On Tue, 4 Apr 2006, Aidan Stanger wrote:

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.

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.

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 could do this reliably, so that every other mainline train made a
really good connection with a shuttle, this would be excellent.

There's presumably room to throw in a passing loop halfway along the
branch; that would cost money, but be cheaper than doubling, but would
allow the frequency to be doubled, so that every mainline train could link
up with a shuttle. Making this work reliably would be a challenge, but on
such a short and lightly-loaded line, one that could be met, i imagine.

If they shortened the train length proportionally, it wouldn't even cost
any more to run.

What's the train length got to do with it? Going from 15 to 8 minutes
would be done by cutting down waiting time, not running more trains, AIUI.

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.

Is that on the old Northern Heights Alignment?

This would mean that nobody in North London would have to detour to
Euston to catch a train to The North,

Er, provided they can get to the High Barnet branch of the Northern line,
and they don't want the ECML or MML!

and more passengers would be attracted to the outer ends of lines, where
there's plenty of spare capacity.

Not sure i get that bit - anyone at Watford is going to catch a fast train
to Euston, not sit on a tube train that stops at a dozen places on the
way.

Does anyone else have any other ideas for it?

Extend the parkland walk .

The trouble with resurrecting the Northern Heights plan is the green belt;
the intention was always to drive development of new suburbs in the north,
as the Met did for Metroland, but post-WW2 planning policy has put the
kybosh on that. If the illustrious Mr Prescott or his successor waves a
wand and lets the golf courses and subsidy sinks of Bushey be buried under
an avalanche of Barratt boxes, this plan might regain wings.

However, linking it to the ELL would be folly, IMHO; better would be to
link it to the GN electrics from Finsbury Park to Moorgate. A graded
junction at Moorgate would allow this to be done without conflicting with
mainline traffic to KX; the branch to Moorgate itself might need some
upgrading to cope, but the frequency would be well within the capability
of modern (ie early 20th century signalling systems). Of course, this all
comes to pass anyway under my glorious plan to drive the tunnel further
south from Moorgate, under the Bank and the Thames, to link up with the
lines at London Bridge ...

tom

--
The revolution is here. Get against the wall, sunshine. -- Mike Froggatt