London Overground

Train arriving at Camden Road

The blogger at London Reconnections has recently written a series of three posts about the past, present and future of the London Overground. So far TfL has scored a big hit with the way that it has brought to life the tired old services that used to run on the North London Line and other services that now make up the new network. Another blogger, Diamond Geezer, has documented the improvement in the frequency of trains thanks to the new service.

Overground crossing the Canal

The Class 378 Capitalstar trains were made by Bombadier. This is the company based in Derby that recently failed to be selected as the preferred bidder to supply the new trains for the Thameslink service.

The Overground will make a complete circuit of London once the orbital route to Clapham Junction to Surrey Keys is complete. However trains will never make a complete circuit.

Paddington Station

The most recently decorated 'span 4' at Paddington

A trip to Exeter and back this last weekend reminded me that Paddington is one of the pleasanter London station for travellers. This is thanks to brilliant engineering in Victorian times and recent refurbishment  which was initially carried out according to a design by the architect Nicholas Grimshaw. Network Rail publishes a mini-guide to the features of the station.

Polished limestone has brightened the platforms while travellers can wait and shop in the Lawn - an area that was long ago station master's garden.

Paddington was built using the same techniques as the Crystal Palace. It opened in 1854 just three years after the Great Exhibition.

Brunel at Paddington

The statue near the entrance on platform 1 celebrates the engineer, Brunel, who worked with the architects and designers Matthew Digby Wyatt and Owen Jones to create this spectacular station. 

Already much of the redecorated ironwork has been blackened by the soot from the diesel locomotives. However the line of arches in 'span 4' is showing the glory of the colour scheme because it has only recently been unveiled. 

Meanwhile the next engineering challenge is the design and construction of an underground addition to Paddington as part of Crossrail.

The paradoxes of London cycling

Docking station near Warren Street

The Barclays cycle hire scheme has been running for a year. The Londonist blog shows that the scheme has had mixed reviews. The bikes have proved remarkably robust and very few have been stolen. However the IT system for  hiring and charging is unreliable. Some users have been frustrated by the fact that they cannot reliable find a bike to hire when they want one or that there is no dock free at the end of their journey. However others have been inspired to buy their own bikes.

The scheme has also stimulated technical ingenuity, such as the London Bike Share map devised by Oliver O’Brien, a researcher and software developer at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), an interdisciplinary research group at UCL in London. This continuously tracks and displays the number of parked bikes and free docks at each of the docking stations. 

It might seem that Transport for London wants to promote cycling, yet today there has been a big protest on Blackfriars Bridge because TfL's traffic engineers are making the bridge more dangerous for cyclists by adding more lanes of traffic and raising the speed limit. The political campaign been led by bloggers who have exposed the failure of TfL's engineers to treat all travellers as equal while giving priority to the smooth flow of motor vehicles. They seem to ignore the fact that, over 24 hours, cycles make 16% of the traffic. That rises to nearly 36% of the traffic in the morning rush hour.

So TfL provides the means to cycle - at least for some - but does not engineer the roads so that cycles have their rightful amount of space to ride safely.

The Regent's canal

Canal locks at Limehouse

A four mile walk from Limehouse to Islington along the canal today. The towpath was busy with walkers and cyclists and there more boats than usual going though the locks. The number of Nicholson canal guides on view suggest that quite a few of these boats were exploring new territory.


The Regent's canal opened in 1820 to link the docks on the Thames at Limehouse with the Grand Union canal's Paddington arm. The canal was built too close to the coming of the railways to be a financial success but commercial traffic continued until the 1960s. 

Old Ford Road lock

Apart from boating, cycling and walking, the canals still have technical importance today. Long lengths of the towpath of the Regent's canal from Limehouse through Camden, for example, are laid with concrete slabs which cover high voltage power lines helping to distribute electricity to London. 

Boat entering Islington tunnel

The twelve locks between Limehouse and Camden raise boats from the Thames to the level of a lock-free pound that stretches 21 miles to the nearest lock on the Grand Union main line. 


I must revisit the London Canal Museum soon. It tells the story of the canals and also acts as a reminder of the importance of the Regent's Canal in supplying ice for London from Norway in the nineteenth century.