On Wed, 5 Sep 2007, Sarah Brown wrote:

In article .com,
John B wrote:

Agreed that Finsbury Park, Oxford Circus, Euston and Stockwell are all
both good and clever.

But why didn't they go for x-platform at Green Park and Warren
Street...?

Or Kings Cross.

Indeed.

It's a particular bugbear of mine that there's really no good way for
someone arriving at Kings Cross or St Pancras to get onto the Charing
Cross Branch. Surely it wouldn't have been too hard to arrange things so
that the Victoria Line interchanged with the Bank branch at KX, and the
CX branch at Euston?

If you look at the maps on John's site:

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acro...9/ltkxplan.gif
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acro...69/ltkxiso.gif

You can see that it wouldn't have been *that* hard to provide
crossplatform interchange with the Northern line at KX. With the tunnels
swapped round as at Euston, this would be a handy way to get to the City
from the northern reaches of the Victoria; you can make this change at
Euston, but it involves going a whole two more stops!

I think Vic to CX at Euston would also have been doable, using a similar
strategy as was used for Vic to Bank: recycle the existing southbound CX
platform for the northbound Vic, and build two entirely new platforms for
the southbound CX and Vic, underneath the New Ticket Hall. Here's a map of
what was actually done:

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acro...9/lteuston.gif

Having cross platform interchange at Euston with the Bank branch seems a
whole lot less useful than what could have been done.

As Clive pointed out, one of the goals was to get people off the CX branch
and onto the Vic, so this probably made sense at the time. I still think
it was shortsighted.

tom

--
Nullius in verba