I have believed for decades that London and our other major cities should always have a significant infrastructure project under construction. Finish one, commence the next. With this country’s intellectual and material resources - not to mention the proven financial benefits - this should be self-evident, but the Treasury doesn’t understand capital investment, and our politicians can’t countenance anything that doesn’t deliver results within a single parliament. Oldcastle would make an excellent Crossrail 3 - after the “Chelney” is under way.
20k new homes set for Crews Hill. The great Northern line had better figure out how to improve both capacity and reliability at some point. It's pretty poor as it stands.
Bang on the money with Manchester although worth noting that since Stalybridge to Victoria got electrified under TRU and so did Lostock-Wigan, so Bee Network trains have a chance of running an equivalent of an east-west S-bahn
Both the Sutton Loop and Moorgate trains are length-limited by the platforms, but the Moorgate trains are even shorter. It's 160m vs 120m; eight vs. six car 20m units. Doesn't sound like a lot but going from six to eight is a 33% increase, which means a lot with 24 tph along the core.
If it isn't cost-feasible to redevelop the three underground station stops wholesale (Essex Road, Highbury & Islington, Old Street - probably Drayton Park too), both to accommodate the longer trains and the vast increase in traffic, probably might consider building new stations a la Bank Northern Line.
> For example, Waterloo has four pairs of lines going in, which could carry perhaps 96 trains per hour, but only 24 platforms, which turn around no more than 42 trains per hour.
What's the actual bottleneck here? This implies that each platform can handle less than 2 trains an hour, which means it takes more than 30 minutes to get a train in and out. This seems very high to me?
Part of it, no doubt, is that the old Eurostar flyover viaduct means it narrows down to seven tracks, it isn't consistently eight tracks throughout, and the spare seventh track is probably used for peak trains and empty coaching stock moves.
Having checked Wiki, it seems that the classic SWML is the heavily used one
SWML slow (Inner Suburban) is 15 tph
SWML fast (Outer Suburban) is 13 tph
but the Windsor lines are only 8 tph total.
The high number of level crossings in the Staines - Feltham area probably means you can't funnel lots of trains there even if you could get more out of Waterloo, the roads would be closed longer than they're open (if they aren't nearly as such now).
Broadly speaking, on the Windsor lines the bottleneck is the line, not platforming at Waterloo.
On the SWML however the bottleneck is the line *and* platforming at Waterloo, given that some of the trains travel pretty long distances so need long turnaround times.
I suspect that better operations could improve frequency on the SWML on the margin. But not enough to double capacity, which is what crossrailing the SWML slows would do.
I have believed for decades that London and our other major cities should always have a significant infrastructure project under construction. Finish one, commence the next. With this country’s intellectual and material resources - not to mention the proven financial benefits - this should be self-evident, but the Treasury doesn’t understand capital investment, and our politicians can’t countenance anything that doesn’t deliver results within a single parliament. Oldcastle would make an excellent Crossrail 3 - after the “Chelney” is under way.
Crossrail 2?
20k new homes set for Crews Hill. The great Northern line had better figure out how to improve both capacity and reliability at some point. It's pretty poor as it stands.
Bang on the money with Manchester although worth noting that since Stalybridge to Victoria got electrified under TRU and so did Lostock-Wigan, so Bee Network trains have a chance of running an equivalent of an east-west S-bahn
Both the Sutton Loop and Moorgate trains are length-limited by the platforms, but the Moorgate trains are even shorter. It's 160m vs 120m; eight vs. six car 20m units. Doesn't sound like a lot but going from six to eight is a 33% increase, which means a lot with 24 tph along the core.
If it isn't cost-feasible to redevelop the three underground station stops wholesale (Essex Road, Highbury & Islington, Old Street - probably Drayton Park too), both to accommodate the longer trains and the vast increase in traffic, probably might consider building new stations a la Bank Northern Line.
> For example, Waterloo has four pairs of lines going in, which could carry perhaps 96 trains per hour, but only 24 platforms, which turn around no more than 42 trains per hour.
What's the actual bottleneck here? This implies that each platform can handle less than 2 trains an hour, which means it takes more than 30 minutes to get a train in and out. This seems very high to me?
Part of it, no doubt, is that the old Eurostar flyover viaduct means it narrows down to seven tracks, it isn't consistently eight tracks throughout, and the spare seventh track is probably used for peak trains and empty coaching stock moves.
Having checked Wiki, it seems that the classic SWML is the heavily used one
SWML slow (Inner Suburban) is 15 tph
SWML fast (Outer Suburban) is 13 tph
but the Windsor lines are only 8 tph total.
The high number of level crossings in the Staines - Feltham area probably means you can't funnel lots of trains there even if you could get more out of Waterloo, the roads would be closed longer than they're open (if they aren't nearly as such now).
Broadly speaking, on the Windsor lines the bottleneck is the line, not platforming at Waterloo.
On the SWML however the bottleneck is the line *and* platforming at Waterloo, given that some of the trains travel pretty long distances so need long turnaround times.
I suspect that better operations could improve frequency on the SWML on the margin. But not enough to double capacity, which is what crossrailing the SWML slows would do.