The Magical Moving DLR Station

TfL are selling the new DLR station at South Quay, which opened this morning, as a sleight of hand worthy of Derren Brown at his best: "without any disruption to passengers", according to a press release, engineers "effectively moved a station" over the weekend. Well, they didn't, really: instead, a £30 million new station has been constructed over the past two years, lying 125 metres away from the old one. The reason? South Quay's original location on a curve meant the platform's couldn't be extended to accommodate the DLR's new three-car trains, so a new one had to be built from scratch. A blot in the copybook of the DLR's original planners, but gold stars all round for the engineers, who managed to build the whole thing without the line or the old station being closed once. The next major headache for Docklands travellers will be the closure of Bank's DLR platforms this winter.