D800 – 28-105mm 30mm (45 eq)
Despite its usefulness there are many little things that annoy me about Transport For London (TfL)’s Journey Planner. Invaluable though it is for working out how to get around London, it very seldom yields the best answer for any but the simplest journeys directly. Of course it isn’t a simple problem, and way back in 1993 I worked in a menial capacity on a rather simpler subset for my son’s A-level Maths project, sitting on underground trains and timing the stops (the information in the timetables wasn’t particularly reliable), and the platform to platform timings at the major interchanges. He did all the maths involved working with Djikstra’s algorithm and the result was a pretty reliable way of working out the fastest way between any two stations in Central London. For a while I found it useful in my work, but once he’d got his A level there was no incentive to keep it up to date. But TfL covers a much wider area and many more modes of transport which makes it a much more complex problem, so it’s hardly surprising it sometime gives some very curious results – or that it’s often much better to break a journey into simpler steps and look up each separately.
One of the more annoying things about it is that there is no simple switch on the modes of transport to say that you are using a travelcard, and it will happily supply routes for which a travelcard is not valid. It will also give routes for that are not valid for certain rail tickets and often fails to spot simple walking routes that will significantly cut times. When I went to an opening at London Fields it suggested I change buses halfway rather than simply walk another 50 yards from the direct route. An so on.
It does allow you to chose modes of transport, and by far the silliest is called the ‘Emirates Air Line’ . It’s actually quite unnecessary to have a box to select or un-select it, because there is probably one one journey for which it provides the best route – from the Greenwich Peninsula to Victoria Dock. If you are travelling from anywhere to anywhere else on bus or tube, a journey under the river from North Greenwich to Canning Town is almost certain to provide a faster route, and one that doesn’t close down when its windy and keeps going rather later at night.
Calling the cable car an ‘Air Line’ is perhaps as ridiculous as the suggestion that it is a viable part of London’s transport system. Many Londoners have adopted the name I think proposed by blogger ‘Diamond Geezer’ of ‘Arab Dangleway’ though I prefer the simpler ‘dangleway’.
I really think it’s great – a tourist attraction but at a price which Londoners can afford. It gives you great views over some interesting areas of London, though a little far out from the City. But at a tenth of the price of a visit to the Shard a much better bargain. Not quite as high either, although the only way to actually get to the top of the Shard is to climb up the outside as I watched the six women team from Greenpeace do yesterday in their daring #iceclimb in protest against Shell and other oil companies threat to destroy the Arctic ( and with it life on Earth as we know it.) I have problems these days climbing on a two foot wall.
D700 – 16-35mm at 18mm
The first problem is actually getting there. The southern terminal had of course to be sited close to the river, but it is a rather long walk from North Greenwich station, perhaps a quarter of a mile. Once there it’s easy to buy a ticket, and to walk on to a pod. I shared mine with five tourists, but there were few as crowded and they hold ten people.
There was just a slight feeling of side to side movement as the pod climbed up but not enough to worry me at all. I was too busy looking out of the large windows and taking pictures – as were most of the others in the pod.
D800E, 18-105mm at 70mm (eq 105mm)
East London may not have quite the same fascination for everyone as it does for me, and the view dead behind as the pod ascended of the Greenwich Peninsula is largely of a giant car park. But to one side you see the river and the Millenium Dome (I can’t bring myself to call it by its even sillier name) and beyond that the tall towers of Canary Wharf, and in the distance the City of London (do choose a clear day to visit). Ahead and to the left is Stratford, Stratford City and the former Olympic site – with its own silly read Meccano helter-skelter viewing tower looking very small, and closer, the mouth of Bow Creek, where the River Lea meets the Thames. The cable goes over Thames Wharf which still has some riverside activity and is one of the still inaccessible riverside areas.
D800E, 18-105mm at 62mm (eq 93mm)
Ahead and to the right is the Royal Victoria Dock, or as I always think of it, Victoria Dock, and further around to the right Silvertown and the Thames Barrier, beyond the threatened sugar refinery and, perhaps too far distant to be of great interest, Woolwich.
D800E, 18-105mm at 105mm (eq 157mm)
The windows of our pod were pretty clean, and I had few problems with reflections, either working close to the window or across the pod out of the other side. You can see an odd part of the pod (or perhaps a fellow traveller) in the picture above.
D800E, 18-105mm at 105mm (eq 157mm)
I’m not sure how many pods are in use on the cable – there are 14 visible in the picture looking across the top of the cable – which you can see sags quite a lot between the tall towers (one on the south bank and two on the north) and 22 in a picture I took at ground level just after I got off (I suspect that should be disembarked.)
Tourists might prefer to get a return ticket and stay on for the round trip, then there are nice walks by the river either to the Thames Barrier and on to Charlton Station, or west and then south to Greenwich past the dome, a couple of large sculptures in the river and the Greenwich Meridian marker. There is little industry left now, but this was important in the nineteenth century, and there are some reminders, for example of the works which produced the undersea cables which formed telecommunications links around the world.
From the EXIF data I can see that my ‘flight’ took around 8 minutes, just a little slower than the timetabled 7 minutes, but I wasn’t complaining. This isn’t transport, so the slower the better for the customers. Perhaps it goes faster if they are ever busy, but I wasn’t complaining. For the wide-angle images with the 16-35mm I took of the lens hood and worked as close to the window as possible wrapping my hand around the lens to prevent the metal contacting the window which could transmit vibration. I took more pictures with the 18-105 (on the D800E, so 27-157 equiv), some in the same way, but others were taken through windows on the other side of the pod. There is a warning that you should stay in your seat during the transit, but I decided there would be no risk in some careful movement.
More on my walk around Victoria Dock and Silvertown in a later post. You can see more pictures from the dangleway at Emirates ‘Airline’ – Arab Dangleway.
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are copyright Peter Marshall
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