|
|
| Brighton line (Re: London's five-year plan) (15705) | |||
 |
|||
| Home > SubChat | |||
|
[ Read Responses | Post a New Response | Return to the Index ] |
|
||
|
Brighton line (Re: London's five-year plan) |
|
|
Posted by David Fairthorne on Wed Nov 3 13:26:00 2004, in response to Re: London's five-year plan, posted by Rail Blue on Tue Nov 2 17:39:27 2004. These would be far more use than the Watford-Brighton Local.I can see your proposed routes as potentially attractive to Gatwick Airport passengers, as going via the West London line would offer the convenience of not carrying baggage across London. But I doubt that there would be enough demand for the services, or whether they could compete with the fast new services on the West Coast Main Line. Cross-country routes in general come and go over the years, and infrequent passengers often don't know about them or don't think of using them. The SRA Brighton Main Line Route Utilisation Strategy plans to discontinue through service from the West London line via Clapham Junction because, it says, the time slots would be better filled by trains carrying more passengers: "The loadings of these trains across Clapham Junction should be compared with the loadings of many other suburban trains with Victoria as an origin or destination. On average, in the southbound direction, there are only approximately 25 people remaining on each train across Clapham Junction. This train uses paths on the slow lines. Suburban trains out of Victoria could more beneficially use those paths, a principal reason being that the cross-London trains are only 4 cars long, whereas the Victoria suburban trains can be 8 cars in length. Trains to/from Victoria are significantly overcrowded in the peak hours (sometimes with loadings as high as 800-900 people – see Figure 5 on page 10) and these high figures have led us to question whether the capacity used by the Watford – Brighton train (especially during the evening peak period) may not be better used by trains coming from Victoria. In addition, the junction constraints just south of Clapham Junction and at Balham, where the Watford – Brighton trains have to cross from one line to another, pose performance problems." "In order to deliver better performance south of Clapham, and to make what is considered to be better use of the paths south of Clapham, the Watford – Brighton service will be curtailed, on current plans, to become a Watford – Clapham Junction service. Very low numbers of through passengers have precipitated the consideration of this option, and the capacity on the fast and slow lines can be used for longer and busier trains from Victoria. Connections to a wide variety of destinations are available at Clapham Junction." |
|
|
|