On Sep 25, 11:30 am, Tom Anderson wrote:
On Tue, 25 Sep 2007, MIG wrote:
On Sep 25, 9:01 am, MIG wrote:
On Sep 25, 1:07 am, Tom Anderson wrote:
On Mon, 24 Sep 2007, Colin Rosenstiel wrote:
(Tom Anderson) wrote:
On Sun, 23 Sep 2007, Colin Rosenstiel wrote:

the aborted 9 car train experiment.

9 cars? What? Where? When? How?

The 1938 stock book I quoted from last night described the experiment
as "something that seemed like a good idea at the time" with the
implication that the author thought they were stark staring bonkers
to have tried it!

Ha! Sounds about right. Surely hardly any of the central network would
have been 9-car, so where did they think the passengers in those rear
two cars would be going?

I've been trying to make sense of it as well, and I think it must have
been a kind of overlap, ie a couple of coaches not opened between a
suburb and somewhere in the centre, and then maybe two others going out
of use at the same time, having been emptied in the first half of the
centre.

Or filled with people heading for the opposite suburb of course.

True. How much demand is there for trips from north of Golders Green to
south of Clapham? Not a lot, i'd have thought.


That's not what I meant. Two cars in use could deliver people at
stations up to Tottenham Court Road, while filling up at Euston, TCR
etc with people who would then have to stay on till a suburb.
However, this theory is scuppered by the lack of platforms in the
south.

I think the nine-car trains actually went round the Kennington loop.
Two cars would be open as Leicester Square or somewhere and then not
open doors till Golders Green (and the equivalent in the opposite
direction). Presumably two others would come into/go out of use at
Tottenham Court Road for all stations through Euston to Golders Green.

But it still doesn't make sense to me and it seems mad to even attempt
such a thing. Obviously the PIS was a lot better in those days ...

The amazing thing is that, rather than being shown to be a disaster on
the first day, it was considered successful and attempted twice.



Also, having got my head around the history of the Northern line, i'm
starting to think it was the 1930s extension from Archway up the old LNER
line to High Barnet that had the long platforms, not the 1920s bits. That
would mean that there wasn't a nine-car region in south London. In the
absence of an overlap scheme like yours (which would involve drivers
stopping trains with their cabs two cars into the tunnel!), all this could
have done is brought people from the northern suburbs down to Highgate.
Perhaps the idea was that a lot of people would want to transfer there to
the surface railway trains to Finsbury Park, which i think were still
going at that point.

Oh, or maybe it was all part of the Northern Heights plan - if the line
from Highgate to Finsbury Park had been assimilated, longer trains could
have carried on down that way. To, of all places, Moorgate! Ha!

tom

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