The Gospel Oak to Stratford section of the London Overground service will be closed between Saturday 20 February and 1 June 2010 to allow major engineering works to take place, Transport for London has announced.
The work includes efforts to improve signalling and track as well as platform lengthening and forms part of a £326m upgrade of the London Overground service.
Bosses at TfL promise the work will herald a new era of more frequent services with longer trains.
Ian Brown, the Managing Director of TfL London Rail, said: “We apologise to passengers for this inconvenience and are doing all we can to minimise the disruption caused. This was one of the most neglected railways in the UK when we took it over two years ago and these are essential works that will help us unlock the true potential of the London Overground network, which is to offer a far more frequent Metro-style turn up and go service.
“We have to close this part of the line for this amount of time because of the nature of the work. Large amounts of material will have to be moved around for the signalling and track upgrades, which means if we were to restrict the work to weekends and then have to restore the railway to working order each Monday morning, the disruption would be over a much longer period.”
For the duration of the closure a rail replacement service will provide buses every 20 minutes six days a week. On Sundays this will reduce to two buses an hour.
Further information is available from tfl.gov.uk/over ground or by calling the Customer Services Team on 0845 601 4867
Annie says
How can they justify this? We’ve already suffered closures at weekends and over holidays for more than a year and now we have NO trains for three months. And how is a little bus every 20 minutes going to compensate for the capacity of a big train every 10 minutes. This lines was already full, how much misery will we suffer now? Boris doens’t care about anyone in East London, as he proved when he put the buses up by 20%. So long as he pleases the middle-class Tories by taking the west-London congestion charging zone away, he’s happy. We have had so many more closures since he came to power. The Jubilee has been closed many weekends. And the trains. And my bus stops been shut several times for several roadworks in a year. Why is so much stress forced on us ordinary people because of mismanagement? It stinks.