patrick Jenkin as Environment Secretary and Reg Ward (still leading the LDDC) both sponsoring the DLR project, but Nicholas Ridley still questioning its go-ahead all the way to Cabinet (David Howell had been the Transport Secretary during the original Cabinet decision in 1982, but allowed Ridley to lead the assault on DLR).
Matters had not eased when Ridley became Secretary of State for Transport – he merely had to re-assert his own previous judgment, however “anti-transport” it may have seemed to a passing observer. It was then that Ridley insisted on a cash cap to the project cost. Accounts suggest that the second round of the Ridley vs DoE match was fought at cabinet committee, rather than full cabinet. There was a detailed discussion on the size of the public sector contribution, which is what made it so odd – one spending minister arguing for another spending minister’s spending to be capped. It got to the point where senior officials wondered if Ridley had mentally left the Treasury at all.
Finally, it was agreed to limit the cost to no more than £65m cash – £77m outturn after Retail Price Index (RPI) adjustment – a tough condition. It is believed that the £65m was the value of project benefits that had been estimated by LT, and that hardliners in the Conservative Government weren’t going to allow a scheme to cost more than the benefits it generated. The obvious point is that Ridley had an unheralded two bites at the cherry, but the DLR stayed alive. The light railway’s survival was also despite the DLR Bills being led technically by London Transport. London Transport was being turned into a nationalised industry under direct DTp control during the Government’s local authority dismemberment legislation in 1983-84, which was aimed at the GLC and other city region authorities following the June 1983 General Election.
Was the DLR the outcome of a silo mentality? No. It was self-protection for the project and it had been shrewd positioning to place the DLR under DoE aegis to ensure the railway’s survival. If it had been fully integrated within LT/LRT, that would have gifted the project into the DTp decision-making zone, with a high risk of the project being dismissed.
The separate LT Tower Hill Bill (the second DLR Bill) started in 1983 and progressed through the Parliamentary machinery, gaining Royal Assent in 1985.
In general, the Docklands was not seen as an opportunity within the Transport Department – indeed DTp had hardly regarded it as an issue.
LDDC had the powers to promote their own transport of a somewhat limited choice, so they did – apart from trolleybuses, where they set out to argue that the “Trolleybus Act” should be applied to them – they slunk away when told that no such legislation existed. The LDDC also knew full well that with the GLC and LT soon to be gutted, it was down to them or nobody to push through their railway.
The LT 1982 Annual Report stated:
In October 1982 the Government accepted proposals for a light railway to serve Docklands [the Tower Gateway-Isle of Dogs and Isle of Dogs-Bow-Stratford system], at a cash-limited outturn cost of £77 million, financed equally by the London Docklands Development Corporation and the Greater London Council. In November, London Transport deposited a Bill in Parliament requesting the necessary powers for the east-west section. The target date for the completion is 1987.
The London Regional Transport (LRT) report of March 1985 states that LRT took over the responsibilities of the GLC for the specification and funding of the DLR on 29 June 1984, when GLC’s transport powers were reduced by Government:
The cost of construction of the railway is met 50% by London Regional Transport and 50% by the London Docklands Development Corporation who reimburse London Regional Transport on a costs incurred basis. London Regional Transport is responsible for the construction of the railway and carries it at full cost
The DLR book value at an early point of construction was £33.1m at 31 March 1985 (LRT £14.3m, third parties £18.8m), with a further £23m expenditure already authorised by the Department of Transport.
The LRT 1985/86 Report notes that a Bill was deposited for the Bank DLR extension desired by the Canary Wharf developers, and part of the cost of that would be met by those developers. This project expansion will be covered in Part 4.
West India Docks showing the largely cleared lands. The DLR would cross these Docks on viaduct.
The remaining £23m of the GLC’s funds, beyond the DLR’s £77m outturn, was funnelled to build a number of roads for the area, including the Docklands Northern Relief Road and the Isle of Dogs Loop Road, mirroring the Iron Lady’s insistence that modern society was based on the car. In that way, the LDDC and LT were able to support Docklands regeneration and to fulfil the Cutler/Government agreement.
| Date |
Sponsor |
Line |
Main Routing |
Cost |
| Dec 1979 |
Cutler’s GLC |
Jubilee Stage 2 |
Charing Cross – Aldwych – Ludgate Circus – Cannon Street – Fenchurch Street |
£103m |
| Early 1980 |
A Study of Lower Cost Alternatives to the Jubilee Line in Docklands |
Interim Jubilee Line Stages 2-4 |
Charing Cross to Beckton, with no stations at Aldwych, Ludgate Circus, St Katharine Dock, and no Thamesmead branch |
£200m |
| 1981 |
LT |
East London |
Branch the ELL west from Wapping to Tower Hill (£40m). |
£110m |
| Branch the ELL east from Rotherhithe to Isle of Dogs Millwall (£70m) |
| 1982 |
Docklands Report |
East London |
Branch from Surrey Docks under the Thames to Isle of Dogs |
£100m+ |
| Jubilee Stages 2-4 |
To the Docklands, Woolwich and Thamesmead |
£450m |
Heavy rail proposals for the Docklands 1979 – 1982
Meanwhile, in December 1982 the plug was officially pulled on the plans to extend the Jubilee line when the GLC didn’t seek to renew the Parliamentary powers for the Stage 2 extension to Fenchurch Street. The LDDC press release of 7 October 1982 about DLR had this as a farewell eulogy of the Jubilee extension scheme:
The challenge was to find the best system which could be implemented with the funds available. The extension of the Jubilee Line was a proposal which perhaps best met the needs of the area, but the very high costs of construction means it is not high now on the Government’s list of priorities.
This was all at the time when Transport was a poor relation of Government, previously being a subsidiary of the Department of the Environment. When Heseltine, at Environment, presented DLR at the Conservative Party Autumn 1982 conference as the solution to Docklands transport shortcomings, the political tide had turned in favour of Docklands being an urgent priority. Heseltine had better lines of argument to put before the Prime Minister than Cutler, having started the LDDC and cultivated a free-market ethos for area replanning (so being more likely to secure No.10 approval in that era).
There are parallels today with London’s (Conservative) former-Mayor Boris Johnson and his Labour successor Sadiq Khan, and the Mayors’ battles for financial autonomy with the Coalition and now Conservative led government. Ultimately it is not professional and impartial transport planning and needs that generally determines what transport scheme is approved, but political will and power, via control of funding. As one of the core tenets of LR Towers holds: you get the railways that politics allows, not the ones that transport planners would like to build.
Personalities not Principles
So what we have seen during the first Conservative Government from 1979 to 1983 is a couple of strong personalities who shaped all of the initial (rail and road) transport for the Docklands. Specifically for rail transport schemes, Reg Ward and Michael Heseltine were key proponents, fighting to push their vision forward in the cacophony of ideas that was Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet. In January 1983 Tom King became the next Environment Secretary after Heseltine, and then moved to be Transport Secretary in June 1983 – a happy accident for DLR when it needed high-level DTp support.
Conventional ideas didn’t always win out. Horace Cutler’s vision of a Tube line through the Docklands – itself poorly matched to the prevailing development policy for the area and which the GLC had itself failed to modify – was stopped by a much stronger personality, the Iron Lady.
If it weren’t for these strong-willed individuals, the Docklands would likely have become a difficult-to-access sprawling business park, with some equally inaccessible housing estates.
Death of the Jubilee extension…
The key underlying failing of the Fleet/Jubilee extension project was that no-one went out of their way to make a case for a higher-density Docklands, which in turn would have provided a stronger baseline for a Tube business case. The 1976 LDSP projected and effectively locked in the perception of a low-density semi-industrial/business park development pattern there, which didn’t foresee new large volumes of commuting to/from Central London. This despite the fact that a Tube line would enable higher development densities (either as cause or effect).
It is reasonable to conclude that the GLC’s long-standing involvement with Thamesmead also dragged the early River/Jubilee Line schemes to too distant and low-density a destination.
No private developer would have built in Beckton then, and the LDDC itself couldn’t justify public transport or even road improvements there at the time, as the demand was negligible. The concept of building infrastructure to stimulate development was a difficult sell. Even when the Beckton DLR scheme was being promulgated, it was seen as a Dock too far.
Upstream Docklands were seen as having some development potential sooner, but as part two of this series demonstrated, even shorter distance Jubilee Tube extension schemes to Surrey Docks or Millwall didn’t cut the mustard.
…and birth of the Docklands Light Railway
In 1984 the first Docklands Light Railway Bill was finally approved by Parliament, with construction starting later in the year. It was sponsored by LT in its new form divorced from the GLC, London Regional Transport. The DLR opened in 1987 and proved very successful, after initial teething problems, in assisting the area’s economic rejuvenation. It has been expanded multiple times, going from 13km to 40km in route length. The original section has been partly rebuilt and strengthened at least twice since. Where there were once two-car articulated automated units, there are now six-car trains, with frequency and capacity still growing.
Passenger volume grew fifteen-fold from 6.6m annual passenger journeys in 1988/89 to 110m in 2015. But the DLR story has been told in greater detail elsewhere.
Looking forward to the next part of this series, there were major shifts in the economic and planning realms that were about to have a fundamental impact on this part of London.
Acknowledgements to Graham H for his many contributions.
Previously on Diving Into the Fleet
Part 1 –
Diving into the Fleet: A look at London’s lost Tube
Part 2 –
Jubilee line derailed: 1974-1979
Part 4 –
The rest of the Eighties
Part 5 –
Th Canary Wharf years
Docklands transport infrastructure as of 1980. LDDC
Reg Ward, the first LDDC Chief Executive
LDDC’s Docklands remit area compared to central London. LDDC
Billingsgate Market 1982 LDDC building with Canary Wharf epicentre and Crossrail station ironically behind. Crossrail Ltd
Artist’s impression of Metro-Cammell’s proposed minitram to Docklands.
West India Docks showing the largely cleared lands. The DLR would cross these Docks on viaduct.
Nice article. You have a rogue “Bishopsgate” in the text, rather than “Billingsgate” in the text following the picture of Canary Wharf.
[Corrected, thank you. LBM]
And the “Use free 1983 image” line just before the last photo appears to be strictly editorial.
[Indeed. Corrected, thank you. LBM]
“As the introduction to the Thunderbirds series might have said, ‘anything can happen in the next half decade’.”
Stingray not Thunderbirds – sorry.
In all other respects, quite revealing.
It is an interesting observation, and one I haven’t really thought about until reading this article, about what a low-rise, “white elephant” the New Billingsgate fish market has become
A questions I am sure the authors/others can shed light on: The article talks about the Docklands Northern Relief Road – is that Aspen Way, the upgraded A13 or Royal Albert Way ?
Nameless 14 October 2016
You are probably right! As an aficionado of Thunderbirds, not StingRay, I thought the Ts were also introduced that way occasionally thought not generally.
Maybe this article ought to be renamed: StingReg…
For others who know nothing of Stingray or the Thunderbirds, here is an informative link:
https://georgesjournal.org/2011/03/10/gerry-anderson-anything-could-have-happened-in-the-next-half-hour/
To confirm Stingray quote:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w_Kx7EWNSA
Thunderbirds ran for about 50 minutes per episode.
“Yet even in the mid-2010s Thamesmead is only on target for a final population of 50,000 (although there are local hopes that Crossrail will achieve more).”
I’m pretty sure I’ve read reports and documents which state the current population is about 50k-60k?
Add in the new Housing Zone and that’s 10k more. Then last week the DLR announcement had Peabody looking into about 11k additional homes. If we assume 3 per dwelling (lots of family units mentioned) then that’s almost the 100k.
