Paul Corfield wrote:

On 10 Oct 2006 02:56:00 -0700, "Mizter T" wrote:

Regarding your comments about Dalton's poor patronage: the ELL will
provide a more useful through link that goes south rather than stopping
at Broad Street (and for those who want the City the new Shoreditch
High St. station will be _just_ round the back of Liverpool Street
station); and in the late 70's / early 80's the demand for rail
services was fundamentally different from now - see the success of the
present-day North London Line and compare it to the ghost line it was
in the early 80's.

There are a couple of points here (happy to be corrected if my facts
aren't quite right). The NLL that exists now was two separate services
back in the late 70s. It was diesel operated out at North Woolwich and
through Hackney IIRC. You only got the third rail bit at Dalston. There
was no effective through link and the service was run with clapped out
stock with stations maintained to the lowest BR standard possible. Even
Broad Street was run in that way - it was distinctly uninviting. The GLC
spent a lot of cash on the NLL, electrified it and built / modernised
stations in Hackney. The ELLX will, from the looks of things, be a
further step change in quality and frequency. The stations and trains
will also offer far better security than the old 1980s BR services did.
The poor quality of the old services is what made them unattractive and
ELLX / Overground should reverse that in time.

The photos of Dalston Junction in the 80's on the Disused Stations
website help to illustrate your point...

http://www.subbrit.org.uk/sb-sites/s...on/index.shtml
(see the bottom of the page for a link to many more photos)