No speed-up on Gospel Oak Barking

[Basil Jet]

In 2015 the diesel Goblin took 34 minutes to get from Gospel Oak to Barking. The Electric Goblin still takes 34 minutes to Barking! I expected the timetable to be sped up before Barking Riverside opened, so that the faster longer Goblin would use the same size fleet as the slower shorter Goblin did. But they've lengthened it without accelerating it, which suggests they bought too many trains, and when they finally get round to speeding it they will have superfluous stock.

 

[mmh]

Alternatively, they might just not speed it up. How much could you speed up such a short line with frequent stops anyway?

 

[Bald Rick]

Punctuality is transformed though

 

[baz962]

To be fair you could speed it up on a basic level. I'm not a timetabling or planning expert, but I was driving it up until a year ago and you could dwell at a couple of stations or in my case I drove slower. Would only be around 3-4 minutes tops and as Bald Rick alludes, that would go to pot during a busy time.

 

[zwk500]

It's worth bearing in mind that the timetable is constructed out of rounded blocks of 30 seconds, and with a line like this where trains stop so frequently the changes to the actual run times are likely to be small enough that no benefit can be gained when the rounding is done for the length of the line.
Also, if you had a nice neat junction margin of 3 minutes, and then you speed your train up by 3 minutes, you might be forced to just waste all that precious improvement with 3 minutes of pathing time because the 1st train has to run in it's slot to get to London Gateway on time.

 

[leytongabriel]

In 2015 the diesel Goblin took 34 minutes to get from Gospel Oak to Barking. The Electric Goblin still takes 34 minutes to Barking! I expected the timetable to be sped up before Barking Riverside opened, so that the faster longer Goblin would use the same size fleet as the slower shorter Goblin did. But they've lengthened it without accelerating it, which suggests they bought too many trains, and when they finally get round to speeding it they will have superfluous stock.

When they first started running the electrics there were a lot of complaints about trains leaving intermedaite stations early. The Barking Riverside extension was planned to have 5 trains per hour at one stage. The GOBLIN group wondered how that would work but it might account for having enough trains to run further without any speeding up.
There are still some pretty severe speed restirctions around South Tottenham and Green Lanes. Are they going to be permanent?

 

[martin2345uk]

When they first started running the electrics there were a lot of complaints about trains leaving intermedaite stations early. The Barking Riverside extension was planned to have 5 trains per hour at one stage. The GOBLIN group wondered how that would work but it might account for having enough trains to run further without any speeding up.
There are still some pretty severe speed restirctions around South Tottenham and Green Lanes. Are they going to be permanent?

what speed restrictions are they?

 

[MCR247]

Isn’t the line also constrained by timetabling/platforming at Gospel Oak? If I recall correctly trains used to wait outside whilst the previous train departed (not sure if this is still the case), so without frequency increases speeding it up might just make this wait a few minutes longer without any overall benefit to journey times end to end

 

[zwk500]

Isn’t the line also constrained by timetabling/platforming at Gospel Oak? If I recall correctly trains used to wait outside whilst the previous train departed (not sure if this is still the case), so without frequency increases speeding it up might just make this wait a few minutes longer without any overall benefit to journey times end to end

There's certainly still only 1 platform at Gospel Oak, so yes if a train arrives when it's still occupied it will have to wait .Obviously timetabling can reduce the risk of such an occurrence, but only to a point.

 

[Class 170101]

Constraints also include South Tottenham Jns, Woodgrange Park, Interface with c2c at Barking and Freight services running on either part or all of the route.

 

[swt_passenger]

In 2015 the diesel Goblin took 34 minutes to get from Gospel Oak to Barking. The Electric Goblin still takes 34 minutes to Barking! I expected the timetable to be sped up before Barking Riverside opened, so that the faster longer Goblin would use the same size fleet as the slower shorter Goblin did. But they've lengthened it without accelerating it, which suggests they bought too many trains, and when they finally get round to speeding it they will have superfluous stock.

That’s clearly not the case as they ordered and announced two extra 4 car trains specifically for the Riverside extension back in 2017.

 

[leytongabriel]

In 2015 the diesel Goblin took 34 minutes to get from Gospel Oak to Barking. The Electric Goblin still takes 34 minutes to Barking! I expected the timetable to be sped up before Barking Riverside opened, so that the faster longer Goblin would use the same size fleet as the slower shorter Goblin did. But they've lengthened it without accelerating it, which suggests they bought too many trains, and when they finally get round to speeding it they will have superfluous stock.

They took the same time with first generation dmus in 1982 too! Going back to 1951 the steamers did Barking - Kentish Town in 40m with a minute or two more the other way.