On Mon, 21 Feb 2005, Jack Taylor wrote:

"Peter Masson" wrote in message
...

How much use is made of the West Ealing - Greenford line by freight,
or ecs workings (e.g to turn), and is this use sufficient to preclude
conversion to tube or tram?

OTOH the line is so short, so why not retain one bidirectional line for
heavy rail and convert the other for bidirectional light rail use?

Or Central Line use.

If there were enough passing loops, this would work. According to my
calculations, if loops are spaced t minutes apart, you can run trains in
each direction at intervals of 2t; i believe the Ealing Broadway branch of
the Central has trains every 6 minutes, which would mean having passing
loops every 3 minutes. The stations on this line are 2-3 min apart, so
there would simply need to be a passing loop at each: you could annexe a
bit of the running track at South Greenford, some of the a school
playground at Castle Bar Park, and part of a tennis club or something at
Drayton Green. The loss of green space would be unfortunate, but it's
compensated by the provision of tube access to Epping Forest [1]. Some of
those bits of line might be in cuttings, in which case you could build the
loop in a cut-and-cover tunnel, so it's not as bad as all that.

Anyway, all fine in theory, but it'd probably be a nightmare making this
work reliably.

tom

[1] Joke.

--
Can we fix it? Yes we can!