On Fri, 14 Dec 2007, lonelytraveller wrote:

On 13 Dec, 21:53, wrote:
On Thu, 13 Dec 2007 10:13:54 -0000, "Paul Scott"
wrote:

You will only ever see NLL & WLL frequency increasing incrementally,
up to 4, 6 or maybe 8 tph over overlapping sections of the line,
because it is also a goods line. When Ken talks about 'metro style
frequencies' he seems to mean better than 4 tph, which is when it is
considered (by many) that you don't need to worry about the
timetable.

Aren't they planning to eventually send the goods trains over a different
route?

As far as I remember, they wanted to send goods trains via the east
london thames crossing, and a new rail link (or, more accurately, the
resurrection of an old one) going from oxford to cambridge.

Most of the freight is coming from ports on the Essex bank of the Thames,
either in the depths of Essex at Felixstowe (probably soon to be joined by
an equally huge new container terminal at Harwich), or at the Gormandy
end, smeared along the river around Purfleet, Thurrock and Tilbury, and a
little bit further down at Coryton and another planned huge container
terminal at Shell Haven. There's also the Ripple Lane freight yard and
various work and docks in Dagenham, but i don't know how active those are
these days. Anyway, a Thames crossing isn't really relevant to any of
those ports.

There are flows from kent, from the Tunnel and from the oil terminal at
the Isle of Grain mostly. They're much smaller than the Essex flows.

You're right about a cross-country link, but it's not Oxford to Cambridge,
it's from Ipswich to Nuneaton. The tracks are there, but the route isn't
suitable for freight trains. If it was, traffic between Felixstowe and the
West Midlands (which is most of the traffic through Felixstowe) could go
that way rather than via London. There is a plan to reopen
Oxford-Cambridge, but it's not such an important freight axis.

The cross-country route doesn't do anything about traffic generated by the
ports nearer London, around Tilbury etc. One plan there is to use the
Gospel Oak - Barking line for a lot more freight, possibly even closing it
to passenger trains, i think, which would relieve the North London line
between Stratford and Gospel Oak. If you could send all through-London
freight that way, i think you could in theory run a tube-frequency service
between Stratford and Gospel Oak.

A long time ago, someone here proposed four-tracking the NLL all the way
from Stratford to Camden Road, and argued that it was a practical thing to
do. This would give you a route from the GEML and LTSR to the WCML, which
is where freight wants to go, that would be completely segregated from the
passenger tracks of the NLL. Skepticism about the possibility of the
scheme has also been expressed, though.

tom

--
The most successful people are those who are good at plan B. --
James Yorke