"Mizter T" wrote

Yes, that's a very good point, I hadn't really thought about that
issue. Hmm. Well, I suppose the brutal solution would be to simply
give up on serving Wandsworth Road with Victoria trains altogether,
and leave it for ELL phase 2 to serve, and tell pax that they can do
one of four things...

* get to Victoria by going to Clapham Jn on the ELL and changing
(though the geographical daftness of that does offend me somewhat)
* get the bus to Vauxhall and then tube (or another bus) to Victoria
* walk to Clapham High Street and catch the train from there (AIUI the
Vic-Dartford trains could serve Clapham HS, as there's a junction the
name of which I forget that provides access to and from the Atlantic
Line)
* walk to Battersea Park and get a train (though the walk isn't all
that direct as there's all this railway land in the middle! Plus
they're not not the most appealing of streets to walk down.)
Not ideal in any case though. If a portion of the Up low level line
through Stewart's Lane could be made reversible where it joins the
Chatham Slow, might that work? (I dare say that something like that is
far far easier said than done!)

I think that it's around there (Denmark Hill and Peckham Rye) where a
lot of the opposition and campaigning has been been brewing (though
I'm a bit out of the loop on the latest) - so putting in some extra
stops might address matters somewhat. Though at Denmark Hill I think
the loss of a through service to London Bridge is quite a big part of
it (the almost adjacent King's College Hospital is part of the same
Trust as Guy's Hospital next to London Bridge, and I think this
arrangement manages to generate a certain degree of inter-hospital
traffic of staff, patients and students, and so this is where some of
the noise is coming from).

The junction between Clapham High Street and Wandsworth Road is Voltaire
Road Junction.

IMHO making the up low level line reversible is a non-starter - from Clapham
High Street the Chatham side has effectively produced a 4-track approach to
Victoria, using the low level route as the up slow, and the reversible slow
between Battersea Pier Junction and Voltaire Road as effectively the down
slow. So without significant track and signalling work I don't think serving
Wandsworth Road with Victoria trains is practicable. And I don't think it's
worth keeping Clapham High Street to Victoria trains. Apart from
claustrophobics who want a surface journey at the expense of frequency,
anyone making this journey will do better by LUL from Clapham North via
Stockwell.

The reduction from 4tph to 2tph between Victoria, Denmark Hill, and Peckham
Rye might seem a retrograde step, but in practice the SLL and Dartford
trains mostly run very close to each other, followed by a near 30 minute gap
to the next pair. Ideally this is a flow that should be provided with the
(ex-) Mayor of London's aim for at least a 15 minute clockface service on NR
lines in London, though rather than a new service to Bellingham I'd rather
see the Dartford via Bexleyheath service augmented with a Victoria to Sidcup
service (which can avoid some of the worst conflicts on the flat crossing at
Lewisham, especially if Cannon Street to Sidcup trains are run via Parks
Bridge direct, as they wouldn't need to serve Lewisham).

While the loss of through trains between Denmark Hill and London Bridge is
regrettable, passengers making this journey will be able to do it with a
same-platform change (at Peckham Rye or Queens Road Peckham) and will have a
new possibility of travelling to Blackfriars and using the new South Bank
entrance.

Peter