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| Re: Crossrail gets Treasury backing (was Re: London's five-year plan) (10714) | |||
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Re: Crossrail gets Treasury backing (was Re: London's five-year plan) |
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Posted by Rail Blue on Wed Oct 20 17:26:27 2004, in response to Re: Crossrail gets Treasury backing (was Re: London's five-year plan), posted by Fytton on Wed Oct 20 05:25:06 2004. The reason the Central Line is so successful is that it goes where people want to go - right through the heart of The City and the West End. The north (Metropolitan) and south (District) sides of the Circle don't.The north is adequately used by enough branches and serves the City and Main Line stations pretty well. If anything, this makes it a superior line for people getting to Heathrow, as no-one actually lives on Oxford St (compared to all the people living on the lines out of Euston, St Pancras, and King's Cross) - at least no-one who'd catch a train. The south is almost as good as the Central Line (it serves the City better than any other line, and Charing X Embankment is right in the middle of things (Covent Garden, Charing X Rd, Regent St)) , it's just that the branches are no good at the east end. Encouraging more use of the south side of the Circle (the District Line) makes a lot more sense. Presumably that was the reason why the cross-platform interchange between the Central and the District at Mile End was provided in the 1940s - yet London Underground seems to keep it secret; I've never seen any publicity encouraging people to use it. And stations like Temple, Embankment and Westminster are pretty close to important destinations. If anything, the 1940s scheme got it backwards. The eastern branches would have worked better flipped. Crossrail, whatever its faults, is meant to be an express version of the Central Line. Nice idea, but it's too expensive. A better idea might be surface (or subsurface) LRT along Oxford St to reduce the short-distance traffic instead. I see it as part of the same concept as Thameslink 2000 - fast cross-London services, one north-south, the other east-west, the two connecting at Farringdon. TL3K would work perfectly well regardless. It already crosses two East-West lines extending into the outer suburbs, one at Farringdon, one at Blackfriars. It sounds more like a marketing job to me. |
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