Tom Anderson wrote:

On Tue, 10 Oct 2006, Mizter T wrote:

Tom Anderson wrote:

(snip)

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!


Thanking you kindly for your 'executive summary' of the situation -
it's really not something I'm au fait with. Thee is, I understand, a
report on this issue that I'll try and track down and take a look at
sometime.

TOT - just noticed what an odd word freight is, no "i before e except
after c" rule for this rebel rule-breaker. I think I should go to bed!


(snip question re viaduct stub)

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!


Like a very short version of the NYC High Line...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Line
http://www.thehighline.org/

....that'd be a great idea. Though if it ever happened I'd be glad it
was so short - as the rest of the trackbed would be in daily use as a
railway!