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


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.


That's a good point (and a remarkably quick journey in comparison,
considering that it's going much further). Will every eurostar be stopping
at Stratford, though?

No, not all of them; I suspect stopping patterns will alternate somehow
between Stratford or Ebbsfleet.

If the Olympic bid is successful, no Eurostars would stop at Stratford
for the duration of the Olympics, to create capacity for the "Javelin"
St Pancras - Stratford - Ebbsfleet shuttle to run (with cross-platform
interchange to Eurostar at Ebbsfleet).

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

Oh, I know :-)

There's so much gubbins, they even ruled out surface works to run the
Cross River Transit along the Euston Road to reach St Pancras. Following
opposition from Somers Town residents, now it has to take a ridiculous
route via Mornington Crescent!

Would it be possible for the travelator to go at roughly the same depth,
but parallel to the Metropolitan line?

On the northern side of the Met, I think that would foul the new Western
ticket office at King's Cross. As for the southern side, I've really no
idea. The foundations of the buildings might prevent it being built at
the same level as the Metropolitan.

Oh, and there are other things like the Thameslink tunnel and the
various other old railway tunnels (which aren't very deep) like the
Hotel Curve and the Maiden Lane Curve.

(I'm presuming all the other 'deep tube' lines are indeed, somewhere
deeper at this point - it must be quite a job for someone just keeping
accurate tabs on what, exactly, is all down there, and where exactly
they all are!)

Some of them aren't that deep. Victoria is closest to the surface,
Piccadilly is just underneath, and Northern is just underneath that.
However, all of them are over to the eastern side of the overground
station and the tube ticket hall.

(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).


Obviously you would have escalators rather than trekking (although I
agree it might be somewhat bizarre to go all the way down an escalator
only to have to pretty much immediately go up another one ;-)

For example, taking the tube from Marylebone to Baker Street and
changing to a subsurface line (takes longer than just walking to Baker
St!). Escalators aren't very quick unless you walk up and down them...

Maybe you could have a little funicular or rack-and-pinion railway
shuttle (flog it as a tourist attraction between train times ;-), but
this would start adding even more expensive to a possibly ridiculous
project and loses the continuous flow advantages of the
travelators/escalators :-)

Actually that sounds quite fun.

Alternatively, suspend a travelator above to Euston Road in a
transparent enclosed tube, and give it an interesting design. It would
be especially fun if it were some sort of spiral travelator that takes
you from ground level up to, say, the third storey and back down 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 :-)

I know, I was just thinking in terms of decreasing the number of station
stops and in trying to reduce passenger number on the stretch of
Underground between Euston and St P. However, I suspect there wouldn't
be any time savings in getting off a stop earlier and getting the
travelator direct into the international station than just continuing on
the Victoria line to St P anyway..

Well I don't know; if the travelator took you from the Victoria line
platforms at Euston, and it were reasonably fast (like that "high speed"
one at some Paris station)...

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.

That would be good. It would need to have considerable priority over
other road traffic (ie, considerable segregation) so that it wouldn't be
uncompetitively slow, though. I'm guessing the Kingsway subway features
somewhere in such plans?

The plan is to have a heavily-segregated bus and tram route along the
whole central corridor from Camden to Waterloo. Every junction would
have tram priority installed, except for the one at the Euston Road,
where the 90-second timing of the traffic lights is vital to keep
traffic on the Euston Road moving. That's the limiting factor to tram
frequency; in the peaks there would be 40tph, so departures from the
tramstops either side of the Euston Road would be managed to get them
across with the lights, and prevent bunching.

Kingsway subway does not actually feature; it's considered a bit too
restrictive for modern trams. Instead, trams would have their own lanes
on the surface, running contraflow southbound on the western side of
Aldwych.

(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.

I know, that's why I was suggesting travelators from the existing
entrances to a *new* combined station which would be pretty much
underneath Charing Cross station itself, so that the station properly
serves the mainline station but is *also* still accessible to the street
in the original locations. I know there are historical reasons, but it
just seems a little odd to have two stations (Embankment and Charing
Cross) in a relatively short distance. Some kind of unification, like
Bank-Monument, would seem to be more sensible. But it'd be extremely
expensive, for relatively little gain, so it wouldn't happen :-)

Oh, I see what you mean now. You'd make interchange between the deep
tube and subsurface lines worse though.

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...

Yeah, it's quite clear from the plans on John Rowland's site that if it
hadn't been for the Jubilee line, then they probably would still have
remained as very discrete separate stations..

But am I right in thinking that research has shown that people don't
"mind" so much the walking between parts of interchange stations?
That people regard themselves as "on the Underground" as soon as they've
passed the ticket barriers, and that a couple of minutes spent walking
(or travelating!) through the tunnels is better than the same couple of
minutes waiting impatiently on the platform for a train (ie, the feeling
that you're in control of your actions, or not) - and, in this day and
age, a useful bit of exercise, too!?

I haven't heard that research. I can understand the "on the Underground"
mentality though; that extends to finding your way to unfamiliar places
too. I met two Imperial students on the Circle line yesterday who were
on their way to High St Kensington... having walked from Imperial to
Gloucester Road and boarded there, as they didn't know the way to
Kensington High Street.

Still, I would do almost anything to avoid a change at Green Park.
(Except perhaps having to use the Circle line; then it's a case of
balancing the relative evils.)

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