With further scope for development and denitrification a final population of 120k is possible.
Ah and Crossrail is only much use for about 30-40k of those without far better links from North Thamesmead which is cut off by the Southern Outfall sewer, dual carriageways and other failures of planning. Hence the new plans, but they wont link south bizarrely.
Two completely tangential comments.
1. Those suggested minitram vehicles from Met Cam look remarkably like Bedford JJL midibuses.
2. The only other place I’ve encountered “tabula rasa” was Anton Lesser using the phrase in an early episode of Endeavour (Inspector Morse the early years). I don’t think I’d ever have expected it to arise on LR.
Coming back to transport matters and obviously with the benefit of hindsight it still amazes me how 30 years on we face the same problems and demands with transport access to Thamesmead. The other issue is how completely wrong the politicians were about the Jubilee Line. All that palaver *not* to build it and now we have a line that is utterly bursting at the seams in the peaks and is very well used off peak. I know there’s a risk of “putting the cart before the horse” with my remarks because you can argue about what caused what – the enterprise zone, Canary Wharf redevelopment, transport access via DLR etc etc. Nonetheless we still have growing transport demand and congestion in the Isle of Dogs and yet more demands for cross river access (road, rail, cycle etc).
@WW – re your substantive comments, it was the same with the Victoria Line. The problem seems to be the credibility of transport planning and its output forecasts – I don’t have a glib solution to that, except to note that the Treasury’s own forecasts are hardly uncontested…
I was puzzled by the “minitrams” in the headline picture – I can’t recall anywhere (even in the States) that has used similar stock – articulated versions perhaps (eg T&W) but not single cars. Perhaps a duorail answer to the trendy M-word? The concept ship/freight/rail/car interchange was particularly entertaining… Autopark anyone?
Tabula rasa – clearly time to step up the Latin content…
@WW
2. I’m happy you noticed this – a latin present for aficionados of ancient languages who haunt (in a good way) this site.
@ LBM – now we have a “haunted” blog. 🙂 🙂
@WW Appropriately seasonal!
But what if the Canary Wharf development had never happened?
Perhaps the DLR would have remained a curiosity, still with it’s two car trains today, its Canary Wharf and the political clout that has had a gravitational effect on transport policy.
In comparison look at how much longer it has taken to develop the Royal Docks.
@Graham H, 14 October 2016 at 20:28
In size and appearance those minitrams closely resemble airport automated people mover (APM) cars and similar vehicles used for short suburban distributor lines at mass transit stations in Singapore. Those are all rubber tyred however.
It was difficult to justify spending such a large sum to serve the docklands wastelands. Much easier once the development was underway.
GH,MT et al.
My copy of “A New Ringrail For London” 1973 talks,inter alia,of “cabtracks” serving intermediate stops,with actual trains only stopping at interchanges…perhaps the illustrator had this concept in mind?
However the RR proposers use the words “suspended rail-cars” which suggests something rather infra-dig here.
We need an editorial decision, please.
Will we have to be able to decline moderator, or does the moderator decline?
@nameless – having had to sit through a DTp board meeting, ten minutes of which were devoted to discussing the plural of scenarios*, I think you may have unleashed whole flocks of grammasites (with apologies to Jasper Fforde). I suspect moderator is one of those awkward 6th declension nouns that varies little with case (thus reflecting the nature of the beast itself..).
*Scenarios, you might think – but scenarioes, scenarioi, and best of all, scenariones, were also offered…
Back on topic, I was involved with the purchase of the first trains designed for the Jubilee line (1983 tube stock, with it’s wide single doors and its “interesting” yellow, orange and brown interior) during this period. The designs were done a) against a backdrop of falling ridership and b) to accommodate enough seats to ensure that all the forecast customers at the planned station at Lewisham might have one.
Because of the falling ridership the number of trains for the Stanmore – Charing Cross line was cut from 30 to 15 and in order to retain enough 1972 tube stock and eliminate the last 1938 tube stock other tube lines had to tighten their belts to provide trains. By the time the trains were delivered, Ken Livingston was in power, all the shenanigans of Fairs Fare were settled and traffic was growing again, thus, right at the end of the period being covered, I had to prepare the specification for more trains (16.5 trains – I don’t recall why the half trains). You might say that the specification should have said “more like this please”, and this was more or less right but the various modification had to be incorporated and the things that really didn’t work had to be eliminated. I’ll add to the rolling stock story in the next instalment.
When I first saw the title picture I thought more of one of these, rather than any kind of passenger transport vehicle…
Canary Wharf is highly public transport orientated (even less car-friendly than central London). A more regulated planning system would have thrown it out on that ground certainly at the time, whichever party was in power.
Isn’t it ironic that the Thatcher years were Public transport unfriendly yet at the same time made the city so car hostile with its ring of steel…
@ The Future’s Bright.
Canary Wharf Group has indeed sponsored rail – notably building of Jubilee and Crossrail. But I disagree that they are less car oriented than central London. There are numerous large car parks under many of the towers at the Wharf – much more parking provision in the Wharf than at similar buildings in the City or West End
In the options considered, mention is made of express buses. In the early days of the LDDC, there was one such route, the D1. This ran non-stop from Mile End to the Isle of Dogs, then once on the island it served stops on Marsh Wall, Millharbour and on to Island Gardens.
In tune with the original vision for the area, along Marsh Wall, Millharbour and Limeharbour there were small industrial units – and the large FT/Express print works – exactly as originally envisaged. The irony is that most of these have now being (or are about to be) demolished, to be replaced by residential towers – invariably 30-plus storeys high….
Ah for an edit button. It was an Express/Telegraph printing works (Westferry printers), not the FT. Now due to be demolished.
The planning powers of the LDDC, to bypass just about all other agencies, also gave us the “red brick road”. The new roads that the LDDC built, Marsh Wall and Millharbour were originally surfaced in red brick. Presumably to show how “on trend” they were.
Anyone why has ridden a motorbike knows that wet brick has all the grip of sheet ice. I recall one “interesting” journey when the driver of the bus I was on discovered the lack of grip, as we went into a dramatic all-wheel slide right across a junction….
A fascinating read. Thank you and I look forward to the next episode.
But if LR is to be a “blog of record” then I feel we should have the current London Mayor’s name correct in the last paragraph of the Docklands Politics section.
Graham H 1217A 15102010 et passim: it’s Latvian not Latin which has a 6th declension I believe; & the Latin ‘moderator’ is 3rd declension. I like ‘scenariones’ tho’.
On topic (ish): in October/November 1987, Eurotunnel raised public equity capital on the back of traffic & revenue forecasts which turned out to be, err ‘remarkably optimistic’; so they’re not all woeful underestimates.
Has anyone compared ‘forecast’ vs ‘actual’ for Lewisham & Woolwich DLR extensions? I’d hope the state of the art in traffic forecasting has improved over, say, 20 years.
There’re some salutary lessons from history in this interesting saga, thoughtfully chronicled.
@OB -You are right to correct me, although it may be the 2nd declension-perhaps wrongly – I had in mind; remind me not to learn Latvian (Estonian was bad enough with its 17 cases)
Back on topic, , whilst the sorry tale of the DLR/JLE illustrates the waste and inefficiency of, shall we say, an adventitious approach to infrastructure planning, there is a debate to be had as to whether the other extreme of a typical French plan which lasts with little change for anything up to 25 years,is any better. The problems faced by both Eurostar and Eurotunnel neatly illustrate the pitfalls.
Graham H
Also the malign (or beneficial) effect that single “powerful” individuals can have on such schemes.
In this case, Ridley & Heseltine (?)
Back off topic I seem to recall tabular rasa being a term used by John Locke the late 17th century/early 18th century philosopher. Perhaps someone can continue the philosopher theme by using the Hegelian, thesis, antithesis, synthesis in the next article with the original Jubilee line being the thesis, the cancelling of it being the antithesis and the new Jubilee line being the synthesis.
Great stuff. As Greg says, it’s a reminder of the powerful impact that individuals have on history, in this case the history of transport in a small part of our nation. Twas ever thus in all walks of life. Nothing big ever got done without some passionate belief on the part of influential individuals. However, in the opposite direction, the dull ones could always stop something by injecting doses of delay and uninterest.
New Billingsgate is indeed a reminder of the low density industrial vision for Docklands, but as has already pointed out, many similar buildings have already come and gone, e.g. the Fleet Street diaspora which was the site of the Battle of Wapping. There is no reason (apart perhaps from our present little constitutional difficulties) why a superbly located site like New Billingsgate should not already be the subject of numerous secretive plans for profitable replacement.
Fandroid: Some good musings there. But perhaps we should add that “stopping things” (whether or not done by dull individuals) is not always bad. Far more “big things” are proposed – often by influential individuals – than could possibly all be built, and some negative input is essential to enable the best ones to thrive. (I could mention a topical big thing which is in dire need of stopping – but I won’t).
@Malcolm/Fandroid – indeed, much of my time in DfT seemed to be spent stopping things from happening – eg Settle-Carlisle closure, bus substitution, and so on. Then there’s the Cornfordian argument about doing nothing having no possible consequences politically…
@Anon of Croydon
This is an excellent suggestion, about which I will confer with my co-author. At the very least it will spawn a separate line of research into Hegelian philosophy. Now, to find a copy of Hegel for Dummies…
As I remember at the time, in the early 80s there was also an argument – principally from what became BIS – that DLR (as it became) should be pursued as a showcase of British technology and industry which would then lead, no doubt, to countless export orders. Just another tube line would not, of course, have achieved this. I haven’t done the calculation at to just how many DLR clones exist in the rest of the world, I’m sure it’s genuinely countless.
@quinlet 🙂 [If only you knew how difficult it was to get Ministers to take overseas trade seriously – unless it involved, err, arms sales – I will forbear from drawing a present day lesson…]
@LBM – of course, you do realise that Hegel’s dialectic was supposed to justify the Prussian State, as the final synthesis?
@LBM
Also to expand the philosophical and metaphysical themes perhaps a consideration of the influence of millennialist metaphors in mass entertainment and modern public policy and the consequent effect on day rates demanded by electrical contractors in response to an entirely immobile project end date.
@quinlet
Weren’t the first DLR cars another run of a German design, as had been operated in Dortmund I seem to recall? Perhaps the export orders were to be from Germany, not to Germany…
@LBM
The initial stock was definitely fairly standard German Stadtbahn cars. They went back on withdrawal and some may still be running in Essen.
Former DLR cars in Essen:
https://youtu.be/DCsuFWncQcw
https://youtu.be/hr_PtAIuD90
Just a thought. If those minitrams had arrived and circulated, paternoster-style, every so often on a continuous loop, would not the whole kerfuffle of increased train/platform lengths have been obviated by the simple (?) expedient of increasing the “so often” bit?
quinlet 16 October 2016 at 15:42
” just how many DLR clones exist in the rest of the world ”
I been on the British Columbia Skytrain. They are inclined to think of it as Canadian technology from far away Montreal.
@Mark Townsend -not quite standard German kit and required extensive rebuilding to make them operable in Essen.
@Anonymous – no- thelimitation is the spacing between the individual units, so basically,the longer the units, the more you can get on board for the same number of tph(it’s not quite a linear relationship because longer trains may,stress may, have longer dwell times which then may,stress may, eat into service intervals, but basically the longer the unit, the more PAX/hr you can shift.) For a practical demonstration of this watch any busy bus service or taxi queue.
