Woolwich Ferry – refloated

After a gap of just over two weeks since Ernest Bevin, the last of the old ferry boats to leave London, departed the River Thames there is once again a ferry at Woolwich.

The first of two new boats that will operate the service once again, starting in the New Year, made its maiden arrival at North Woolwich just after 10am on Thursday 15th November to take part in docking trials with the new magnetic coupling automated docking system.

As with all such projects there are long checklists to test that all of the components parts work together as part of the complete system and so this first vessel will spend several days doing tests.

A video of the Ben Woollacott arriving, including some fast pirouettes mid river, followed by some of the docking trial activity can be seen below.

The arrival of the second new ferry, named Dame Vera Lynn, is expected in the near future and training and testing will continue for several weeks prior to the relaunch of the ferry service across the Thames.

Update 19th November

At 0930 on the morning of Monday 19th November 2018 the second and final of the new fleet of Woolwich Ferry boats arrived at Woolwich in the shape of Dame Vera Lynn.

She arrived with no fuss or fanfare but headed straight to moor alongside the southern ferry terminal in Woolwich.

Further testing will take place with both boats continuing with handling and docking trials to get them ready for the service to resume but once again there are ferry boats at Woolwich.

A few more pictures of the new Ferry boats can be seen here.

The arrival of the first of the new vessels is the final stage of a  complex marine engineering project undertaken by BAM Nuttall on behalf of Briggs Marine and Transport for London to remove the old ferry terminal docking structure and replace it with the new one.

A few photos of the various elements of the project can be seen below.

A report about the retirement of the former Woolwich Ferry vessels can be seen here.

Farewell John, James and Ernest

Not a blog post about the break up of a local band but actually marking the retirement of the fleet of three vessels that have been operating the Woolwich Ferry Service since the early 1960s – their names being ‘John Burns’, ‘James Newman’ and ‘Ernest Bevin”.

On Friday, 5th October 2018 after 55 years of service the last crossing of the River Thames has been made by the current Woolwich Ferry fleet.

Ernest Bevin did a final South to North crossing arriving at the North Woolwich pier at 1835 UTC and then went out of service.

The honour of the final crossing went to James Newham with the final service running North to South (with a few pirouettes enroute!) arriving at the South Terminal at 1906 UTC.

James Newman – last ever commercial service for the Woolwich Ferry class of 1963

She then went out of service to join her sister vessels John Burns and Ernest Bevin in retirement – sadly not a happy retirement for any of the vessels as they are all on the way to the breakers yard at the end of their working lives.

In fact the tug that will be taking John Burns to the scrap yard is ready and waiting for a weather window to make that final journey!

A week previously the John Burns had made its final crossing at 1154 UTC on Friday 28th September 2018 – the drawdown of the service with the current boats had begun.

During the final week of John Burn’s operations I took the opportunity to have one last trip across the Thames.

This video shows the view from on board the Ferry.

This second video shows the view of the Ferry service in operation as seen from the Woolwich side of the River.

Whilst the route the vessels take on their daily service is very short and not that varied they have still made a significant number of crossing during their service livers – so I thought I would make a very rough calculation of the number of crossings each vessel might have done:

Total number of crossings = 3 crossings per hour x 9 hours per day x 5 days per week x 45 weeks per year x 50 years

That gives a number of 303,750 per boat so for the fleet that would be 911,250 – I would think the actual number is well over the 1m mark just for the Woolwich Ferry services.

Update: Thanks to Andrew Jarman and his comment about the higher service frequency during the early part of their career this would push their individual trip totals closer to the 500,000 mark and the fleet total to around 1,500,000 – some impressive numbers!!

Sometimes the weather out on the river wasn’t that great but as long as the crew could see the other side of the river then the boats would cross as this picture in the snow demonstrates.

Time moves on and whilst the three vessels will be missed they had come to the end of their viable working lives and the new vessels will offer many improvements –

This is not the end of the Woolwich Ferry as two new boats are on order and over the coming few months further work will be done on the Ferry piers to install the new docking mechanism.

Update 7th October – The John Burns was finally towed down river from Woolwich this morning on her journey to the breakers yard, the other two ferries, Ernest Bevin and James Newman, remain moored just upriver from the South ferry terminal and await towage to Le Havre.

Update 31st October

The James Newman was towed away from Woolwich on 25th October and Ernest Bevin was the last of the old ferries to be towed away on 31st October 2018 – as one era ends we await the arrival of the new ferries to begin the next one.

More pictures of the Woolwich Ferry fleet can be seen here.