John B wrote:

MIG wrote:
Peter Smyth wrote:
According to the Hendon Times, Mill Hill East services will be reduced
to a shuttle to Finchley Central off-peak and weekends from October
2006.

http://www.hendontimes.co.uk/news/lo...3442.0.mill_hi
ll_east_tube_link_to_london_cut.php

And closure following closely no doubt. Yet another service reduction
disguised as "reliability", even though for the time being there will
still be through services at the busiest and potentially most
problematic times. Why don't they genuinely improve reliability by
doubling the track?

The service is being made less attractive so that a decline in use can
be given as an excuse to make more cuts, leading to more
unattractiveness and further decline in use.

The most reliable railway is one that runs no trains at all: none are
ever late or cancelled.

I disagree. It was planned to extend the Northern Line further, but the
reason it has no trains at all is because the entire extension was
cancelled!

I don't think this is fair.

It's uncontroversial among transport planning professionals that the
more branches a service has, the more scope there is for it to go
wrong. This is particularly pronounced in a system as complicated as
the Northern Line, where minor delays in one branch have the potential
to cause serious system-wide distruption once trains start arriving out
of timetabled order in the wrong places.

The Northern Line would be significantly more reliable if the junction
at Camden were abolished and all trains ran either Edgware - City -
Morden and High Barnet - Charing Cross - Kennington. This isn't
feasible, at least until Camden Town is rebuilt (and possibly not even
then): the station is not big enough to take the required volume of
interchanging passengers. It would also be significantly more reliable
if the signalling were replaced to allow ATO. This will happen, but not
for years.

On the other hand, the interchange at Finchley Central is easily
capable of taking the required volume of Mill Hill East passengers, and
this change can happen with immediate effect. The cost of the manoeuvre
to MHE pax is very limited: they can get a once-every-four-mins train
to Finchley, then a once-every-15-mins shuttle to MHE as-now. This
increases the average expected through journey time by about 2 minutes
(can't be bothered to do the proper maths), while providing no
reduction in service frequency.

If the result is to make a substantial reduction in total Misery Line
misery, which it should be, then it seems like a good plan...

It would be a good plan if they did it right! There's no excuse for
sticking with a pathetic 15 minute frequency. What's the advantage to
having the train waits at the terminus for most of the time???

The MHE branch doesn't go far enough to be of much use to many people,
and having some trains go to Mill Hill East does make the service less
reliable. Converting the branch into a shuttle service makes sense, but
they should double the frequency (or better still, if as you say the
main service is every 4 minutes, run the MHE train every 8 minutes). If
they shortened the train length proportionally, it wouldn't even cost
any more to run.

The interesting thing to consider is how the MHE branch can be made more
useful in the long term. One idea I put on my website is to have it as a
branch of Crossrail Line 2, and extend it to Watford Junction via MHB,
Edgware and Stanmore. This would mean that nobody in North London would
have to detour to Euston to catch a train to The North, and more
passengers would be attracted to the outer ends of lines, where there's
plenty of spare capacity. Does anyone else have any other ideas for it?

--
Aidan Stanger
http://www.bettercrossrail.co.uk