Alan Griffiths…..Skytrain is Ontario technology as far as I recall with vehicles from UTDC (now Bombardier Canada and Seltrac signalling from Alcatel, now Thales. It was based on the first system of UTDC’s Intermediate Capacity Transit System installed on the Scarborough line in Toronto, which was intended to be automatic/driverless but never was (although Skytrain is automatic/driverless as far as I know). Both systems used steering bogies and linear induction motors. The only factor these have in common with DLR is a) they’re elevated, b) they’re railways, and c) they use the Seltrac signalling system.
@Graham H
Why would longer trains have longer dwell times? Generally, the longer the train, the more doors. Even if the longer train is carrying proportionately more passengers, the dwell time would’ve increase.
@timbeau – as I say, it depends – one could, for example, envisage uneven distribution of punters along the (longer) train leading to disproportionate delay but it’s not very likely – I was mainly trying to avoid pedants devising implausible but possible scenariones where dwell time was a direct function of train length…The essential point is the station re-occupation time which is normally invariate with train length.
And for road vehicles (which we weren’t talking about as such, but Graham did mention bus and taxi queues), dwell time does rise (somewhat lumpily) with vehicle length, because the number of passengers per door does tend to increase (lumpily) with vehicle length. Has done ever since toastrack trams (about which we were also not talking) went out of fashion.
Malcolm. In your Moderator role, are you maintaining a list of things about which we were not talking?
@Malcolm – depends entirely on the number of doors and the bunching of the punters. Try to avoid these sweeping generalisations – see me in my study afterwards.
Fandroid: err, no, but if I wanted to, then the contents of the original article (about which we are supposed to be talking) would be a good foundation.
To get more serious, and strolling near my moderator hat (though not yet donning it) – some movement back towards perceptions of events of 1980-85, and any conclusions which may be drawn from those perceptions, would be desirable.
@Malcolm – besides dwelltime, and perhaps I should have mentioned this, too, the other determining factor is the spacing between trains – where greater length is actually helpful. Think of the tunnel/line as a pipe. Trains cannot approach each other (however long they maybe) closer than x metres. Now in a single car operation – let’s say each car is just 20m long and the permitted gap is 230m (for ease of calculation) then the maximum number of trains is 4×20=80m single cars per km. In other words you are using only 8% of the available tunnel. Now move to 220m trains and you have 2.2(rounded) – longer – trains per km but you fill 480m /km with train and you are using 48% of the tunnel for punters. Sorry to be boring but it does help to try and crystalise the arguments factually.
@Cent trente
Very well summarized. UTDC is the Urban Transport Development Corporation, a Crown corporation created & owned by the Government of Ontario, Canada in the 1970s to enter what was then expected to be a booming market in light rail mass transit systems. The SkyTrain, as the system became known after its most successful implementation in Vancouver, was designed to provide capacity between a traditional subway and buses/streetcars, filling a niche in suburbs that were burgeoning around almost every major city.
The Scarborough Rapid Transit line in Toronto is indeed programmed to be automatically driven, however union rules required (and still require) that a driver take the driving instructions from the train computer, to speed up, slow down, open doors etc.
However, as Malcolm is in the same room as his Moderator hat, and mine is around here somewhere, this should be the last of the UTDC/SkyTrain comments.
@LBM – ” union rules required (and still require) that a driver take the driving instructions from the train computer”. I hope you’re joking but I fear you are not. That’s one hell of a rewarding job description that the unions have negotiated there – a really good model for the future of work generally.
Graham H: Of course there may be other ramifications and complications hidden behind the brief way LBM has described the situation. But if it really is as stark and simple and daft as the description implies, it can be seen as making some of the oft-criticised British union stipulations look positively benign by contrast!
Graham H……at risk of Malcolm’s or LBM’s snip, I don’t believe the Scarborough line’s driving style is quite as bad as you imply. It is simply driving in manual following the cab signalling which is indicated by target speeds and not green, yellow or red lights. (dimly recalled from a cab ride 10 years ago)
@130 – no different then in principle from our own driver advisory systems? [Perhaps the moderators would be happier if this exchange continued on the “last stand of the old guard” thread].
… yes, if it really does need to continue. But hopefully it has got to a point where there is enough doubt as to just how awkward the unions are or are not being, that we can move to other matters not subject to such sensitivities.
Graham H…..no not like Driver Advisory Systems, more like ETCS. DAS is advisory, ETCS commands are mandatory – and this brings us into the UK at least, and, I can honestly say becomes relevant to the Jubilee line albeit 25 years later where manual driving with the Thales signalling system was/is going on!
@ Southern Heights ” Ring of steel ” The ring of steel was more a ring of plastic and was installed following IRA bombing of the City of London which caused massive damage which I saw when I visited City the next morning . It included CCTV cameras on all approach roads and had a side effect of reducing crime particularly where road vehicles were used .
I remember visiting Canary Wharf when it first opened and simply consisted of its famous tower block and the surrounding buildings which were build to look like they were older than they were and only 1 coffee shop was available on Saturdays I visited.
The original DLR with its single car was more like a very big fairground ride especially when turning towards CWG after ascending the ramp connnection.
The DLR. had better fortune than Croydon Tramlink which still basically covers the same route as when it opened . While the DLR managed to constantly grow both in route length and length of vehicles and stations one of the major problems of the restricted funding when built meant large sums have needed to be spent to cope with growth and still some stations are not long enough for 3 carriage trains.
As for how we got Canary Wharf well perhaps it was Bob Hoskins film ” The Long Good Friday?” which featured an empty docklands backdrop with Bobs character talking about major development in this area !
The “ring of steel” was Major-era rather than Thatcher-era (1993), and one consequence of its construction was that the IRA switched to targets outside the City, including Manchester and (back on topic) Docklands. The 1996 bomb planted under the South Quay DLR viaduct unintentionally helped the further densification of the area.
@LBM and Jonathan Roberts: On the subject of union rules etc, in your researches, was there any indication in the political discussions that one of the appealing things about an automated DLR separate to the Tube was that it might not be so dependent on the rail unions?
Also on the subject of films, Beckton in the 1980s was desolate enough for Stanley Kubrick to use it to represent South Vietnam during the Vietnam War, while Thamesmead in the 1970s was dystopian enough to represent the future in A Clockwork Orange…
Ian J
Re Thamesmead:
[Derogatory remarks snipped. LBM]
Back on the topic, it’s interesting to see that the NLL Woolwich river crossing was being considered. It’s rather ironic that one could imagine this working well now, given how good loadings on the DLR and NLL are throughout the day. That scenario, however, couldn’t have got past the ‘chicken and egg’ stage, since 3-car trains every 20 minutes at that time, without a JLE interchange along the route, is unlikely to have generated much ridership. I’m surprised it was even suggested, but somehow glad that strategic hope over financial reality was tabled back then. Who would have thought that Crossrail would come along in the end.
With the Barking Overground electrification already taking place, and the prospect of more development south of the river, perhaps the likelihood for the crossing to Thamesmead may be better than before too.
@ Nick BXN – don’t count on the GOBLIN extension proceeding. I can see the ghosts of times past haunting the current situation. The Mayor’s apparent support for the DLR diving across the river to “Thamesmead” seems to be heavily linked to Peabody wanting to build thousands of new homes and possibly being willing to pull some money out of its wallet to help fund the link. Clearly the Mayor wants housing built and that’s fine but I detect another one of these daft development led decisions rather than a transport one which would ensure the rail services in the area were linked together.
If the DLR link is built I can’t see money being found to extend the GOBLIN as the business case will inevitably be partly diluted by a DLR cross river link into broadly the same area. I would very much the GOBLIN extended as the connectivity to Abbey Wood would be very valuable. The challenge, of course, is that the link would probably become extremely busy thus causing problems at Barking as to how you run an intensive service alongside C2C trains and freight (if trains ran beyond Barking).
The ideal development stimulus would be for the GOBLIN link to somehow serve different areas that are ripe for development over and above whatever Peabody may wish to do. The obvious thing is for it to head east from Abbey Wood to Erith. However this would likely stymie an eastwards extension of Crossrail so pretty unlikely. It’s just a great shame that Mr Johnson killed the Dagenham Dock extension as that would have served Barking Reach far more effectively and a cross river link to Thamesmead and Abbey Wood would fit in much better as DLR offers flexible service patterns. However hindsight is a great thing – as this series of articles on the Jubilee Line is showing all too well.
@NickBXN: Would part of the thinking about the NLL Woolwich tunnel have been its usefulness for freight? Especially in the context of the various on-again, off-again Channel Tunnel proposals of the period (which were expected to bring a vast rush of freight that never really materialised).
I would agree we won’t get both, though Woolwich will have done in the end. The interesting thing about this is that in each scenario, Barking would be very busy, but so would the the awkward Custom House interchange in the DLR solution. Either could end up forcing a southward extension to spread the load via Abbey Wood where, for the sake of circulation and site constraints, it would have to be a Lewisham MkII. Not easy, but easier if DLR. This may seem a touch crayonish, but as seen elsewhere, when the development and money starts to make something take shape and traffic builds up, these things have a habit of building up further and capacity expansion becomes irresistible.
Ian J
Channel Tunnel proposals of the period (which were expected to bring a vast rush of freight that never really materialised).
I still don’t get this, actually – is there something really perverse in the way freight charges are stacked up? Because I can’t think of any other reason.
I should, perhaps, add the rider, that twice recently, I have driven down part of the A2/M2, & the sheer volume of long-distance HGV traffic is scary – but this is really, actually economic, with a person in each HGV cab, being paid, rather than trains of containers?
Is it regulatory costs, or previous guvmints deliberately favouring road, or something else entirely?
@Greg: the factors you mention are present, but the main reason AIUI is the lack of interoperability on the other side if the Channel – which is a long way (in topic terms at least) from London, so I’ll stop there.
@Greg T – certainly the charges pay a part -I understand that the charge for a standard freight path (=2 Eurostar paths in the simplistic tariff used by Eurotunnel) is something in excess of £6k per train. Dunno what the charge for HS1 is,alas. The RFG constantly cites these charges as a major deterrent ( and one can see their point: it equates to about £2-300 per lorry before the operating costs and any profit margin are added in). The short explanation is – cue Alan Robinson – that in a fully-funded commercial railway, infrastructure charges weigh very very heavily.
@Greg. Also that the channel tunnel isnt useful for many logistics markets. To be competitive with road, trains need big loads going (ideally) several hundred miles at the same time. Hence in the UK freight is now limited, mostly, to containers between deep sea ports and inland logistics terminals at least 100 miles from the port, plus some point to point flows of heavy goods, principally aggregates, oil and steel.
Add in the charging regime and the security issues, and it’s generally quicker and cheaper for goods to go by road.
@OB
“lack of interoperability on the other side if the Channel”
I don’t get that – freight wagons have been carried across the Channel on train ferries for eighty years
http://www.doverferryphotosforums.co.uk/the-dover-train-ferry-dock/ (Dover – Dunkirk service opened in October 1936)
In an ideal world, quite apart from freight trains as such, some if not most of the Eurotunnel freight shuttles would continue to at least somewhere in the Midlands (Daventry freight terminal, for example), taking large numbers of HGVs off the M2, M20, M25 and M1. But that implies a whole load of infrastructure we haven’t got.
@Jim et al
An overall national transportation policy that focusses on reducing pollution and climate change, and optimises journeys, would also help, but is nowhere on the horizon.
Government policy actively encouraging cheaper road freight – for example through increasing the maximum length of HGVs (only as an ‘experiment’ for ten years, you understand) – does not help either.
@ Timbeau : I wasn’t going to go into detail but since others have chipped in:
It’s interoperability between European nations I was thinking of. Locos & drivers need changing at borders between member states. That knocks on to timings & the probability of a given train arriving punctually.
