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| Re: London's five-year plan (13908) | |||
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Re: London's five-year plan |
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Posted by Fytton on Fri Oct 29 06:37:34 2004, in response to Re: London's five-year plan, posted by David Fairthorne on Fri Oct 22 01:04:39 2004. "Its the long distance services that should use the tunnels""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....... ....But Thameslink 2000 is another story, having short and long distance trains that seem unlikely to mix well on the tame tracks. I also share the concerns of London Rail that they are trying to do a shoehorn job, and the 24 tph projection may be unrealistic. If there were fewer trains serving fewer and shorter routes, it could be made to work reasonably well, but where are the shorter routes? Most of them are in south London and would be better served by extensions to the UndergrounD." So far as cross-city routes are concerned, they are actually doing two different jobs. One is for people who actually don't want to go to the big city at all, but want to get from (say) fifty miles north of it to fifty miles south of it - a non-random example since that's exactly what Bedford-Brighton is. The other is for people who live (say) west of the city but whose commuting destination is at the eastern end of the CBD - precisely the situation of commuters living on the Paddington line who work in The City. Such people were of course the intended audience of the world's first underground railway, the Metropolitan Railway of 1863, Paddington to Farringdon, and indeed the Great Western Railway did run through trains from its main line west of London down on to the Met. So far as the first type of journey is concerned, I think James (Rail Blue) is right to point out the inconvenience of having to use the tube for crossing London when you have lots of luggage. And so far as the second is concerned, I do observe lots of Bedford commuters riding Thameslink across to Blackfriars or London Bridge instead of alighting at Kings Cross. Both functions are useful, if properly planned; half-baked cross-city schemes are of course no better than any other half-bakes rail schemes. Your remaining point concerns mixing the two sorts on a single route (Thameslink 2000). I do foresee some difficulty with that, owing to timekeeping problems with the trains coming from so many different branches on the south side. However, it will be such a long time before it gets built that I probably won't live to have to grapple with them! A thought - if the politico-legal problems could be overcome, would it actually be useful to people in the Greater New York metropolitan area to link the LIRR and NJT, with trains running through NY Penn? |
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