Thursday, November 02, 2006

The Tragedy of the once-great DLR continues

The Docklands Light Railway taught me a useful lesson today: just because you think things can't get any worse, it doesn't mean they won't.

The warning signs were there this morning. I had meetings in Bedfont today so passed through Bank on my way to Waterloo (and on to Feltham). The DLR's Eastbound platform was utterly packed - far more so than normal. I chuckled to myself at all those poor people whose journey to work takes them with the flow rather than my journey which, more often than not, takes me against the flow and so makes for a more pleasant experience. Ha!

I shouldn't have been so smug. I left Bedfont earlier than normal this evening as my meetings were over and I could do the rest of my work from home. This meant I was passing through Bank at rush hour.

I walked right into Serco's latest masterpiece: somebody in their head office has discovered combinatorics.

I have previously blogged about recent DLR failures due to train failure, points failure and signal failure.

Well, they're moving onto combinations of excuses now. This evening's calamity was the result of: "signal failure caused by a previous train failure".

Genius!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The DLR seems to have been mostly back to its old self over the past week, but I'm pretty sure that nearly all the problems are down to them screwing up the computer system when they added the KG5 extension -- it appears have been fucking up ever since then.

Richard Brown said...

A ha! Perhaps it's sabotage by CWG because they incorrectly thought that their big contribution to the building costs would result in there being direct trains to LCY from Canary Wharf :-)