On Fri, 21 Sep 2007, Mizter T wrote:

On 21 Sep, 19:23, Tom Anderson wrote:
On Fri, 21 Sep 2007, Mizter T wrote:

Bear in mind that the line would have found a number of new passengers
who would have started to make use of it from Highbury & Islington
southwards when the Victoria line opened

You reckon?

People coming from the north of the Vic line would've been best taking
the BR train to Liverpool Street.

[...] the North London Line ran from Richmond to Broad Street. (A less
direct route bit I can't imagine the journey time was much different.)

So it would seem that, from 1964 at least, the GN&CR (aka the Northern
City line) would mostly been a bit of interest to local passengers.
Certainly some reports suggest it was a bit of a backwater even before
it got cut back from Finsbury Park (after all, if it'd been a crucial
link it wouldn't have been evicted from FP) - it only really came into
its own from '76 onwards, fulfilling it's originally intended purpose.

That's what i would have thought. And yet ...

What i hadn't realised is that, as John Band pointed out, there *was* a
link from the GN to the GN&CR at that time, it just wasn't the one we
have now.

Yes. What I've read suggests the setup would not have been remotely
suitable for running a proper service up to the GN though.

Evidently. Enough to put something like 8 tph through in the peaks,
though, from what Paul Terry says (depending on how long the morning peak
is!).

And... I've just remembered something else that's crucial to all this
talk, d'oh! Pre-'76 many of the GN suburban trains in fact went on from
Kings Cross to Moorgate via the widened lines

Aha! Good point.

All of which does make it a bit surprising that there were 300 people on
board at the time of the Moorgate disaster. I wonder where they'd come
from. Were other lines out that day? Did lots of people come in off buses?
Are we just completely wrong about this being a bad route?

tom

--
Formal logical proofs, and therefore programs, are *utterly
meaningless*. -- Dehnadi and Bornat