DOCKLANDS LIGHT RAILWAY, FROM UGLY DUCKLING TO TRANSPORT SWAN London’s Docklands Light Railway has sometimes seemed like a minor service compared to its larger subterranean cousin, the London Underground. But it now carries more than 80 million passengers per year. Robert Williams reports.
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nown colloquially as the DLR, the line was originally built to provide a modest public transport system for the growing London Docklands development, with a dozen trains serving a route just 7.5 miles (12 kilometres) in length. However, it has since grown dramatically owing to the ever increasing demand for transportation in East London, and was one of the unsung heroes of the 2012 Olympic Games. The first phase, opened in 1987, went from the Isle of Dogs to Tower Gateway, next to Fenchurch Street station in the City and cost only £77m to build. Now its various phases and additions have resulted in ten times that 14 Industry Europe
amount of money being spent on a railway that critics say is now the wrong type of system for Docklands’ needs. The history of the redevelopment of Docklands has been dominated by the issue of transport. At first much of the Docklands area, particularly Canary Wharf, was completely inaccessible. There were buses, a semidefunct railway line and roads which could not cope with traffic levels. The DLR was seen as a cheap way of bringing people from the City to the Isle of Dogs and was originally planned as a tram system at street level, although that idea was quickly dropped. To keep costs low, existing railway alignments enabled low-cost
construction over much of the route. The central section through Canary Wharf, however, involved building a completely new overhead route. The original layout was a three-pronged star, with Poplar at its centre, Tower Gateway to the west, Stratford in the north and Island Gardens, on the north bank of the Thames, to the south. The DLR was opened by the Queen at the end of July 1987, and began public services a month later. It originally had 11 driverless single-unit trains serving 15 stations and, in its first year of operation, carried 6.7 million people. Today the railway has 45 stations, 46km of track, and 149 units working