It also militates against efficient long haul flows, which as others have noted are rail freight’s ‘sweet spot’.
Accept your point that train ferries ran for over 80 years. Though ‘just in time’ logistics hadn’t been invented then & I suspect there was less awareness of full “top to bottom” costs (see, eg Graham H above & elsewhere on Victorian railway companies’ accounting practices).
It’s a long way from London & the cibtribution of light & heavy rail to the redevelopment of docklands though.
@OB: Sorry my aside about rail freight seems to have derailed the discussion a bit – even with no Channel Tunnel freight there may have been thought given to a freight component to a Woolwich rail tunnel, as there certainly was in the mid 1990s (have to wait until 2026 to find out what the conclusion on that one was, unless there happens to be someone reading who was involved in the planning at the time…)
To attempt a connection between rail freight and Docklands: the reason all that land became available in the first place was because of the containerisation of freight.
@OB
“It’s interoperability between European nations I was thinking of. Locos & drivers need changing at borders between member states.”
Not an insuperable problem – many locos can operate on more than one European country’s systems – I have seen Austrian locos in Munich, Belgian ones in Paris, etc. Driver’s hours rules mean there is a limit to how far one driver can go, whether on a road or on rails.
@OB: British train drivers on Eurostar are also trained on the Belgian and French signalling systems, so that is no hinderance. This is but one example…. Look at Thalys PBKA units: Suitable for use in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. They will probably work fine in Luxemburg as well, so giving them a huge range.
Multi system locomotives allow freight (and passenger) trains to go a long way into foreign countries. As timbeau mentions the real limitation is driver hours.
@SHLR/timbeau – well, that’s the theory anyway, but we all know how difficult it is to get approval for one country’s traction to be used in another. e320s anyone? Nor is it just technical cross-approval; it has taken a lot of work (not yet complete) to enable manifests to work across borders/operators, not to mention EU/non-EU frontier clearance to work “on demand”.
Way back up the thread I suggested we might like to spell the London Mayor’s name correctly (an error I have just seen made in the editorial of the last issue of Rail magazine) but it still appears to be as it was.
I do feel that a four letter name should not provide too much difficulty even though it isn’t Smith ,which, I would wager is unlikely to ever appear as Smiht.
[Apologies, thanks for the reminder. Fixed. LBM]
Way off topic, but vehicle gauge, rules, language, signalling, power supplies all hinder international freight. It can be done……China to Europe via Russia has been done that even requires the bogies to be changed en-route given European an Russian gauges are different.
What is interesting is that there appears to be no market for high value, but relatively light freight that could get goods from country to country quicker than by lorry. France did build some yellow TGVs for the French post office, but I believe these were withdrawn.
@130
There is a market for light, high-value, time-sensitive cargo… it goes by air.
Moosalot yes I agree. I failed to make the implied *by rail* overt.
Rail is always going to be at a disadvantage to air (and to a lesser extent road) over longer distances, because of the cost of infrastructure.
For air, there is no physical infrastructure except at the terminals, which is the same whether the flight is 100 miles or 10,000.
For road, the infrastructure is generally paid for from the public purse, although fuel tax does make some contribution to that.
Should have added that sea has even fewer infrastructure costs that scale with distance than air does – I assume an airline has to pay for air traffic control in the territories it overflies.
On the subject of air traffic control fees, I can vaguely remember being told in A level economics that those were the biggest source of foreign currency for either Laos or Cambodia (can’t remember which) at the time
@130 – at the risk of drifting even further off topic, I would draw attention to the French Carex project which envisaged large numbers of logistics firms such as the French Post Office, DPD, DHL, UPS, various supermarket chains and the like (cut flowers were mentioned), agreeing to group their time critical dispatches into convenient train loads that could then be whisked between somewhere near Paris to somewhere near Toulouse. This would then justify purchasing special TGV units; the necessary paths formed part of the business case for the LGV to Bordeaux. (And,which was my professional interest at the time, therefore part of the receipts for the contractors building the line as a PPP scheme.) A moment’s reflexion would show that the time lost sending goods to some central point, grouping them and then unloading them at the remote terminal would more than nullify any time savings, quite possibly damage the goods, and add a layer of cost. Even assuming that the distributors didn’t already have distribution networks already set up much closer to their target markets. Soon,no more was heard about Carex; its sorry tale does neatly illustrate (a) why rail struggles in low volume, time critical markets, and (b) how the spirit of Descartes and Louis XIV is still alive and well in French thinking.
A similar story might be to look at an older but very similar effortful exercise in distributing national newspapers – or even the post.
Even I wouldn’t pretend that this has much to do with the Fleet Line,however…
As for those weird yellow vehicles, they remind me most of the Morgantown PRT. This is a fully automated rubber-tyred system that connects the various parts of West Virginia University which are scattered along a rather tight valley:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgantown_Personal_Rapid_Transit
http://urbanrail.net/am/morg/morgantown.htm
Graham mentions the unviability of high-speed rail for time-sensitive deliveries. In addition to the problems mentioned, it just seems to be a classic squeeze. Either road is not quick enough (in which case air is the only choice, distance permitting), or road is quick enough. The squeezed middle, of traffic requiring a bit more speed than road, at less cost than air, is clearly going to be pretty minimal, even before the factors Graham mentions reduce it to a big fat zero.
@Malcolm – yes,the trouble with rail (and rail freight especially) is that it’s a volume-hungry business and it’s the infrastructure costs that make it so. Back on topic, the history of the Fleet/DLR projects further illustrates how using cheaper infrastructure reduces possible volumes and therefore revenue/ benefits, not necessarily proportionately- and, contrarywise, as we saw with the subsequent need to expand the DLR capacity, buying extra capacity doesn’t always buy commensurate benefits (but may be unavoidable in the light of political expectations…)
@straphan -I always thought that Morgantown was on a long-dead branch off the former West Penn interurban. Talk about reinventing the wheel.
@Straphan: PRT was highly fashionable amongst transport researchers and politicians in the 1970s and early 80s so would have been very on-trend to gesture towards in a brochure.
Lots of government money went into PRT research in various countries; about all that was left to show for it seems to be the Morgantown system. (West Virginia had a very powerful Senator, Robert Byrd, and Morgantown was part of Boeing’s largely disastrous post-Vietnam and Apollo Program attempts to diversify beyond planes, rockets and weapons).
Minitram was the British answer to this, coming out of the Roads Research Laboratory and Hawker-Siddeley (another aerospace company trying to get into the public transport market). In the footnotes to that Wikipedia article are links to a New Scientist report on a 1973 proposal for a Minitram system for Docklands that would go from Fenchurch Street to Thamesmead, since it was believed that demand would not be great enough for a full scale tube line to Docklands – and then a 1976 last-ditch attempt to salvage the Minitram idea with a line from Croydon to New Addington.
Then nothing seems to have happened until the PRT revival of a few years ago, when it was once more touted by some as The Future of Transport, that gave us the Heathrow business class car park shuttle and, err, nothing else. The PRT boosters seem to have moved on to driverless cars as The Future.
Meanwhile Docklands eventually got that allegedly unviable tube line. And New Addington got old-fashioned trams.
@IanJ – Didn’t Boeing also supply some poor quality trams to Boston (?) around then?
As to RRL, there was a period in the early ‘eighties when I acted as the “customer” for DTp’s research programme and we had the greatest difficulty stopping RRL wasting money on such things as PRT: you would shut one project down only to find it revived under a slightly different guise elsewhere. There was a constant procession of bizarre inventors – remember Flydacraft ( a suspended – oh woe! – monorail PRT system)? Not to mention such oddities as the “electric rope” system of power distribution, whose nature and purpose remained shrouded in mystery, although the inventor was busy attempting to sue the Danish government for infringing his alleged patent. RRL’s own inhouse projects were hardly better- my favourite was research that showed that cars tended to turn their lights on when it became dark. That one we nailed dead. The fact that the hapless head of public transport research there was a dead ringer for professor Brainstawm didn’t help; their support for PRT seemed quite modest by comparison with the rest of their work.
Docklands and Addington did well to escape some of these projects….
@IanJ
Hawker Siddely also supplied, I believe, trams to Melbourne.
@GrahamH
At least the editors at RRL had some sort of sense of humour. I remember one report which was entitled ‘Laboratory Testing of a Swedish Vibratory Aparatus’, which was no doubt snapped up hungrily, only for the eager punters to find that this was about a tarmac compactor.
@Graham
Yes, the Boeing Vertol Light Rail Vehicle
Although I gather that, while poor build quality and over-ambitious design were problems, another major issue was the imposed requirement to supply much the same vehicle to two systems, Boston and San Francisco, which had quite different characteristics.
@Philip – ah yes,the ‘Frisco batch,too. Thank you.
@quinlet – 🙂 Not entirely sure that you are right to attribute the title to a sense of humour, more perhaps a complete otherworldiness. Other really “worthwhile” projects included a study that showed that cars tended to go more slowly uphill, and that drivers preferred to travel through countryside (ideally woodland) rather than towns. Having closed down the latter, it re-appeared stage left as a project to determine the optimum place for laybys, in which the participants were sat between surrounding screens on which were projected various types of roadside scene; they were then invited to press a button when they found the most attractive spot. Coarser critics suggested that the experiment be accompanied by the sounds of running water and that the results would show a marked preference for suitable bushes.
Aircraft manufacturers diversifying into public transport – the Hawker Siddeley Group light and rail design and manufacturing were undertaken by its then subsidiary, Brush Traction, which was acquired in 1959. The light rail projects may not have been a huge success. However, their Type 2 and 4 locomotives were top trumps of the BR fleet for decades.
Contrast with railway and heavy engineering companies diversifying into aircraft – e.g. English Electric.
Brush was eventually subsumed into Wabtec, English Electric into Alstom.
How are the mighty fallen.
Nameless
The English Electric Lightning was at least as good a success for the RAF as the brush types 2 and 4 were for BR.
RRL = Road Research Lab????
@SHLR – sometimes also styled the Transport and Road Research Laboratory.
PRT is still being promoted by companies such as Ultra, who are also taking part in a road operation trial of their vehicles in Greenwich using another company’s autonomous driving technology rather than their standard fully segregated guideway control used at Heathrow.
https://www.gateway-project.org.uk/heathrow-shuttles-take-off-from-terminal-5/
Autonomous pods are much more likely to find applications in the near future through this kind of technology at a fraction of the cost of traditional people movers. Such Systems could still contain dedicated guideway sections where required for capacity, speed and performance, just like bus lanes, and those might even be elevated like the ‘traditional’ PRT proposals of the 1970s where that made sense, but crucially ‘standard’ autonomous driving technology will also allow cost saving ground level operation where that is sufficient, shared with other traffic and pedestrians as required.
PRT promoters often cried foul when they failed to gain contracts or consultancy recommendations for their systems, accusing transit authorities of being stuck in the past, even implying they were beholden in some way to the big traditional system suppliers. Part of their problem was they were offering a myriad of proprietary systems, each incompatible with another. The smaller companies could not back up their bids with sufficient finance or guarantees relating to long term support. Many PRT people in the past have been of their opinion that their particular system is the universal solution for every transport problem, and that all traditional solutions and any competitors alternative are completely ineffective and need to be replaced. They also usually underestimate the difficulties of threading their elevated systems through traditional older cities like London.
Morgantown, although calling itself PRT is really a GRT (Group rapid transit) as the cars are much larger than the traditional 4 to 6 person capacity of an Ultra pod for instance. I understand the system works to schedule during main operating hours, only reverting to ‘on demand’ at quiet times. It is much more like a traditional airport APM (automated people mover) in this respect, although technically they PRT and GRT are both subtypes of people movers. The vehicle size is not critical to the concept.
