Saturday 8 March 2008

Wrong Stick?


I wonder what happened here?

Seems as a
promotional event they got one of the new Javelin trains into Stratford Market Depot on London Underground's Jubilee Line. As you can see from the two pictures they managed to fit a bus in there as well. The depot is LU's newest on the eastern end of the Jubilee and on the edge of the Olympic site.


All good and well now as a
promotional event for the 2012 London Olympics but these pictures show a white Javelin with a tellow nose rather than bule with a yellow nose. Does this mean that SouthEastern is repainting all these new trains once they have finished testing them? Why didnt they just have them painted when they were making them?

Just incase you don't what the Javelin's are all about they are the the new high speed trains. Basically the only way they could get Kent's councils to drop any challenge to building the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL) or HS1 as it now known was to promise to provide high speed trains from Kent towns to Central London using new trains with a maxiuium speed on HS1 of 140MPH. Quite an improvement for some people, I.E. Ashford will drop from 83mins to 37mins, Some towns will only get minor gains like Chatham goes from 47mins to 43mins. But with connections to Stratford and St Pancras International means the Kent traveller willing to pay extra for this service will have great onwards connections. For me it means I can visit my mums in about an hour with one train compared to two Tube trains and one train for about 2hrs 30mins. Quite a saving for the extra 30% they will be charging. But we have to wait till decenber 2009 before these trains will run. This is partly because Stratford International isn't safe to let passengers use as its currently in the middle of the Olympic building site construction. This won't be helped when it opens in december 2009 as it still won't have an links to anywhere really. The DLR extension isn't supposed to open to mid 2010. I can see it now, people walking the half mile as the nice new shiny DLR train run in test mode empty. Or will the DLR work its magic and have the extension finished ahead of time again?

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