Reopening the Hall Farm Curve would make it possible to travel from Chingford to Stratford in just 20 minutes
By Victoria Munro
A stretch of train tracks that once connected the borough directly to Stratford could one day reopen, alongside separate plans for a brand new railway station in Leyton.
The proposals, which require the “support of Network Rail” and “several further stages of work” before a concrete timeline is possible, were outlined in a recent Waltham Forest Council report.
Connecting the Overground line from Chingford to Stratford would entail reopening the “Hall Farm Curve”, a 500 metre stretch of train tracks pulled up in 1970, and could mean Overground trains run through Lea Bridge Station once more.
The potential new railway station could open in Ruckholt Road, only a short distance from the existing Leyton Station on the Central line.
“The nature of the programmes,” the report notes, mean they are likely to be “delivered over medium to long-term time horizons”, ranging from five to more than fifteen years time.
The report explains that the potential Ruckholt Road Station would serve thousands of new residents expected to move into homes the council hopes to see built in the Leyton Mills area.
According to a report from January last year, the council expects to see around 2,750 new homes built at New Spitalfields Market, around 1,950 homes built at Leyton Mills Retail Park and around 730 built in Temple Mills Lane – a combined total of 5,430 homes.
Reopening the Hall Farm Curve, meanwhile, would make it significantly quicker to reach Stratford from the borough.
A since-deleted council report from 2017, accessed via the Internet Archive, states the journey from Walthamstow to Stratford currently takes 40 minutes at peak times, while reaching Stratford from Chingford can take over an hour.
If the former route was reinstated, the old report notes, “the journey time from Chingford to Stratford would be approximately 20 minutes”.
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