I’m sure some more niches will emerge for small autonomous pod transport as prices inevitably fall, but I can’t see city wide dedicated elevated systems with tens of thousands of vehicles as envisaged by some in the heady days of the 1970s.
@MT – it’s difficult to see, at one end of the spectrum, how these systems would differ from autonomous cars. Another issue is lack of capacity – in theory, bumper to bumper,a mile’s worth of guided system might contain 250 pods @ 4 persons per pod and with a service speed of say, 20 mph, you’d shift 20 000 punters an hour. But- as any user of Swiss cable cars which provide individual 4/6 seater cabins will know, these cannot follow each other closely because of the time taken to board, with something like a minimum of a minute between cars, capacity drops by upwards of 75% compared with the theoretical maximum.
Other issues include privacy both for riparians and in-vehicle,and because of the enclosed, small scale nature of pods, cleanliness and security.
Not much sign of prices falling after 40 years either.
I dare say you’re right about niche operations but the lack of any open technical platform is a key issue for potential investors. One is reminded of the fate of the Dutch electronically guided bus (whose brand name escapes me just now – Phileas?) in Eindhoven,and the French trolleybus guided by a central rail (again, the name escapes me) which had to be dis-installed from Rouen after Alstom withdrew their technical support.
There are two centre-rail guided trolleybus systems (modern, that is, there were several nineteenth-century concepts of a similar nature) – the Bombardier GLT and the Alstom Translohr.
The GLT was only installed in Nancy and Caen. Bombardier is no longer offering the system for sale due to various problems – the worst being in Nancy as the vehicles operate both in guided and unguided mode and there were serious problems with engagement of the guide rail. Caen is having its system upgraded to conventional tramway due to a mixture of technical problems and desire for more capacity.
The Translohr has been slightly more successful, now running in Clermont-Ferrand, Paris, Padua, Venice, Medellin, Tianjin, and Shanghai.
Neither of them were used in Rouen which was conventional tramway from the start – Graham was probably thinking of Caen.
Both of them seem to me to combine the disadvantages of the tramway (inability to alter route in the event of disruption or steer around obstacles, need to invest in permanent track), the disadvantages of buses (rough riding), and some disadvantages of their own (proprietary lock-in, rutting of the road due to the wheels always following the exact same path), with no particular advantages.
The advantage of a guided trolleybus over a tram is probably installation cost. Not quite as much digging. But presumably this does not count for much against the snags which Philip lists.
While we’re on the subject of weird and wonderful guided vehicles (Is it a bus? Is it a tram? No! It’s… Well, what DO we call it?)
http://www.drehscheibe-online.de/foren/read.php?17,7609922,page=all
A lovely Mercedes Benz prototype guided bus with pantograph and a tram cabin at one of the ends…
Graham H: Yes, it was Phileas in Eindhoven and I think it was probably Nancy rather than Rouen being thought of. I understood that Caen always operated better as the vehicles did not regularly enter and leave the rail (such ‘flexibility’, as with kerb-guided buses, being one of the originally-touted benefits of the system). The ultimate problem in Caen seemed to be the very high cost quoted by Bombardier for additional vehicles.
The ultimate in GRT (Group Rapid Transit) was probably the Dallas-Fort Worth airport Vought (another military contractor) Airtrans system with a complex network and freight as well as passenger operations. The proprietary problem and lack of original manufacturer support was eventually circumvented by making new items including cars themselves. I understand that it has now been replaced.
The, as it was then, Matra (yet another defence military contractor) VAL system was seriously promoted for Docklands, being more LDDC’s idea of what was wanted image-wise. A single car from Lille was exhibited on the Isle of Dogs, along with half a SIG light rail car from Utrecht-Nieuwegein (on behalf I think of GEC) to provide the conventional contrast. From memory, it was probably in early 1984.
One thing we (in LT) found was that the limited wheel loading permissible with a pneumatic tyre in turn limits the size of the vehicle with a given running gear configuration. This seems to be a fundamental problem with rubber-tyred systems, and is something that bedevils overseas users (e.g. Mexico City) of French rubber-tyred metros who would certainly now wish for much higher-capacity vehicles, at least for new lines where historic infrastructure dimensions would not apply. Paris has got by on cars of the standard size for the historic metro, although the new orbital lines now being constructed have the restriction as well. I think Mexico City runs relatively long trains of relatively small cars.
As an aside, if I may be permitted another reference to UTDC, was that when visiting Vancouver Skytrain while wearing a DLR ‘hat’, they did express envy at our (original) vehicles. They were, and I think essentially are, restricted to the “proprietary system” vehicle format with limited window area and dimensions. The DLR vehicles from a standard interoperable background, with wide windows and much larger capacity were considered far more attractive. The restrictions of proprietary systems, with the attendant impact on purchase cost, form an interesting topic.
Sorry; I could also have added that Caen emphasised the difference in use of the system by adopting current colelction by pantograph, rather than by trolley poles as in Nancy.
@Philip – thank you for the more precise location! I think I might disagree with you, however, about the word “upgraded”. “Totally replaced” might be better, as none of the previous equipment was useable for the conventional tramway. The mayor of the luckless French city in question was subsequently quoted as saying that he wished they had never had anything to do with the guided trolleybus system. (No doubt the whole thing was a typical French “Grand projet” intended to underpin Frech manufacturing at someone else’s expense.)
@RNHJ – I understood that the Achilles heel of the single guide grooved rail was the tendency to derail on the points. Interesting about the loadings – often touted as the main advantage of these sorts of system because “they therefore didn’t need to touch the services under the road”.
BTW I recall from a c1963 edition of Modern Tramway that there was a guided trolleybus system in the Genoa area – the Filovia – dating from c1940. Nothing new there.
The VAL (Véhicule Automatique Léger) system is offered today by Siemens, with the Translohr centre rail steering instead of the combined side guides and conductor rails used in earlier applications such as Lille. The city of Rennes is currently building their Metro Line B using this technology.
https://www.mobility.siemens.com/mobility/global/en/urban-mobility/rail-solutions/automated-people-mover/pages/automated-people-mover.aspx
AirVAL Steering guidance system shown here:
https://youtu.be/bvfHaimDdpA?t=3m12s
And to think that the promoters of VAL lobbied hard to build a £1bn line from Hyde Park Corner to Heathrow. It’s noticeable that the sales of VAL have been more less restricted to the Francophone empire.
@ Malcolm – “The advantage of a guided trolleybus over a tram is probably installation cost” – But something like the Alstom Translohr system as to be found in Clermont-Ferrand is at first blush more like a tramway, with all the trappings including tram gong:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Inmw1NFhOqA
It’s only when one travels on it does one realise all is not quite right as the rubber tyres rumble and bounce along their concrete pathways:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCRsmHnZJbA
@Graham F – at the risk of putting words into Malcolm’s mouth, I think the point of Translohr and similar is that the load on the street substructure is no more than it would be with a bus and therefore the cost of moving subsoil services is avoided. The obvious downside is, of course, that the steering wheel in the track doesn’t have much weight resting on it . (The “Tramobus*” appearance is, of course, no different to the ftr effect)
*The Tramobus was a 1920s attempt to build a bus that looked (vaguely) like a single deck tram, on a Sentinel chassis; the curious can see one still operational at Amberley – and jolly rough riding it is, too.
Sorry to reference Wikipedia here but it appears to be accurate in this case!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translohr
Note the diagram showing the twin single-flanged wheels gripping the central rail from either side and partly from beneath, thus holding the car captive to the guidance rail irrespective of the effects of gravity.
Compare to the Bombardier GLT system:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_Guided_Light_Transit
This has a single double-flanged guidance wheel running on the top of the central rail. I imagine this is much easier to derail than Translohr.
Well, stepping delicately between Grahams, yes I did mean that little or no expensive digging is required to install a guidance rail (either version) rather than rails taking all the weight. But I think the point of Graham H’s “downside .. doesn’t have much weight resting on it” was not about derailability, but about the fact that the ride is buslike not tramlike (and especially not m*n*raillike) (as indeed Graham F reports). As for the effect of the gong, I cannot really work out whether that is supposed to be a plus or a minus.
Well having watched the videos of the Clermont Ferrand system it seems to be run frequently, no sign of any breakdowns and is well used. OK the ride may not be plush but having nearly been shaken off my seat this last week by the “hunting” of a DLR train through the Woolwich Tunnel there are no guarantees that steel on steel gives you a “magic carpet” ride either. I can see why tram purists will never like something like the Translohr system but the wider question is “does it get people on to public transport?” and the albeit limited and possibly partial evidence from those videos is that it does. My only negative observation is that Clermont Ferrand still has high car usage and congestion – again from the videos but the same could be said for parts of Croydon despite the success of Tramlink.
Paris has used the same technology for its recently completed T6 line in the south western part of “Greater Paris” (for want of a more precise term).
And Clermont-Ferrand is the home of Michelin. Yes, I believe it gets used as do the steel-wheeled tramways in so many French cities but the traffic restraint as part of the overall planning has perhaps not been as significant. From a comfort and capacity viewpoint, I think the relatively narrow and short body sections are much more restrictive that in an Alstom Citadis, to take an example at random.
Yes, I’m sure that Michelin had an influence in Clermont-Ferrand (“C-F”).
The point I made about tram gongs is that those in C-F actually call it a tramway and use gongs like tramways almost everywhere else (as opposed to Manchester, where the trams only have horns/hooters and many employee diehards still consider it to be a light railway running in the street).
Above is mention of tyre scrub and its affect on the running surfaces of fixed-guideway bus/trolleybus systems. C-F was not immune and that’s why they subsequently have had to relay the ‘track’ with concrete paths. I would suggest that the foundations are not insubstantial either, as the first minute or so of this clip might demonstrate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoqmXhGePLk
Of course, there’s also the argument that there’s no need to move sub-soil services underneath tramways either. It’s just that over here these things tend to be over-engineered because there seems to be little experience carried through from the past (or even from learned books and papers from the past) or from the Continent today as to how these things can be done. One has only to compare track laying in, say, Gent in Belgium, with over here.
P.S. I forgot to mention that even Translohr vehicles can derail:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1kFOqpEKA4
Hmm. I thought that the definition of a tram was a light railway running in the street. I think there may be technicalities like having your valve-gear totally enclosed. Doubtless tramway experts can point to the key differences. I have just been to Sassari, where the trams, which look like and behave like trams (not sure about the gongs), but are technically tram-trains (apparently) because they share a bit of track (the depot spur, as it happens) with a bit of light-railway track (also a spur to stabling sidings, but also the main line of a very infrequent – about once per year per enthusiast-sending country – tourist service). And trains worldwide make all sorts of strange warning noises.
I lived in Clermont-Ferrand from 2001 to 2004 and made frequent visits there up to 2010, and my recollections are as follows:
(1) the construction, in those areas where the infrastructure didn’t already exist (see below) was incredibly disruptive and went on far longer than planned;
(2) however, the project was integrated with a total renovation and near-complete pedestrianisation of the town’s central square (the place de Jaude). So the post-tram environment was vastly improved, but not solely due to the tram;
(3) some of what became the tramway infrastructure, including the Carmes viaduct and a long stretch along the centre of the avenue de la République, was already in place as a dedicated (non-guided) busway;
(4) that was a strength and a weakness, because the tramway largely copied an existing bus route and missed other opportunities. It serves neither the station nor the airport, and this, particularly in respect of the station, was hugely controversial at the time. It was hard to see what the tram achieved that buses on a dedicated busway couldn’t already do;
(5) soon after it opened, there were problems with leaf and other debris clogging the guide rail. I don’t know how this was resolved.
