26 August (Part 2) - Splashrail
Abbey
Wood has always had a problem with water. It has moved on a bit from
rowing boats in Fendyke Road (the 1953 floods) but even the slightest bit of
rain can render some of its roads impassable to pedestrians.
Abbey Road was so poorly resurfaced in 2009, come to think of it it wasn’t, they only moved
the kerb stones towards the centre of the road in one of Bexley’s mad narrowing
operations, and
the result was that the well worn tyre track some way out from the footpath
became a shallow ditch a foot out from the kerb.
Any competent traffic engineer could have predicted the end result but Bexley
hasn’t got any competent engineers, certainly not Andrew Bashford who masterminded
the wrecking of Abbey Road
is not a competent engineer.
Only an hour ago I got a good soaking from a speeding car while negotiating the
flood on the incompetently constructed Abbey Road footpath.
Whilst one has come to expect rubbish engineering by Bexley council I expect
better from Network Rail which on the whole does a pretty good job of constructing
Crossrail to a high standard. However even they seem unable to cope with
every drainage problem.
There is almost
no shelter on the platforms
at Abbey Wood and there is none on the footbridge either as you may see below.
The official reason for there being no roof on the footbridge is that because
there is necessarily almost no shelter on Platform 1 Network Rail didn’t want people to use
the bridge as a shelter and dash down wet steps when the train arrives.
One can see their point but it does rather smack of two wrongs making a right.
Maybe they will put a temporary shelter on the new platform because there is not
going to be a canopy over it until the new station is completed in 2017.
Photo 2 is the rearranged footbridge to Platform 1 which allows for the work
that needs to be done on the new North Kent lone platform currently under construction.
More Crossrail related blogs.