No London Overground services on our line all weekend / Southern Railways operating

From TFL’s weekly weekend travel email:

This leaves us with only 2 trains an hour on Saturday and 4 trains an hour on Sunday:

Saturday
Forest Hill to London Bridge at 43 and 13 past each hour from 0643 to 2313

London Bridge to Forest Hill at 10 and 40 past each hour from 0610 to 2340 then 0020 & 0035

Sunday
Forest Hill to London Bridge at 0749, 0805 then at 18, 31, 48 and 01 past each hour until 1231 then at 46, 01, 16, 31 past each hour from 1246 until 2346

London Bridge to Forest Hill at 0731, 0738, 0801 then at 08, 24, 38 and 54 past each hour from 0808 to 2254 t then 2311, 2331 and 2350

Southbound services from Forest Hill on Saturday terminate at Coulsdon Town but on Sunday 2 services per hour terminate at Caterham/Tattenham Corner and 2 at Crystal Palace.

The weekend shutdowns on London Overground look likely to continue until the bank weekend of 29/30/31 August.

We used to have 6 trains per hour to London Bridge before the Overground came along. This is ridiculous!

It’s worse at the moment when we lose London Overground on Saturdays because Southern have still not reinstated the London Bridge - Victoria service which would give us another couple of trains an hour to and from London Bridge on Saturdays!

However the bad news is it looks like we’re only going to have the Overground back for the first two weekends in September before we have six weekends of no trains at all due to engineering work between New Cross Gate and West/East Croydon! .

It’s a pity the engineering work on “our” section of the line couldn’t have been planned to be done at the same time as the engineering works north of the river. That would have made too much sense!!

It actually was, there was supposed to be two or three sets of four day closures, primarily over Easter and week before or after can’t remember. It was cancelled so that key workers could still get to and from work.

Thanks for the explanation. I wondered whether it had happened due to changes caused by Corvid-19, but it still doesn’t explain why the two lots of work couldn’t have been rearranged for corresponding dates instead of completely separate dates leaving us with limited or in the case of the September-October work no services at all for around 14 weekends.

Do you happen to know what’s happening this coming weekend? National Rail Enquiries are not showing any engineering works on the East London line on Saturday at all and only until approx 0830am on Sunday but TFL are showing the complete line closed as per the last 6 weekends!

Well originally right now we’d have full service as those works would’ve been completed. It’s an unfortunate side effect of what’s been going on, but maintenance can’t be neglected. Usually works are planned months in advance, so the weekends where there are Southern services, means that the works are purely on the East London Line “Core Route”. Where there are replacement buses, the works are on the section south of New Cross Gate. This weekend there are no London Overground services at all.

There are engineering works south of New Cross Gate, so there is an engineering possession until 0805 on Sunday. So there is a little confusion between TfL and NR site. No ELL services, but Southern available on Saturday and from 0805 Sunday. Also bear in mind that ELL maintenance on the “core route” is carried out by Cleshar, not Network Rail, so there can be some delays in information getting out, especially if it’s short notice.

Thanks for the update and explanation.