On Jan 6, 12:23*am, Grumpy wrote:
On Jan 1, 12:41*pm, Robert Cox wrote:

The Crossrail tunnels will cost billions and will have to be
intensively used to make any sort of financial sense.

If only.
The business case purports to show a net *present value of £11bn.
To get that they build a case based on huge future growth (like HS2)
and then offset the costs by trying to put a value on benefits for
such as "time savings" and "easing congestion".
For example of the net present value, £10bn is claimed to be for the
value of "time savings".
Given that this is principally going to be a London commuter
railway,it means that most of the time savings will be people having
another 15-20 minutes in bed on a morning. Meanwhile the billions
spent will have to be paid by the rest of us in real taxes/rates.
Madness. If the faster service is so valuable why cant the users be
expected to pay premium fares to use it?
The whole project just hasn't been thought through properly-witness
the confusion (aka lack of any decent planning on the Western end)
which the recently published London RUS exposes. This makes clear
there simply isn't capacity to run separate Crossrail trains to
Maidenhead as well as the FGW services. Also that a second branch (to
the LNW lines) should be provided. This sort of thing should have been
thought through well before now.

IMHO, the Crossrail branches should be served by only Crossrail
trains. Otherwise, there is a likelyhood of train frequency on the
core section being disrupted by delays on the branches. IIRC, this is
termed "service polution". Unless LNW frieght can be diverted
elsewhere, utlization of the slow AC pair is a non-starter.