(6) there was a separate project, called Léo 2000, for the city’s main east-west bus route to guide itself by following white dashes in the road. As far as I know this never worked reliably and was abandonded in (?) 2004.
On earlier comments about how Docklands and New Addington were spared proprietary (and prone to be cul-de-sac) technologies, the Sydney elevated monorail comes to mind- now being replaced by conventional tram on a much extended route, with more under construction.
Excusing the pun, it’s quite fascinating to see how some technologies gain traction and others don’t. Give or take guided busways, they appear to split into two categories – citywide metros that need to handle massive loadings (conventional), and dedicated, non-networked people mover installations such as to/from/at airports, convention centres and oddities like Las Vegas.
Docklands was probably just too big, and despite being under LDDC administration as far as planning was concerned, still too much part of the wider metropolitan environment to have made smaller people movers like Minitram viable. Thanks to steel rails at standard gauge and conventional power pickup system, the DLR actually made the jump from oddity to virtually conventional with the endless upgrading. I would place a bet that the next generation DLR trains will be yet more heavy rail / metro-like in feel, with the main distinguishing feature merely being an ability to take the tight curves.
The guided busways and rubber tyred metros teeter at their peril in between the categories, hoping to have their time in conventional-land such as when trolleybuses were standard in parts of London. The Adelaide O-bahn does a decent job, but it still doesn’t get people out of cars in the way that trams do. The curse of the bus being the ‘poor cousin’ remains a challenge. One watches initiatives like Bogota with interest, but is not surprised that the mooted East and SE London projects have not got further than the CAD screen (too much dedicated tech), while “DLR or Overground to Thamesmead” pops up in public discourse instead.
@Jim, 23 October 2016 at 09:50
Thanks for your first hand report.
The route does make a connection with heavy rail at the peripheral Gare de Lapardieu
Adopting Translohr allowed longer vehicles, 30m vs the longest buses in the city, some Renault 15m streamlined ‘ftr style’ bendy buses (these run past the main rail station).
The system also allowed electric traction, and the guidance perhaps permitted parallel vehicles to pass closer and faster in some areas of limited clearance. The brochure liked below claims a 10.5m minimum curve radius and swept path on curves much narrower than bendy buses.
Of course twin rails would have allowed some of of that too. Much is made of the gradient climbing abilities of rubber tyres, but in C-F that doesn’t appear to be critical.
Lohr Group no longer promotes Translohr. What that means in terms of ownership of the IP I have no idea. Alstom offer the system under their subsidiary NTL. Note there is no Alstom branding on the following brochure, which might indicate a possible spin off?
http://www.alstom.com/Global/Transport/Resources/Documents/brochure2014/Translohr%20-%20Brochure%20-%20English.pdf?epslanguage=en-GB
Siemens also offer the same steering technology for their NeoVAL products, CityVAL and AirVAL. In that segregated application, the single rail is open with no grooves alongside to become clogged.
@Malcolm -for the avoidance of doubt, I did mean that the lack of weight on the guide wheel on the GLT system encouraged derailments and the complexities of the Translohr track work at points has also been a source of serious operational difficulty (BTW, MT might like to note that the first link to a Wiki article didn’t produce any Translohr-specific material,let alone a sketch).
I also meant what I said about rubber tyred vehicles spreading the load on the road surface – just like a bus, in fact – a form of transport for which it is not necessary to relocate subterranean services. Contrary to what has been said, the French do, in fact, relocate these services when constructing a tramway. We asked them. I had occasion to lead an engineering and financial review of a French proposal for a new tramway in Vilnius in which the French intended to move away allthe services in the streets through which the trams would pass; after discussion with my engineering team, we prepared a negotiating brief for the City to dealwith the utilities in which (a) only those services within the vehicles’ swept path needed to be moved, and (b) the City was advised to take further advice on the existing extent of delapidation in the services before signing up for a full replacement of what was there already. Matters weren’t helped, asJim remarks, by the French insistence on wall-to-wall clearance of the street and all its underlying services, cellars and the like. The pictures of the relaying of the roads used by Translohr certainly do not show services not having to be moved; they merely show relaying the first two layers in a road, the underlying concrete substructure over the services remains untouched as you can see.
@MT in fact,conventional trams can offer all that Translohr/GLT offers and more.
@Malcolm – the definition of tramways varies extensively from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The need to cover valve gear and so on is there in the 1870 Tramways Act,which delightfully refers to the “clatter and blast of machinery” (surely written by a hymnographer and fan of Blake) but such wording is absent from eg BOStrab in Germany. In Lithuania, we found there was no definition of tramway , Vilnius having lost its tramway at the time of the Russian occupation, and one complication, therefore, was that a definition would have to be invented; we had in mindthe Swiss legislation as a template.
Graham F’s remark about the way things are done “on the continent” did not specifically mention France. He referred to Gent, in Belgium, as somewhere where it had been suggested that tramways might have been installed without too much moving of services. This may be correct, but then perhaps there is something special about Gent (apart from the Aachen-bound messenger).
@Malcolm But Gent has, of course, long had tramways – a much more extensive network than now (the long-gone and much lamented SNCV, as well as the town trams), so much of the “heavy lifting in the principal streets was probably done decades ago.
I would make a joke about Van Gent and Loods in response to your Good News item but won’t…
BTW if you want to see how difficult it is to deal with tramways legislatively, you should track down the legal interpretation of “flush”, as in flush with the surface of the road. Even the lawyers admit that that is an “ambulant” provision – ie one that changes with time.
@GH
I assume you mean this link –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translohr
Works for me every time on both phone and desktop.
Here’s a direct link to the relevant diagram. It is a svg file and should display ok in a modern browser.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/TranslohrGuideRail.svg
Regarding utility diversions. Whether or not these are carried out before construction for any kind of on street technology is as much an issue of future disruption as it is of the roads’ load carrying capability. If a network or system doesn’t allow easy diversions and a line needs to be closed to repair a sewer or gas pipe then the duration of the disruption becomes critical. As others have said in many continental cities and in 1st gen uk tram systems a lighter form of construction was used than the massive slab bases used in the initial 2nd gen uk systems, which forced the moving of services beneath not simply because of the inconvenience, but because the massive concrete slab is very difficult and time consuming to get through again once in situ. Latest street track design guidance from ORR suggest systems are moving away from that type of construction both in new build and renewals, but even with more traditional concrete sleepers or similar under the rails there is still a continuous slab, albeit thinner, cast around and holding the whole structure together that will get in the way of any future excavation for whatever reason.
Translohr is more successful than Bombardier’s GLT in terms of numbers of systems sold, but assuming utilies should be redesigned and diverted at least to some extent even for these rubber tyred systems just as with trams simply to ensure future reliability, then I too can’t see any clear advantages of Translohr over conventional trams.
@Mark Townend – thank you for the link (which works this time!) _ I wouldn’t have guessed the design from the Wiki article itself…
I agree very much with you about the consequences of maintaining utilities under the track. (The Hungarians experimented about 40 years ago with modular slab track, with the utilities buried in troughs underneath,maintenance becoming – so they claimed -simply a matter of lifting up the relevant slabs. I imagine this approach did nothing for ride quality,however, but perhaps that didn’t matter in the commie consumer world.)
@Malcolm/ Graham H – The best I can do for the definition of “tramway” is given in Section 67 (Interpretation) of The Transport & Works Act 1992 as here:
“tramway” means a system of transport used wholly or mainly for the carriage of passengers and employing parallel rails which—
(a) provide support and guidance for vehicles carried on flanged wheels, and
(b) are laid wholly or mainly along a street or in any other place to which the public has access (including a place to which the public has access only on making a payment)”
This also covers the case where the tramway can become a railway off-street.
I used Gent as an example only and I fully admit that new extensions may not require substantial subterranean shifting of services. Having said that, there are examples of where city centre tracks are realigned, still without apparent disruption far below.
@Graham F – so neither Translohr nor GLT (nor the slightly more entertaining Larmanjat system) would be a tramway* in the UK. But what would they be, I wonder? Reminiscent of the Railway Inspectorate’s attempts to get hold of trolleybuses, perhaps.
One of the more interesting provisions is the use of “along” in 67(b), where the 1870 Act talked of “in”, with eventually awkward consequences. (I have my doubts about what might be meant by a “place” to which the public might have access – miniature railways in parks might be seen as tramways, or even track within stations or at level crossings*. This looks like sloppy drafting.)
@Lest this seem fanciful, the Swiss have several examples of track at level crossings being designated as a – very -short tramway, to avoid the expense of installing level crossing barriers.
@ Graham H – Have a look at the complete section:
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1992/42/section/67
to get a flavour of the context. Since we both are acquainted with the person who devised that tramway definition, I’ll refrain from further comment, save to say that it was at the time an extraordinarily difficult task to try and tie in and distinguish what was thought to be required, going on past interpretations of previous legislation, of which your comparison of “in” and “along” was but one. Note that the definition of “railway” includes a minimum gauge.
That does indeed give a flavour. However, that definition is (explicitly) only for the purpose of that act (though it may be followed in other subsequent acts). And that definition (at least in the quoted section) defines a tramway but not a tram. Presumably, while a tram typically travels on a tramway, other vehicles might also do so (like the trains in GH’s Swiss example), and trams might also sometimes travel on something which is not a tramway. And of course popular usage need not always follow that, or any other, legal definition.
@Graham H: @IanJ – Didn’t Boeing also supply some poor quality trams to Boston (?) around then?
As mentioned by others, Boston and San Francisco, both of whom had big problems with them. Unintentionally hilarious quote from their Wikipedia page: “The USSLRV was marketed as and is popularly known as the Boeing LRV (not to be confused with their prior lunar roving vehicles for NASA)”.
Manchester imported a retired Boeing vehicle to try out and could have had the whole fleet if they wanted. Even with an asking price in the low three figures, they decided against.
The idea of a standardised US light rail vehicle was presumably intended to replicate the enormous success of the PCC, which became the standard tram design not just for most American cities from the 1930s to the 1950s but for much of Europe (both East and West) for even longer. Currency restrictions limited Sterling area imports of PCC technology so Britain (and Australia) soldiered on with much less advanced trams.
@Quinlet: Hawker Siddely also supplied, I believe, trams to Melbourne.
Not Melbourne (which built its own trams into the 1950s, then bought none for twenty years, then bought Swedish-derived trams from local manufacturer Comeng, which is now part of Bombardier). Hawker Siddeley Canada was a significant rail manufacturer though (now also part of the same all-conquering snowmobile colossus).
In retrospect it looks like the DLR did well in keeping to reasonably open standards (quirky bottom-contact third rail notwithstanding) and not being swayed by gadget-type hype, while still using quite advanced automation technology. It helped that in the 1990s they managed to choose one of the few moving block signalling systems that actually existed and worked (unlike LUL and Railtrack’s multi-billion pound stuff-ups of the same decade). The man in charge of that project is now head of Network Rail’s Digital Railway project.
@Graham F – difficult yes, but impossible? Not if you try hard enough! (I agree that this can lead to somewhat involuted drafting but, as with computer programme design, that doesn’t matter). You can see why many of us thought that the TWAO Legislation was a major disappointment and no real advance on what it replaced.
