On Tue, 10 Oct 2006, Mizter T wrote:

Tom Anderson wrote:

On Mon, 9 Oct 2006, TheOneKEA wrote:

On Oct 9, 11:54 am, "Kev" wrote:
TheOneKEA wrote:

For that matter, how will the tracks themselves be positioned?

Funniest thing that I have read in ages, the prospect of the Eat London
Line being so busy it will need to be quadrupled.

The big London freight study a while ago did say we needed a new Thames
crossing to get freight from the Kent ports to the north without
faffing around on the south London commuter lines and the WLL; might as
well build it here as out at Tilbury (yes, i know, it'd still play
merry hell with the Dartford lines).

I think it'd be far preferable to get as much rail freight traffic as
possible on routes that avoid going through London.

Not only preferable, but absolutely necessary. There's a Felixstowe -
Nuneaton (IIRC) route that is the great white hope here; it needs various
bits of fiddling about, but would allow Felixstowe's traffic to the north,
which is rather substantial, to bypass London completely.

I've not read the freight study but an out of town link across the
Thames, such as at Tilbury, sounds good.

That doesn't help you avoid London, though - from Tilbury, it's the Goblin
or the NLL to Willesden and up north from there. It does keep trains off
the south London suburban network, though.

In fact, with stuff coming up from the channel tunnel, Thamesport and
Sheerness in Kent, and Purfleet, Tilbury and soon Shellhaven in Essex,
there's quite a lot of freight with no current way to avoid London.
Someone suggested here a while ago that it might be possible to make the
NLL four-track throughout, which would allow for a dedicated freight route
from Stratford to Willesden, which would help a lot (although getting from
the ports to Stratford is still a bottleneck). Ideally, i suppose, there'd
be a freight railway running alongside the M25 from Upminsterish to Hemel
Hempstead, to avoid London completely, but i'd say that was really rather
unlikely to come about!

Secondly, what's going to happen to the stub of viaduct south of the
junction with the answer to the first question?

Re your second question - the stub of the viaduct might contain business
premises in the arches, I don't know, I'll take a look next time I'm
around there. Presumably it could be knocked down and built on, though
I'd imagine such a redevelopment would be expensive given the difficulty
of demolition so close to the busy tracks out of Liverpool Street (look
at an aerial photo [1] to see this for yourself)

I was wondering if something could be put on top of the viaduct, which is
currently just grass. I thought it would be rather fun to have a new park
right in the middle of the City - about half the size of the HAC grounds
at Bunhill Fields, or twice the size of Finsbury Square. And up in the
air!

Oh, third question: what was on the Bishopsgate site between 1964, when i
understand it closed as a goods yard, and the time ELLX construction
started?

The Sub Brit website has several fascinating pages and photos
concerning Bishopsgate Goods Yard [4]. On it Nick Catford says:

Interesting stuff!

tom

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