DLR: Route Changes And More Trains

By Geoff Marshall Last edited 109 months ago
DLR: Route Changes And More Trains

TfL snuck out a quiet press release last week, announcing some subtle-but-important changes to their scheduled train services.

The DLR will now run twice as many trains to Woolwich during off-peak times, which is nice — and there will be twice as many trains in the late evening on the Lewisham branch (previously the frequency used to drop down), so demand has obviously forced them to do this — also nice.

What's slightly odd is that previously, trains from Stratford International used to go to Woolwich during the peak hours and Beckton during the off peak (and weekends), but that's now completely changed with a new Beckton to West Ham service (and we can't remember a DLR train that used to regularly terminate at West Ham before) for all off peak operations. Also oddly, the timings mean that going south from West Ham there's a gap of two and then eight minutes between trains, the most irregular pattern on the system that we can find.

All this might make more sense if there was a map showing the new pattern of services, but TfL has made the DLR to be very "turn up and go", rather than wanting to tell you the exact schedules (information signs at stations used to tell you the exact minute past the hour to expect trains, but not any more) and although there are still in-carriage maps on trains, we couldn't find anything on the website that was a map that we wanted. So we did the best thing to do in these instances — we created our own!

Here's the new service map for off-peak and weekend operation on the DLR. During peak hours there are obviously more trains to more places, but this is the new regular pattern.

Click here for a bigger version.

Last Updated 02 February 2015