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Old March 22nd 06, 08:45 PM posted to uk.railway,uk.transport.london
MIG MIG is offline
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First recorded activity at LondonBanter: Jun 2004
Posts: 3,154
Default Alternative/short-term solution for Thameslink at London Bridge


Peter Masson wrote:
"MIG" wrote

One frequent cause of delays is not so much the busyness of the
two-track section, but the fact that trains heading for platform B at
Waterloo East, and occasional Thameslink trains, get trapped in the
bottleneck by trains coming from Platform C at Waterloo East.

The fact that this happens so often means that the section can't really
be at capacity in terms of moving trains that could fit through, but
any solution I can think of, like pairing by direction through Waterloo
East, would cause horrible crossing movements between there and Charing
Cross instead. Maybe any flyover should be near Jubilee Gardens
instead?

This sounds as though the signallers at London Bridge are, perhaps, not
quite as clever as they might be. There are two crossovers at Metropolitan
Junction, a signal block apart, so if a train for platform B will conflict
with a down train at the first one it can cross behind it at the second. Of
course, if everything is running precisely to time, the WTT is based on
parallel working, so that a train for platform B passes one from platform A
at Metropolitan Junction, while trains to/from platforms D/C also pass at
Met Jn. If necessary, there's another crossover at Belvedere Road, between
Waterloo East and Hungerford Bridge, and for an up train to be replatformed
at Waterloo East is one of the few cases anywhere that replatforming won't
inconvenience passengers.



This very morning, I came out of the Borough Market bottleneck exactly
as a train from platform C went in, and appeared to be heading for
platform D.

Instead of which we just waited for a long time a bit further on for
the second crossover, while at least one other train eventually went
past the other way, and eventually crossed to platform B. I don't know
why we didn't just stay on to platform D, which must have been fairly
clear. Seemed like snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

But anyway, continuous movement from London Bridge to Waterloo is rare
in my experience, despite the bottleneck being at the beginning of it.