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| Re: London's five-year plan (11272) | |||
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Re: London's five-year plan |
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Posted by Rail Blue on Fri Oct 22 08:26:10 2004, in response to Re: London's five-year plan, posted by David Fairthorne on Fri Oct 22 01:04:39 2004. The RER seems a very fine system to me, and at least some lines (including line A) have high ridership. But it must have been very expensive to build. I don't know how much of it ran on existing rails and how much was new tunnelling.Line A was new tunelling from Nanterre to Vincennes. Line B/D from just north of the Gare du Nord to Luxembourg / Gare de Lyon. Line E inwards from just east of the Gare de l'Est. Line C was, however, a bargain. The new tunnel was from Invalides to Orsay. Does every building really need to be within 500 metres of a Metro station? That's one of its best features. And some lines seem to stray too much from straight lines. And that's one of its worst. Whoever designed line 12 really should lay off the Beaujolais-Villages. Here I tend to disagree, and that's what makes me wonder about the RER. Some RER routes are very long. Given a choice I would prefer short distance services to use tunnels. For commuters it doesn't really matter which London terminal you arrive at. For long distance passengers, London can be a distinct nuisance. Try getting from Ipswich to Cardiff. Or for that matter try getting from Leicester to Brighton: First to get onto Thameslink you need to ride the Slow MML train (instantly losing you 20 minutes) or have a very long walk from St Pancras to King's X TL (rather defeating the point of TL). If you do get on TL north of London, you are on an extremely slow train. First it takes ages to get to London, then it might run via Redhill, then it probably will start calling at everystation in Sussex. Compared to a Fast MML to St Pancras, the Victoria Line, and a Brighton Express, TL is useless, unless you have tons of luggage when you are merely trying to fit your luggage into a sub-standard commuter train that could at best be described as inappropriate. If there were fewer trains serving fewer and shorter routes, it could be made to work reasonably well, but where are the shorter routes? Remind me, quite how is this an advantage over terminating everything at Holborn Viaduct? "Brussels has a suberb cross-city rail tunnel for all-comers." That's probably much easier to organize in a less populous city with fewer lines. Compare Birmingham New St. Very similar almost everything goes through, hub of the network kinda thing. The difference is that the Belgians know how to run a railway, whereas the British authorities don't give a flying First-logo what goes on North of Watford. So much for my clever capacity-increasing plan for New St... However R.B's plan may not be feasible because the City streets are too narrow. I don't think they're THAT narrow. I mean, you could fit a 2-track railway alignment into 25-30ft or so. |
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