"Roger H. Bennett" wrote in message
...
"Mark Hewitt" wrote in
message
...
Is this some mechanism to allow "inter-city" trains to run from the
north,
right through London and down to the South-East. Or is it nowhere near
that
sensible?

No and yes respectively.

It's a planned new tunnel to run east-west, carrying an intensive
inner-suburban service (probably from about Shenfield to Heathrow), so
would
be far too slow for intercity trains.

Sounds pretty sensible to me.

I think a lot of the complaints about Crossrail not being used to run
intercity services are missing the point - it's essentially going to be a
new express tubeline, not an addition to the national railway networks.
Considered like that I think it's a great idea - the Shenfield line is one
of the busiest NR lines in London, the Isle of Dogs and City Airport need
(another) fast link to the West End, as does Heathrow. I'm sure that'll be
far more useful to more people than express trains from Norwich to Bristol.

Okay, non-Londoners may like the idea of being able to get train services
direct to the West End without changing, but so do those who live in the
suburbs; and in terms of the number of journeys made, and the proportion of
journey time wasted on changing, I suspect that you can save far more time
by building new suburban lines than intercity ones.


The better scheme is Thameslink 2000 (or Thameslink 3000 as it's now
generally known), which keeps getting postponed. That would allow more
trains to run north-south through London than on the existing Thameslink,
but still not intercity trains.


I actually think Thameslink 2000 should be focused on suburban services as
well - perhaps taking high frequency services to Orpington, Dartford and
Hayes and increasing that on the Wimbledon loop. A few regional services
could still be run, but I would have thought that a larger population of
regular commuters could be better served by keeping the service pattern
simple and local.

Jonn Elledge