[The particularly curious thing about “place” is why it was there at all. I can see it might be a nod at Crich, but they don’t need to be included in the legal definition of a tramway to be able to operate trams on tram track on private land – being a “legal” railway would have been quite sufficient. The 1870 Act had many faults, but it really doesn’t seem sensible to create new – and probably unneccessary – anomalies. For example, the use of the word”parallel” in defining railway. As any ful kno, the rails can’t be parallel on curves, and if there is a loophole of this sort, then smart alecs will exploit it -as the sad history of “flush” shows – but then some tramway lawyers thought that that case was a good thing at first….]
Re Ian J 24 October . You can of course still enjoy a ride on a PCC car in normal public service in San Francisco, along with preserved cars from around the world (including two Blackpool boats). As I recall they haven’t kept any Boeings.
@Gtraham H As any ful kno, the rails can’t be parallel on curves.
Which I assume makes the Spanish gauge changing apparatus not a railway.
Not being able to define things unless they are in a straight line was a loophole I recall was exploited by some designers of articulated lorries – car transporters in particular. The combination was built to the maximum permissible length, but was close-coupled. The drawbar was designed to lengthen when the vehicle negotiated a corner, to allow the two sections not to come into conflict with each other.
@Malcolm “I thought that the definition of a tram was a light railway running in the street. I think there may be technicalities like having your valve-gear totally enclosed.”
The enclosed motion rule (valve gear, coupling rods etc) is a requirement rather than a definition.
You don’t have to go to San Francisco to see PCC trams in regular use – they can be seen just a two hour train journey from St Pancras
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/a6/d8/84/a6d884d87ef7069f6c9f524240206145.jpg
@timbeau – Just so. Still less the famous Stanningley tapered tram track between Leeds and Bradford… The basic point is, isn’t it, why give this new definition when it’s not necessary, and worse, why do it and get it wrong? A different matter if it’s something new like a hovercraft, but even that was capable of being defined legally.
@Malcolm – to reinforce what timbeau says, the legal definitions of tramway, railway, and so on, are there to address the track, not the vehicles (for which an entirely separate suite of construction regulations exist).
@timbeau They look a bit different to these! http://www.streetcar.org/streetcars/
Of course the ones in Belgium are mere PCC derivatives built by BN ACEC (now Bombardier Brugge I think) on a licence from the original PCC manufacturer, the St. Louis Car Company.
The BN ACEC licence was itself then licensed by Ceskomoravska-Kolben-Danek (no longer trading) of Prague, who went on to build north of 20000 vehicles with PCC-type ‘guts’. Two Czechoslovak Tatra T1 vehicles were then bought by the government of Poland, taken apart down to the last few screws, and studied thoroughly. On their basis, the Konstal factory (nowadays part of the Alstom empire) built – if memory serves me right – about 5000 vehicles, without paying the Czechs a haler (1/100 of a Czechoslovak crown) for the licence.
@Grahams, Malcolm et al
I thought the Belgian city in question is spelt “Ghent”. I’ve no knowledge of Flemish so do not know of the ‘h’ makes a pronounceable difference.
@LBM
Gent in Flemish, Gand in French, Ghent in English.
I see. Thanks.
@LBM – this week, the Canadians are studying these differences very closely…
@GH
Ha ha, yes, well spotted. I didn’t want to drag our trade issues into this discussion… So much for la solidatarité de la francophonie.
Returning to requirements for tramway vehicles, Gresley’s A4 pacifics had their valve gear and motion covered by side skirts originally. I could be wrong but I don’t believe this was in any way an attempt to allow the locomotives to run on street railways of any classification!
I think curves of different radii CAN be parallel to each other. Requiring parallel rails to guide and bear seems to be the fundemental requirement in TWA and also in ROGS in order to be defined as a railway or tramway. ROGS cover tramways as well as railways, but both are separate classifications from main line railways. Guided buses and trolleys (I assume meaning trolley buses) are specifically excluded from ROGS altogether. Translohr is guided clearly but is not a bus (that can also operate conventionally on the road off guideway?) yet can’t be described as a railway or tramway vehicle either as it has only one rail on which at least some weight must bear and is fundamental to guidance. Building a Translohr system is very similar to building a tramway and employs a lot of similar techniques in power systems, control etc, yet it’s use of only one rail seems to prevent its inclusion in the tramway class. A Brennan Gyro monorail running along a single street rail would similarly fail to qualify as a tramway or railway on the same strict terms even though it would be guided by and all its weight would be beared on the single rail. I understand Ultra at Heathrow was treated as a transport system under ROGS, as would be any new segregated automated people mover system or monorail used in public service, say a notional new Siemens AirVAL airport people mover incorporating a Translohr derived centre guidance rail, so I think an on street Translohr could be considered in the same way as it is most definitely not a conventional guided bus. Although probably covered by ROGS forsafety and approvals, I have no idea what kind of order could be used to build such a system. What is used for guided buses? At Heathrow they probably didn’t need any such order for Ultra as the entire system runs on airport land. Just to be clear I’m not advocating building any on street Translohr systems!
ROGS Guidance from the ORR
http://orr.gov.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/2567/rogs-guidance.pdf
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ParallelCurves.html
@ CT 1720.
Absolutely fascinating – thank you.
@Mark Townend – But modern railways usually ease the gauge slightly on curves to prevent wheels on fixed axles trying to climb out from between the otherwise parallel railways. You might also have definitional difficulty at the transition between curves of different radii.
“so I think an on street Translohr could be considered in the same way as it is most definitely not a conventional guided bus” – not if it doesn’t have two rails which are parallel. Same goes for a monorail – no parallelism there! The fact that it isn’t a guided bus (not, as far as I know defined in statute) doesn’t make it something else that does exist statutorily. It could, for example, fall in to no defined legal category, as initially with hovercraft or trolleybuses.
Surely a pair of curves can be defined as parallel simply if their radii have a common centre?
It may be relevant (or not) that the Ordnance Survey depicts the Cambridgeshire bus way as a tram line
http://www.streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?X=536775&Y=268375&A=Y&Z=120
Compare
http://www.streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?X=535544&Y=163639&A=Y&Z=120
But not the one in Dunstable
http://www.streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?X=502710&Y=221885&A=Y&Z=120
Compare:
http://www.streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?X=353545&Y=382526&A=Y&Z=120
(you need to zoom in a few scales for the last one to be labelled)
Could a hovercraft be made road-legal, and if not, why not?
Interesting discussion I had recently in another place about the legal difference between a pedal cycle and a skateboard or scooter. The latter are apparently permitted on the pavement (sidewalk/footway) as they are in the same category as handcarts, wheelchairs, perambulators, and other vehicles propelled by (human) foot-on-ground contact. Horse-drawn vehicles and bicycles don’t qualify, and should use the carriageway.
@GH
” You might also have definitional difficulty at the transition between curves of different radii.”
As long as both curves transition at the same rate, at any point along the curve they will have a common centre, even though that centre will move as you move along the curve, eventually out to infinity as the curve straightens out. An abrupt transition may result in two centres being defined either side of the transition point, but the transition point is simply a point at the intersection between two curves. A point does not have a radius.
@timbeau – nor can two points be parallel to each other. And therein lies the rub (err, literally).
I don’t know what it would take to make a hovercraft useable legally on the highway. I doubt if the drafters of the Hovercraft Act 1956 considered the issue in those terms. In the folk memory, the draftsmen were torn between “is it a ship”, “is it an aircraft”, or “is it some species of land vehicle not hitherto known to the law”?
@timbeau
In my research on mid-1970s transport matters I came across hovercraft wagons in a guided concrete well track (think guided bus guideway, but with full flat floor), operated as a freight movement concept that was studied by DTp. Needless to say this study went nowhere. Perhaps they were attempted a low cost maglev type operation?
@LBM -I seem to recall that some warehouse operators use manually-steered mini-hovercraft to shift loaded pallets around. Not sure why anyone would be attracted to a guided version – hovercraft always strike me as highly energy intensive – – only an impression based on the effort to keep the gismo off the ground:I have never seen any published fuel consumption figures
ROGS seems to recognises the existence of such otherwise undefined transport systems. From the guidance document linked above:
“‘Transport system’ mainly means a railway (mainline or non-mainline), a tramway, or any other guided transport system used completely or mainly to carry passengers.”
Guided buses and Trolleys are explicitly excluded in the document.
I know that’s only ROGS which is about approval of the system details as designed and built, ongoing safety management etc.
From what you’re saying it seems that although ROGS is already prepared to manage such systems, neither an ordinary TWA or Highways Order can allow creation of a new people mover, guided bus, monorail or other guided passenger carrying system not based on twin rail technology nor standard automotive technology whether segregated or on the road, pavement (or in a ‘place’) because the acts behind such orders do not acknowledge any such systems’ existence. This is surely a major glaring oversight in this allegedly rapidly approaching age of transport innovation and automation!
@GH Indeed. Why levitate heavy freight with air pressure when steel wheel on steel rail does the job so well?
@LBM, GH
In warehouses and workshops air cushion devices are definitely used widely for moving very heavy things over very smooth surfaces slowly with a very small air gap. I’ve seen videos of them being used to move rail car and locomotives bodies around factory floors.
Here’s a GE loco cab floating about
https://youtu.be/yrcDIX6Hwgo
A Lartigue ‘monorail’ probably could be built under a TWAO as a railway, becasue it is actually guided and borne by 3 (roughly) parallel rails.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lartigue_Monorail
Although a lawyer might attempt to argue the top rail alone bears and guides whilst the the side ones merely restrain. Similar arguments might be had about the Bennie railplane. The similar suspended Wuppertal Schwebebahn technology has no additional rail for restraint below the car so could not be covered by a standard TWAO as it fails the parallelism test.
Oh,the joys of commonplace words finding themselves out of their depth in a legal context!
Wearing another of my hats I have watched at reasonably close quarters,the Canal and River Trust’s struggle with the meaning of the word “Place”
(In the definition of the responsibilities of the holder of a Continuous Cruiser Licence”)
An internet search instantly brings up the problem:
What is the definition of a public place in british law?
It varies depending on which act of Parliament you are dealing with.
Private places are just as bad.
@MT -you are right, the two parallel rails don’t have to be side by side (Bet the legal draftsman never thought of that…)
What is unforgiveable is that the TWAO and ROGS legislation have been allowed to diverge. In the bad old days (before 1992), at least standard definitions of “railway” and “tramway” had been developed and incorporated into legislation. This meant that if you referred to a railway in a new statute then it was clear what was meant. If you had to cater for something new such as hovercraft, then you could deal with it generically and refer to that subsequently. The TWAO was a disaster legally. (It had also been sold to industry sponsorship divisions in Whitehall such as mine, as leading to less Parliamentary scrutiny of the detail of works). Ho ho. Now…
Talking of legal disasters (no, I’m not about to diverge from being parallel to the discussion), what on earth was the point of bringing parallelism into the issue at all? Apart from the fact that monorails are excluded (perhaps), because there is nothing for the rail to be parallel to. But if you particularly wanted to exclude monorails, you could do that by just stipulating that railways (tramways, whatever) had at least two rails. If there is some form of railway-like object with non-parallel rails (such as the gauge-changing bits of track mentioned), what on earth is the point of excluding them?
Parliamentary draftsmen did seem to be utterly reliable, in the so-called good old days. Whatever happened to them? All it needed was a simple question “Why stipulate parallel?”. There can surely be no valid answer to that. A similar question could be asked about the minimum gauge. Supposing someone did manage to develop a 349mm gauge “railway” which carried passengers (presumably very well-behaved wriggle-free passengers) (but not crossing carriageways), just what is the point of declaring it as not legally a railway?
