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| Re: West London Line & West Coast Main Line (Was: Cockfosters) (368508) | |||
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Re: West London Line & West Coast Main Line (Was: Cockfosters) |
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Posted by Rail Blue on Fri Jan 12 07:24:42 2007, in response to Re: West London Line & West Coast Main Line (Was: Cockfosters), posted by David Fairthorne on Thu Jan 11 17:00:49 2007. In order to estimate the demand for through trains on the West London Line, you need to know what proportion of passengers arriving at Euston from the midlands and north want to reach stations on the Brighton lineAnd also what proportion of Brighton's residents give up at their rubbish train service and clog up the M23 and the horrendously inadequate western half of the M25 whenever they want to go to Birmingham, Liverpool, or Manchester. And also what proportion of people look at cross-London connections and think, "I just can't be bothered". Then you need to know what proportion of those people come from the same area; say Birmingham rather than Manchester, Liverpool or Glasgow. If one person in five comes from Birmingham, and one in five of them wants to continue on the Brighton line, that makes one person in 25, which would not justify a through service. With sufficient thought, very good connections to Liverpool and Manchester can be provided at Rugby. I'd still expect increasing the frequency to allow through Trent Valley service to be highly beneficial though, because Nuneaton provides a good transfer point for Leicester, and Tamworth for Derby, Nottingham, and Sheffield. Even if that estimate is low, any additonal services on the Brighton line would mean adding to the existing choice of routes (Victoria, London Bridge and Thameslink), resulting in reduced services on those routes and additional operational complexity. I suspect that the complexity is more to do with the politics of the privatised railway rather than operational concerns. For instance, scrapping the Gatwick Express or having a daytime goods embargo across East Croydon (most goods trains can use the Chatham Lines anyway) would clear the right number of paths, and Southern could recast their timetable around the Cross Country train times (for instance aligning the necessary move of a Cross Country train across the Slow Lines south of Clapham Junction with the slots for the South London Line at Battersea Park). In fact, I think I'll write a sample hour to show how it could be done. |
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