Purpose of the trip
Every so often I go to London – in recent years there seems to have been new infrastructure to visit with trips along the Elizabeth Line, the overground extension to Barking Riverside, underground extension to Nine Elms and the new route through Bank where the narrow platform has been abandoned to enable greater capacity (although with Working From Home it may be many years before it is needed).
Today is a little different and my main aim is to travel on Mail Rail – the remnant of the railway that used to run from Paddington in the West to Whitechapel in the East to enable mail to be moved around without adding to London’s traffic.
Among the exhibits is a remnant of a much earlier pneumatic railway with a car from that line which ran between 1863 and 1874 – although with limited success – which has been found in recent times. A lost railway and one of which I was unaware.
The Mail Rail train completes a loop around the remaining network of lines under Mount Pleasant which was a major sorting office with traffic coming from the connected main line rail companies and then rerouted back to the termini for despatch to their destination. Before my trip I had not found a map of the route (so with thanks to Dave Cross) his blog has a map and I would concur that the trip operated around something that felt like that layout.
Being a single traveller I was given a “compartment” to myself at the very rear of the train so could not see along the line – although being underground there is not a lot to see – but then originally passengers were not carried. The train stops at various platforms to enable videos to be played telling the story of the line and how the postal workers moved the mail around between the trains and conveyor belts to platforms or sorting offices and it was pretty continuous with mail volumes so much higher than current levels.
Having travelled around the line I walked back to Farringdon and caught a Thameslink to Blackfriars and travelled one stop to Monument. Many, many years ago I walked the warren of passages which link Bank and Monument. However since then the Docklands Light Railway has opened and today I wanted to travel on the latter. It is further than I remember – but that could just be my memory!
The DLR has one entry in PSUL and so although I think I have been that way before I travel to Lewisham from Bank to ensure that I cover the curve concerned.
At Lewisham I walk over the the National Rail station and take up residence at the end of platform 1 so that I can photograph the trains as they pass over the crossovers at that end of the station. This enables me to get a decent selection of side shots of the various types operating on SouthEastern. I am highly conscious that I do not have decent side shots of earlier rolling stock showing the underframes – so although there is far less visible detail these days I now should be able to find an example of just about all classes in the photos – one advantage of digital is that there is minimal cost whilst historically every shutter press had a significant cost.
Finally having upset the station staff by my presence (I was ordered away from the end of the platform) I catch a train into Waterloo East. I believe we run to time but it strikes me as very slow as we trundle into London Bridge. Then the peak timetable only offers a half hourly service to Farnborough – which feels frankly like not enough given the way the car park is filling up these days – it is more occupied than it was before the additional deck was put in place and we had a better service then.