@Malcolm -absolutely. We had had workable definitions of railways since 1845. If it ain’t broke… As I understand it, the drafting of certain sections of the TWAO legislation was delegated to someone who was an “expert” in tramways and railways but not a Parliamentary Counsel. It was also managed by a highwayman,not by someone who had direct experience of the legal context. Si monumentum requiris and all that. Me? I’d left for pastures new before the ceiling was stoved in.
To attempt an answer to my own question, I suppose model railways in parks, where punters sit astride the tracks, may be relevant. (As famously driven by the man who may not have actually said “You never had it so good”). Perhaps people should be free to build these without restrictions – which gives a sort of logic to the 350mm limit, as wider than that would cause rather uncomfortable astridehood.
But there surely ought to be a better way of excluding these.
Supposing someone did manage to develop a 349mm gauge “railway” which carried passengers, just what is the point of declaring it as not legally a railway?
There are two miniature railways in parks near my home. I expect the societies that run them are pleased not to be covered by the regulations regarding grown up railways.
@Kit Green/Malcolm -I imagine that’s why there is the exclusion in the legislation.
Just for amusement, the early drafts of the Railways Act 1992,because they tried to do the job as if it were a greenfield site, ended up defining the trolleys used by film makers (which run on rails) as full railways requiring regulation and so on. This seemed to have been dealt with by an attempt to define “train”which curiously included every movement by coupled vehicles but not the movement of single cars. (That has always struck me as a loophole waiting to be exploited.)
(well off topic, sorry)
Graham H… having been briefly involved with the DfT in trying to come up with a simple definition that completely exempted LU’s trains and infrastructure from the horrors of Interoperability and Technical Specifications for Interoperability, I have sympathy for those who have to draft such things.
Malcolm……. it is 7 inch or 178mm gauge miniature railways that are typically ridden astride. 345mm big enough for people to ride on or in the trains. I have worked on 10 1/4 inch, 260mm gauge and that is comfortable to ride on; two-abreast if children. Go up to 380mm gauge and you’ve got the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway which is a very comfortable two-abreast ride-in miniature railway.
Ghent: Having fought off the temptation to give (dozens of) examples of places with exotic names in “other” languages, I refer anyone interested to the comprehensive coverage in (and referenced from) the Wikipedia article on exonyms.
100andthirty: thanks for those points: I didn’t think my comment through very well. So the 350mm in the legislation we are all muttering about is clearly unrelated to the typical human straddle-width, on the contrary it is probably carefully selected to include the RHDR. (Except of course that the RHDR crosses many carriageways, so is included belt-and-braces-wise anyway).
@ Timbeau 1751 – with due apologies for injecting frivolity into all the learned debate on legal matters I am afraid Doctor Who has solved the hovercraft on the road issue. The Pertwee era “Whomobile” or Alien (its proper name) was able to be a car, hovercraft and IIRC to fly. Problem solved. 😉 It was actually a road legal 3 wheeler vehicle owned by Jon Pertwee.
http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Whomobile
@Mark T: At Heathrow they probably didn’t need any such order for Ultra as the entire system runs on airport land
It does cross a public road (the Western Perimeter Road) which tends to be one of the things that makes a ‘railway’ subject to legislation – I suspect one of the (few?) advantages of the system is the very light construction of the flyover over the road.
One thought about that artist’s impression of Docklands, if it was supposed to be so surburban with trnsport hubs etc; why did anyone think all those luxury yachts in the pic would want to moor there?
@IanJ – crossing a road on a viaduct doesn’t make any guided system subject to legislation; it’s crossing it on the level that’s the issue about whether the beast is a tramway or a railway. There’s a separate raft of criteria, such as public use and the payment of fares, which affect the extent to which the system design is subject to safety regulation.
@IJ
Crossing a carriageway would only elevate a tiny (sub 350mm gauge) system into statutory consideration as a railway if it also satisfied the parallel rails criterion.
The parking shuttle application is particularly appropriate for the PRT concept because people tend to arrive at the stops in small quanta that suit the small car size. From a public service point of view PRT reduces both the waiting and the journey time associated with traditional bus shuttles. The emissions of buses making slow scheduled multi-stop circuits around car parks which may not actually pick up anyone at all on certain journeys are avoided. Heathrow has had a plan on ice for years to expand the system to cover all the north side parking lots then run back into the central terminal area via one of the small access tunnels alongside the M4 link road. I don’t know why they haven’t proceeded with it. The costs and challenges of the current operation must be very well understood by now and the system is claimed to have rock solid reliability with a universally positive customer reaction. BAA acquired a large stakeholding in the Ultra company at the time of construction, which was just before the break up of the airport group. Maybe the break up and changes in management shifted focus from what someone at BAA was particularly enthusiastic for. Also the founder of Ultra, Professor Martin Lowson, tragically died very suddenly in 2013. It is not necessary to believe fervently in the 1970s dreams of vast PRT networks with tens of thousands of pods meeting all the passenger transport needs of a city region to understand that there may certain niches where the concept might just fit perfectly.
@ mark T
Crossing a carriageway would only elevate a tiny (sub 350mm gauge) system into statutory consideration as a railway if it also satisfied the parallel rails criterion.
How about 16.5mm gauge?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lbc2ZQBmb4
@GrahamH: yes, but I read Mark T’s point as being that no legal authorisation beyond planning permission was needed to build the system as it was entirely on airport land. But as soon as you need power to build over a public road don’t you need some kind of more definite legal authority (TWAO or similar)?
@Mark T: I think today’s announcement implies that the whole parking area will change beyond recognition in the years to come anyway – maybe there was not much point in building a system only for it to be swept away to make way for a new runway. But the emissions issue from shuttle buses etc isn’t going to go away.
@timbeau
Great fan of Mr May and I saw this programme a few days ago on TV. It was not passenger carrying though I believe!
@Ian J
Indeed I think you may have hit upon an important consideration.
@ Ian J – emissions from shuttle buses can disappear very readily if the operators are forced to buy electric buses. The technology is moving on pretty quickly and a self contained site like Heathrow affords loads of opportunity to provide rapid charging / boost locations depending on the specific charging technology used. If TfL can adopt a policy of electric only single decks in the central area then Heathrow have NO excuses for vehicles used exclusively within its confines.
Re WW,
Going all electric on site is in the Heathrow emission reduction plan.
@IanJ – I guess you would need planning permission to bridge over the public highway, but that wouldn’t mean that whatever it was that was crossing over would become regulated as a tracked system (assuming there weren’t other grounds,unrelated to the crossing) for regulating it anyway) . It wouldn’t actually come into contact with the highway. Perhaps a helpful way of looking at it is to consider the inverse case: if you were tunnelling a railway/guided system under a highway, you’d need a TWAO for the railway itself because it was a railway that was used by the public/in a place to which the public has access, but the TWAO wouldn’t list all the highways that you passed under. (They’d be shewn on the accompanying maps and plans for sure, but not as *public* highways). That monorail in N London would be a case in point.
Incidentally, you can see the damaging effect now of the substitution of “along” for “in” in the tramway legislation. In is very clear: the track is embedded; but was does”along” imply? Eg would the Wuppertal installation be “along” the highway…? Mr Justice Cocklecarrot might well say yes.
ngh: except for the aircraft, of course!
I suspect that Heathrow will look at ways for expanding the PRT system. They are tremendously popular with business travellers. No long waits for buses or getting stuck in traffic near the terminal. Plus most of the time you get a pod to yourself. I suspect it will be vastly expanded to other car parks once all the rebuilding is finished.
It will be way of squeezing more capacity out of the airport road system. If they ever do introduce road tolling for the terminal areas, apart from the outrage expect, calls for remote drop off points so people can avoid the charges.
Heathrow have got onto the self-driving car bandwagon by adapting the pod design to operate without a guideway, taking over a bike path on the Greenwich Peninsula* as part of an £8m government-funded project led by, you guessed it, the Transport Research Laboratory, who boast of “over 50 years of experience” in developing autonomous vehicles (another way of looking at that is over 50 years of publically funded research without a viable system).
Public trials were due to start “this summer” according to that page, but “late in 2016” according to more recent pages, so evidently there have been some technical hurdles.
At present, “the shuttles will operate at low speeds of up to 15 mph and marshals will be positioned around the route at all times…. while the GATEway vehicles are designed to operate without a human driver, there will be a safety steward on-board at all times”.
If they do manage to get them to work fully automatically on footpaths or roads, it makes it unlikely they would go to the trouble of building a guideway network at Heathrow.
* What is it about the Greenwich peninsula and these gimmicky types of transport? Like the electronically guided bus that was meant to serve the Millennium Dome and never quite worked, or the existing automated pod shuttle system which has been such a success…
@IanJ
I doubt if they’d abandon the idea of dedicated guideways entirely as that is what helps to ensure the signature speed and reliability of the product. That in turn feeds back into fleet size requirement. A new approach to control could reduce costs however as the existing bespoke system has the equivalent of a fully blown fixed block signalling system incorporated, with inductive sensing loops embedded throughout as ‘track circuit’ equivalents. An automous car type system might be able to replace that with a vehicle sensor based based spacing system, reducing the quantity and complexity of trackside equipment. While such a system could still be largely segregated ideally, at least for the higher speed ‘long hops’, the more comprehensive on board sensors neccesary for public road operation could also allow the vehicles to operate in a ‘less than fully segregated’ manner where that made sense to reduce costs, enabling guideway to cross low traffic roads and pedestrian paths, even share lanes in places, but only where other traffic was very sparse so as to reduce interference and performance impact.
To note that some housing development is now commencing at Thamesmead in the wake of the Crossrail project. Peabody has just been granted planning permission for 1,500 homes within walking distance of Abbey Wood station. Bexley link here: http://www.bexley.gov.uk/article/20540/Peabody-press-release—Green-light-given-to-1500-new-homes-for-Thamesmead
Jonathan Roberts 29 October 2016 at 11:52
” 1,500 homes ”
There’ll be more than that on site within a short walk of Canning Town (Jubilee Line & DLR) station before long.
Yes! And that’s only the start. Haven’t analysed the linkage between
stationdevelopment location and Crossrail in detail, but there will be some association, even if some of that is indirect. For example, Southall Gas Works has long been a target redevelopment site, not exclusively Crossrail-related – think West London Tram saw that as a possible useful addition to its business case. In East London there is plenty of scope for re-use of disused or low density sites.The interesting thing is that Crossrail is helping to sustain those changes in land use, whereas the original Fleet/Jubilee Line planning took place at the nadir of London population and with no obvious reason why the population would start to take off again. So there is now an understood relationship between housing supply and transport capacity in Greater London which didn’t exist seriously back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. That’s generally a positive where GLA and TfL work together, but less so where the DfT specifies commuter rail franchises and focuses more on revenue growth – the East Anglia franchise issue in the Upper Lee Valley bears that out.
Jonathan Roberts 30 October 2016 at 10:54
” understood relationship between housing supply and transport capacity in Greater London ”
I agree, but your post is more elaborate than necessary. I’d say “high house and land prices mean developers believe its commercially viable to build high”. Some of those sites are very close to stations, others are not. See Stratford High Street.
I’d also say
1) the current house price bubble, ahead of wages and salaries, is the biggest and the
longest anyone can remember.
2) at the end of every previous house price bubble, the value of flats and maisonettes has fallen faster and further than the value of houses.
There is a paper going to next week’s TfL Board about East London river crossings. Doesn’t add a huge amount of new info but does give a view on likely funding mechanisms and next steps including feasibility funding. It carefully avoids making the same comments as TfL made to the Barking Riverside TWAO public inquiry. Can’t think why!
http://content.tfl.gov.uk/board-20161108-item08-east-london-river-crossings.pdf