In article , david stevenson
wrote:
nmtop40 wrote:

It's a connecting line around London we need, not more lines going
through the middle of it.

Can you point me to the traffic survey that came to this conclusion?
(The bit about not needing more lines through the middle)

It wasn't just guesswork, was it?


My thought exactly. I fear it wasn't even guesswork. I fear it
was people who looked at a map and drew lines on it and said "wouldn't
it be nice...." (like Hollywood films of WWII generals, planning their
strategy by stabbing at maps with their cigars. Real generals were
more professional) and that's the crossrail plan. I hear that a
Parliamentary committee judged that Crossrail was "poor value for
money"

I have seen commentators criticise national railway projects,
such as the West Coast Modernisation, as "a black hole", and I thought
it was shamefully obvious that this was a narrow London interest which
thought that money was only well spent in London, and wanted West
Coast modernisation to be stopped, so that the money could be diverted
to the likes of Crossrail.

Rather than very expensively create NEW, it might be much
better value to make best use of what ALREADY IS. Things like create
interchange at the dozens of places in London where lines cross
without any interchange at all or stations just too far apart to be
really "the same place" the remnant of the railway politics of the
19th century. Places like :-

* The crossing of the North London line with the Northern
line. A pair of underground stations to be dug out. Simple
but expensive!

* Putney and East Putney. Join them with a Birmingham
airport-type shuttle? That cost £10M for 1Km, (wow!) and the trackbed
was already in existence.

* At the crossing of more routes than I can list just
west of Old Oak Common depot, roof over the whole area with a
concrete slab, build flats, offices, etc on top of it, which
could be sold for a tidy sum, and connecting stations beneath it.

It all looks possible, and VERY worthwhile.

Michael Bell

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