On Sat, 04 Aug 2007 04:39:39 -0700, sweek
wrote:

Well, Crossrail will be serving quite a few of the communities along
or near Uxbridge Road, which should help with the bus traffic in that
area. I wonder if it's possible to turn West Drayton - Uxbridge into
an extra Crossrail Branch to serve Uxbridge as well? Or maybe a feeder
shuttle train.

Well there will be no additions to Crossrail such as you suggest simply
because it would cause more uncertainty and risk delaying it even
further. To get the money out of private hands you need certainty. I
think people are reading "between the lines" and probably will not be
shocked if there was an extension to Reading but that's largely an
electrification task now that the government has funded the remodelling
of Reading and there is space for a nice EMU depot in the triangle
beyond Reading.

Given that Germany and France have no issues with both RER / S Bahn
lines *and* trams running in similar corridors I wonder why we have to
trade such things in the UK? I personally don't see Crossrail as a
local replacement on a very high use corridor between Ealing and
Uxbridge.

The Uxbridge Road corridor is not dissimilar to the A11 corridor in East
London - there you have Great Eastern trains, the Central Line and an
intensive service on route 25 with supplementary services on the 205 and
86 and yet all modes are very busy. Really the 25 bus could quite easily
be replaced by a tram service as that sort of capacity is really needed.
People travel long distances on the 25 even though logic would dictate
travel by rail would be more effective. The same happens in West London
with the 207s being busy, so is the 607 Express (one of very few such
London services) plus the 427 on the Western Section. You have FGW,
Heathrow Connect plus the District, Central and Piccadilly Line
providing a form of parallel rail service. Again many of these are busy
services.

The local train service, while not as frequent as Crossrail will
probably be, is not as busy as the bus corridor and the stations are
awkwardly located. There are no proposals to add stations as that would
increase running times overall and mean more trains were needed. There
might also be a reduction in overall capacity on Western Crossrail
services which have to pander to the "must get into London fast"
inclinations of both Heathrow travellers and people from Slough and
Maidenhead. I'd argue the transport demand of that part of West London
is such that it could easily support Crossrail and WLT. Still Ken might
have the last laugh and put in nice long articulated Trolleybuses with
loads of priority measures - I wonder if Ealing residents would be happy
then?
--
Paul C


Admits to working for London Underground!