In article ,
Tom Anderson wrote:
On Tue, 22 Feb 2005, gwr4090 wrote:

it would make a lot of sense to extend some CrossRail services to High
Wycombe instead of turning them around outside Paddington. One or two of
these per hour could run via Ealing Broadway to replace the Greenford
loop service.

Crossrail is about providing a high-frequency service on simple,
well-defined lines; if you're going to serve High Wycombe, you have to
do it properly, with more than one or two trains per hour. Perhaps you
meant sending a good frequency to High Wycombe, but only a few round the
loop?

Yes I did mean that !

Even there, i'd disagree - if you make the pattern that complex,
you lose much of the psychological strength of the project, and you make
keeping it all running to time that much harder.

Doesn't sound very complex to me ! Say two per hour via Ealing Broadway
and Drayton Park and say four per hour via Park Royal, with stops at say
Park Royal, Hanger Lane or Perivale, and Greenford. Maybe two of these
would terminate short of High Wycombe at say Beaconsfield or West Ruislip,
and would completely replace Chiltern stopping services between High
Wycombe and South Ruislip.

Not that i'm against using the loop - i'd be in favour of running all the
hypothesised Wycombe services via the loop; that way, you'd get more
trains through Ealing Broadway.

Line capacity between Ealing Broadway and West Ealing will be a
limitation. I very much doubt that more than two extra per hour could go
this way. The original plans, now shelved, involved increasing from four
to six running lines over this stretch. An alternative option would be to
run all Crossrail services via Park Royal but to send some from Greenford
East Jc via Drayton Park to terminate in a bay platform at West Ealing.

Actually, i'd be even more in favour of taking them off at Old Oak
Common, running up to Neasden on the Dudden Hill line, then sending them
along the Chiltern corridor on quadrupled tracks - then we can give the
suburban Chiltern stations a proper service and let the long-range
services run fast more easily (again, utterly nobbling freight traffic
along the way). This would be ten times more expensive, of course, for
not more than twice the benefit.

I feel there maybe be more benefit from taking over the Watford DC lines.

Sadly, Montague and other people whose job it is to think these thoughts
looked at these ideas, and concluded they weren't worth it. Oh well.

It now rather looks as though the whole Crossrail project will go forward
on the basis of the current rather limited aspirations for the western arm
- with the possible exception of extending to Reading rather than
Maidenhead (is there any news on this ?). Then once the service is
underway, there will probably be another rethink about additional western
destinations instead of turning back nearly half the trains at Paddington.

David