Thames River Routes: RB5

The difficulty of defining RB5 sums up part of the problem with the Thames Clipper timetable. Conceptually it's simple, a limited service connecting the following piers:

• North Greenwich
• Woolwich / Royal Arsenal

But these two piers were also served by the RB1 / RB1X routes.

The idea, I think, is that at weekends the RB1 / RB1X boat, a large clipper, stops at North Greenwich and then heads back into central London. A separate, smaller clipper boat (often used for RB6 to Putney), shuttles between North Greenwich and Woolwich, and this is the RB5.

However the day I went to North Greenwich there were two large cruise liners in London that had hired the smaller clipper boat and so the larger RB1 boat was continuing on Woolwich.

I was a bit worried that this might not count as going on RB5 but the timetable expert at the pier side said the larger boat arrived as RB1 but left as RB5 and the printed timetable at Woolwich definitely said RB5 not RB1 so felt I could confidently tick this one off.

The endless new blocks of apartments made there were no views of the O2 and the Gormley sculpture Quantum Cloud is now hard to see from the river so instead I took the picture above of a Thames Barge heading towards Trinity Wharf.

This end of the river is wider with more of an estuary feel and zips though the magnificent Thames Barrier:

After this is passes the Woolwich ferry which of course had been on as part of the ferries of London project:

Then we arrived at Woolwich pier and there was a quick turnaround as the clipper was late and some were a bit slow on reaching it in time and hence missed it, watching it disappear off upriver in a roar of spray.