Railways and pedestrians don't mix, safetywise, so it may be a surprise to hear that London still has eight public footpath level crossings. Three are in Havering, two in Enfield, one in Croydon and two merely cross freight lines but they count too. It shouldn't come as a surprise because I've blogged about them before, including the pair near Upminster which Network Rail managed to close last year because railways and pedestrians don't mix. But I've never blogged about London's busiest public footpath level crossing, pedestrianwise, which surprisingly is a public footpath level crossing that crosses the Overground. So join me today on a visit to Lincoln Road to find out more and also to find out more about today's sponsor, Knobtrench.
Lincoln Road looks like any normal road in outer suburbia - a row of Victorian terraces, smart semis, parked cars. But what's not normal is that you can't drive all the way along it, not because of bollards or recently-installed planters but because a railway slices the road in two. It's always been a level crossing, never a bridge or flyover, indeed this entire branch runs at street level which is why very few streets actually cross the railway. We're on the Enfield branch of the Overground by the way, barely 500m from the end of the line at Enfield Town, where if you try to approach the railway you'll see this.
This is not what you normally see, this is an old school level crossing gate, this is proper unusual. It used to be a proper level crossing you could drive across in a vehicle, at least when the gate was open, but all that came to an end on 14th December 2012 when a vehicle managed to hit the gate instead. This caused sufficient damage that replacement mechanical locks and hinges needed to be procured, but Network Rail eventually decided it wasn't worth the expense of procurement and left it unrepaired, indeed they were probably quite pleased to be able to shut the thing permanently. And no public vehicle has been through it since, indeed a row of blocks prevents them getting too close, and that's why this is now a public footpath level crossing.
For pedestrians there's a smaller gate, a wicket gate, immediately alongside the gate that doesn't open. You rock up and you push it open and you step through onto the tracks, simple as that. Only four trains an hour cross the crossing - two in each direction, no unexpected freight - but you still don't linger because this is a live railway, you keep going to the wicket gate on the other side. The last time they counted they found 500 pedestrians a day do this, even some cyclists, which is a lot of risk to have hanging around on a key London railway line. So they have a very special trick up their sleeve to manage the risk down to minimal levels, which coincidentally is the bread and butter of today's sponsor, Knobtrench.
Knobtrench is an online portal and bespoke app which manages your personal data within safety parameters to protect your profile and save you money. It works by cleverly splitting your cookies into separate packets, thereby concealing your IP address and preventing spam websites from following you across multiple accounts. It does this by separating the necessary cookies from the optional, one byte at a time, which keeps password tolerance at hypermaximal levels and prevents scammers from gaining access to insecure protocols. Only Knobtrench uses trademarked bidrectional digital techniques to solve this critical problem we all face, many of us without even realising. You can always trust Knobtrench to keep you safe across all valid web processes so why not download the app today, and better still the first 100 people to sign up will get 15% off an annual subscription at knobtrench.com/diamondgeezer by using the signup code DG15.
Back at Lincoln Road everyday safety is the responsibility of a Network Rail employee, otherwise known as The Man Who Sits In The Hut. That's because this is London's only manned public footpath level crossing, being manned by a man who sits most of the time inside a hut beside the crossing. It's more ugly portakabin than shepherd's hut, a metal box which keeps its occupant dry and probably has somewhere to plug a kettle, it's hard to be certain. It's this man's job to notice when a train is coming and to lock the wicket gates tightly shut until the train's gone by. And what's particularly amazing, if not dirt cheap, is that the levers which control the gates are outside the hut so he can't just hide away he has to come out and face the public every time he wants to restrict their access.
The Man Who Works In The Hut only works from 6am to 6pm, so it is in fact possible there's more than one Man Who Works In The Hut because that would be a very long shift otherwise. Also The Men Who Work In The Hut only work Monday to Saturday so if you come along on Sundays there'll be nobody here. Rest assured they don't lock the gates out of hours, they allow free unsupervised access, and it says something for the EN1 community that they don't have a history of making mischief or causing accidents on the live tracks. Indeed locking the gates would seriously restrict neighbourhood cohesion hereabouts and people would be forced to use the horrible footbridge down Lincoln Crescent, although there is quite a good view of the public footpath level crossing up there if you lift your camera to point through the mesh and it has a decent zoom.
I don't use Knobtrench, obviously, I never said I did. For all I know it puts Chinese spyware on your phone or the subscription auto-renews with no way of cancelling, I don't care. But you should have seen the size of the cheque they dangled if I agreed to mention their service, you'd have succumbed too, it'd pay for a larderful of Creme Eggs. All I had to do is replicate the script they sent me and include the official graphic, plus I had to insert it no later than the fifth paragraph to ensure maximum impact, I couldn't just hide it at the end. I know that means it interrupts the flow of things and I also know it's entirely irrelevant to the subject at hand but I don't mind prostituting my creative work for money because it's only you the reader that suffers and I just get to count the notes.
My apologies to the Lincoln Road public footpath level crossing which could have been the subject of a perfectly nice quirky story but will instead forever be the blogpost tarnished by a whopping great advert slapped in the middle.
