Docklands Light Railway rolling stock issues explained ahead of reduced timetable

London’s Docklands Light Railway has been forced to cancel some of its services from July 21 because some of its current train sets are no longer fit for use and are to be scrapped.

Its new CAF rolling stock is still not cleared to run, and most of it has not even arrived in this country from the factory in Spain.

The new timetable, which hits the Beckton-Stratford International route quite hard, is necessary because the DLR has still not resolved signalling compatibility issues.

The new trains were due to enter service in 2023 but are now not expected to run until at least the end of the year.

It is also important for them to be able to run alongside the old units during the changeover period, and testing is under way again after being suspended for a time. It is understood that only four of the eventual total fleet of 54 have so far been delivered to the extended Beckton depot.

DLR has just announced that some its 92 B90, B92 and B2K units are being withdrawn, but not said how many. Their lives are being extended by reducing the length of some train formations from three to two to reduce overall mileages.

The following service changes will be introduced:

• Beckton to Canning Town/Stratford International services will not run (Tower Gateway to Beckton to run as normal).
• Peak hour services from Stratford to Lewisham will not run (normal Stratford-Canary Wharf, every five minutes in the peak, otherwise 6.5 minutes).
• Bank to Lewisham services run as normal, and customers will need to change at Canary Wharf to continue their journey).

Stuart Harvey, Transport for London’s Chief Capital Officer, said: “The testing of the new DLR trains is progressing well and customers will start to be able to use these modern trains later this year. We need to begin retiring some of the oldest trains, meaning some short-term timetable changes are required.”

When they do arrive, the new CAF trains will increase overall passenger capacity by more than half, with each unit offering 10- per cent more space, air-conditioning, easier platform accesses, walk-through carriages, improved live travel information and mobile phone charging points.

There are also big worries for the London Underground, where the introduction of the new fleet of Siemens Piccadilly Line trains from Siemens has been delayed by a year until at least July 2026, and there is still no Government approval for renewing the life-expired stock on the Bakerloo.

While the first of the 94 sets in the £1.6 billion Piccadilly Line order is reported to have achieved around 10,000 miles of successful running at Siemens’ test facility neat Wildenrath in Germany, this cannot mimic day-to-day operation in the capital, and the problems to be resolved have simply been described as “revisions to the underbody electrical gear”.

Further part or full closures of the Piccadilly line at weekends, to prepare the stations for the new nine-carriage trains, will continue over the coming months.

Meanwhile, the London Assembly’s Liberal Democrat leader Baroness Caroline Pidgeon continues to press Mayor of London Sir Sadiq Khan for news about the order for up to 34 new Bakerloo Line trains, because Siemens’ option to replace the 50-year-old vehicles officially expires on November 1.

Although it says “discussions are progressing”, the Government failed to come up with any positive news in the latest Spending Review in early June. It awarded £2.2bn billion to TfL for the ongoing management of the total network, not more new-build.