Stratford City

Stratford City- Transport Development

East London Line extension

The Government has approved the extension of the East London line, providing a new link between east London, location for most of the planned 2012 venues, and the rest of the city. The extension will complement the 10 rail lines, including the new high-speed Channel Tunnel line, that will serve the Olympic Park in Stratford, east London. It will also help to accommodate the growth of Docklands and east London, facilitating economic regeneration by linking new communities into the network.
 

Stratford International- a new depot for Eurostar

A new maintenance depot for Eurostar trains linked to the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL) is to be built at Temple Mills near Stratford in east London. The new depot will come into service when Eurostar trains begin to operate from London St Pancras International in 2007, following completion of Section 2 of the CTRL from north Kent into St Pancras. It will replace the current North Pole International depot in west London. Original plans for the CTRL envisaged that Eurostars from St Pancras would gain access to North Pole International via the North London and West London lines, but recent increases in traffic on the already-busy North London line mean that Eurostars cannot be accommodated without costly and disruptive infrastructure improvements.

The Temple Mills depot will be on existing railway land a mile north of the CTRL station at Stratford, and rail access to it will be to the larger European loading gauge so that, like the rest of the CTRL, it can be used in the future by trains built to more generous European dimensions.

Channel Tunnel Rail Link The CTRL is being constructed in two phased sections. Section 1, which opened for commercial services in September 2003, is the 74km (46 miles) from the Channel Tunnel to Fawkham Junction in north Kent. Section 2, which began in July 2001, extends the new high-speed line 39km (24 miles) into London’s St Pancras via new international stations at Stratford in east London and Ebbsfleet in northwest Kent.

Section 1 of the CTRL was completed on time and on budget and was formally opened on 16th September 2003. Commercial Eurostar services started to use the new line on 28th September 2003 reducing fastest journey times by 20 minutes. Once the entire CTRL is open in 2007, fastest London-Paris Eurostar journey times will be further reduced to 2 hours 20 minutes and London-Brussels to just 2 hours 5 minutes, and new high-speed domestic services from Kent to St Pancras will be able to operate.

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