David Marsh wrote:
[Outlook Express bug: message invisible. See http://viewport.co.uk/outlook ]
begin Paul Terry's quote in uk.railway
about: Eurostar to quit Waterloo


So Waterloo is a good and cheap solution for those north of London

No. Now you are making your third false assumption.

The interchange between St Pancras and Waterloo is poor, especially when
carrying luggage. Eurostar had the opportunity of enabling all of their
customers to avoid making that cross London journey. They have chosen
not to.

Just a general comment in this thread; everyone is assuming that people
will transfer from Waterloo to St Pancras, but there will also be a
direct transfer between Waterloo and Stratford, which only takes 23
minutes platform to platform, compared to the 16 minutes for Waterloo to
St Pancras. There will hopefully be a travelator at Stratford to
compensate for it being a longer interchange than St Pancras.

How infeasible (read: costly) would it be to build an underground
travelator link between Euston Station (with access from the mainline
and the Underground) to St Pancras International (also linking with
King's Cross and King's Cross / St Pancras Underground)?

It's only about 500 m on the surface, and given the nature of all the
existing gubbins underground, probably less than that in practice.

The existing gubbins underground is rather the problem. There's so much
down there, it would be difficult to find somewhere to put the tunnel
(unless you put it very deep, which just defeats the point if you spend
ages trekking down into the bowels of the earth and out again at the
other end).

This would put Waterloo and Euston (and Victoria, come to that) within
easy reach of St Pancras, with only one Underground transfer required.

Er, Victoria already has a pretty decent link to St Pancras :-)

Better yet: build Cross River Transit; surface light rail between
Waterloo and King's Cross, every 90 seconds in the peaks. No need to
journey to the centre of the earth, and you get a view.

Such a link could also be extended to Euston Square Underground to make
it a proper interchange both for Euston Station and for Eurostar from the
likes of Paddington, Liverpool St, Fenchurch St, etc (although presumably
the latter two would have better Eurostar interchange at Stratford).


(And while I'm in tunnel-digging mode, why not merge Embankment and
Charing Cross Northern/Bakerloo stations into one station (on each line)
with travelators to shrink the distance/time from the existing entrances,
to save the time of an extra station stop? Or would that require an
incredible amount of underground reconstruction work?)

Ouch. Charing Cross Northern and Bakerloo platforms are miles away from
Charing Cross SET as it is, without merging them. It would make more
sense to split them back into what they used to be before the Jubilee
Line arrived - Trafalgar Square (Bakerloo) and Strand (Northern). The
Bakerloo platforms are certainly more suited to Trafalgar Square than
Charing Cross. After all, Embankment used to be called Charing Cross...

--
Dave Arquati
Imperial College, SW7
www.alwaystouchout.com - Transport projects in London