I'm not really reassured when in the link above, in its own press release, tubelines says:

"The technology, Alcatel?s SelTrac? S40, was chosen because it is tried and tested on urban railways around the world, including in Vancouver, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong and in London on the Docklands Light Railway, although none present such a challenging environment as the London Underground."

The DLR?! A trundling scaled-up model railway that operates at walking speed but still suffers signal failures? Incidentally, has anyone else noticed a downturn in reliability of the DLR in the last year or two? I stopped using it from Bank to Canary Wharf.

I'm not impressed either with trains every 2 minutes. Moscow Metro does trains every 90 seconds at peak using 1930s technology, and is close to 100% reliable. I lived in Moscow for several years and never remember a single delay. I don't even know the Russian for 'signal failure' (Russian speakers on this forum ... is there any equivalent? )

Returning to London, it always struck me as if the entire system was running on Mogadon. So now we're chucking money at Bechtel to install a whizzy new system that we hope will deliver a fast but not stunningly fast service. Fine ... but how reliable is it?

Because when anything goes wrong at morning peak rush hour, it's going to be ugly.