Medley

It would also provide the likes of me, living in HOP itself, with a night-time bus connection to Elephant and thus other buses and the Northern and Bakerloo lines and Thameslink.

Report it using websites like those. Chances are they'll get patched, because once the Council has been notified it may be on the hook for legal claims from subsequent damage if it decides to ignore it.

Yes, sorry if my earlier post drifted off topic. For me it's the difference between going from Honor Oak Park in the peak to work: via Southern and Jubilee, changing at London Bridge = 4.40 via Overground and Jubilee, changing at Canada Water = 3.10 Nutty.

Ah, the decision to place Shoreditch High Street station in zone 1 (when the old Shoreditch station was in zone 2) rears its head again.

James, on this bit: I think fundementally we disagree. ELL2 is great for a minority of people who live in Southwark. the Loss of the SLL will harm many more Southwark residents and local hospitals. Telling people to take a train to Clapham and change - but the people who will use ELL2 could have taken a train and changed but the ELL2 is constructed to avoid that. You will actually find me in complete agreement. It should be what you call ELL2 plus retention of the South London Line, that's my view. On viaducts, I still don't get it - are you proposing demolishing existing ones?

Quite right Torben. James Barber, I have no idea what you're on about with regards to London B. Do you? By Southwark railway station, do you mean Southwark Tube station, or railway stations in Southwark? Anyway, the remodelling of London B will - South London Line aside - massively boost services for people all over south London, and there is a hope that once the refurb is finished the South London Line could return (I've no idea if this would happen, just heard it said that it could. Would seem to me a classic London Overground service itself, as is the outer circle via Crystal Palace). As for viaducts, I'm not clear what you mean there either. How on Earth could London B function without viaducts? How could Thameslink function without viaducts? I can see they have big and potentially detrimental impact at street level, but surely more viaducts suitable mitigated is a small price to pay for vastly improved rail services?

Assuming the early morning landings have been running for considerably longer than this thread (which they have - many years longer) but you've only just started noticing them recently, the best advice is really to try to stop noticing them again, like you didn't before. Somehow. And hope they don't increase. Which of course, they surely will. If only the above were true. But the point is that the planes are now low much further east - i.e. over ED. That's why it's such a current issue here.

LondonMix - the Overground is not a tradeoff against the SLL, if that's what you were meaning. Jeremy - Crossrail 2 has been around for years as an idea, the route is safeguarded. It's more about relieving capacity constraints than providing new routes. So it certainly won't be troubling south east London!

LondonMix - some muddled thinking there. Buses - the troubles are: 1. unpredictable and long journey times in the peak 2. the other passengers 3. the heaving and jolting 4. terminating short etc - as post above. The good news is: 1. the frequency 2. the 24 hour running or turning into a night bus 3. they're cheap! 4. off peak they can be very quick

I'm no expert, but landing into the wind is the done thing, and the wind is 70% from the west, i.e. 70% of the time the planes head east (over ED etc) into it.

I complain every time it happens to me (like this morning), although I'm over in Honor Oak Park and get woken up later (typically 6.30). I complain via the http://webtrak.bksv.com/lhr site - and they have responded saying we've logged your complaints under the following numbers etc. I take the point about labelled a nutter, but don't feel there's much else I can do.

I found that after a while cycling in London I'd developed a (no doubt fallible) sense of space, of where people were going to be - when a collision might happen, when it probably wouldn't.

Thameslink is indeed one of the franchises now in limbo. The proposal to terminate HH trains (which, e-dealer, are not the DH trains) would have taken effect from 2015, I think, but not sure on that.

Frankly you're overthinking it. Go with the flow, left side being generally better in my experience.

South London Line = the shuttle outer circle service between Victoria and London Bridge ELLX = extension to the East London Line a.k.a. the London Overground, with trains running between Clapham Junction and Highbury and Islington Thameslink = trains from P Rye, D Hill etc north to Blackfriars, Kings Cross etc. and south to Sevenoaks. The South London Line is to cease, the ELLX is to arrive and Thameslink will be unaffected for the moment, although the proposal is that trains from Herne Hill will not continue through to beyond Blackfriars but will terminate there.

> It is difficult to work out which side of the crossing I should be, especially when going south? Is there a protocol? Do you mean the crossing over the road? In which case, the left hand side. The official routing is to go in a question mark shape around the edge of the pavement when going north or south. As this routing makes no sense every cyclist ignores this and cycles across the pavement itself.

Yes - why do you think the service is going to end?

> Make the most of it - we may soon wish this service still existed !! Do you mean having to change at Blackfriars in the future if you use Herne Hill?

Currently watching and very much enjoying The Asphalt Jungle.

The OP question is totally fair. And Beirut's a fascinating trip.

A friend's wife does this. It's just about OK. Reliability isn't great, but isn't hopeless. She usually gets a seat (she does Nunhead-Kentish Town). And you do get some good views on the way!

That's the point though, that the choice is between fast but from central London vs. slow but from outer London.

Agree about Reading. Would be great in general if there could be a fast outer orbital type service building on existing hubs such as Clapham Junction and East Croydon but with sensible inter-connections from stations like ED to those places.

Meant to add - the detriment is in the padded timetables and so longer journeys that passengers get, although there is a reliability tradeoff - some leeway does help trains arrive on time thus meaning you've got more certainty but possibly a slower train. It does all seem a bit depressing over long distances though - there are loads more trains from London to Bristol, Leeds etc than there used to be, but they're almost all substantially slower than the fastest trains of the '70s or '80s.

Sort of - but the threshold there is 30 mins. This is more about keeping the public performance measure in good shape.