Re the confusion of Crossrail as an inner or outer service & The
Central/District/Piccadilly western branches:

Just had the thought (and posted it elsewhere) that there might be
benefit from extending the Central line from Ealing to Hayes &
Halington (inner) and leaving Crossrail to do:
*Paddington, Hayes & Harlington, Heathrow
*Padding - Hayes & Harlington - West Drayton, Iver, Langley, Slough,
Burnham, Taplow, Maidenhead, Twyford, Reading.

This gives an express service from central London to Heathrow as well
as decent and simple (reliable) service pattern for the 'slow' Reading
trains. The only thing I can see which might prevent this is whether
it is practical to extend the Central line to H&H.

I've also been convinced that Crosrail isn't best placed to deal with
the Shenfield Metro. A simple 'Wimblefield' tube (via Liverpool St and
Victoria) would do better to match up the demand from the district
Wimbledon branch and the Shenfield Metro. This would relieve the
Circle line and in turn leave the the Piccadilly with just Heathrow.
The other arm of Crossrail would then be an outer Great Eastern
service (or C2C) to match up with the outer Great Western Service.

On 30 Dec 2007, 23:48, Tom Anderson wrote:
On Sun, 30 Dec 2007, Adrian the Rock wrote:
"Richard J." wrote:
Colin McKenzie wrote:

I hope the principle that Crossrail should be all-stations has been
established.

Then you'll be disappointed. The planned Crossrail timetable involves
some trains non-stopping certain stations west of Paddington in order to
leave paths for some west-of-Maidenhead FGW trains on the relief lines...

Glad to hear this - the suggestion of every train stopping at every
station to Maidenhead seemed utter madness to me too.

Firstly, it's been standard and established practice for many years
now to have separate outer and inner suburban services on major London
suburban/commuter lines. For example the Brighton lines have their
Metro and Sussex Coast services, out of KX the inners run to Welwyn
GC/Hertford N, and so on.

In many cases the underground itself provides a third group of
"ultra-inner" services.

What? No. I don't think that's true. I think LU routes are generally of
about the same extent as NR inners. The Brighton line inners you mention
end at Purley, which is in Z6, as are many (well, some) of the LU
end-of-the-lines. The ends of inners on other lines are Watford Junction,
Potters Bar, Cheshunt, and Shenfield, which are all roughly at the edge of
Z6 - they're all closer to London than Epping, i think. St Albans is a
notable exception.

Most of these don't run alongside NR routes, but obvious examples are
the District/Central lines to Ealing/Richmond/W Ruislip and the Jubilee
to Stanmore. So in effect the inner suburban services over NR are
usually the second tier, not the first.

What are the NR inners on those routes?



Colin McKenzie wrote:

(Adrian the Rock) wrote:

The other extension to Crossrail that seems fairly obvious to me is to
extend the trains currently planned to terminate at Paddington up the
former GW&GC joint line. =A0Bring the Old Oak - Northolt East line back
into proper use, rebuild the main line platforms at Greenford, making
this the first stop out of Padd, then run all-stations to Princes
Risboro and Aylesbury (some trains probably terminating at High
Wycombe). =A0But this is clearly too extensive to be sensible to include
in the initial project.

The principle of an all-stations service stands, so you'd need to give
serious thought to reallocating the Central Line tracks beyond about
Greenford...

No, because this is mixing underground and inner suburban stopping
patterns.

Inners are usually all-stops. A service to Aylesbury would be an outer.

Part of Crossrail's problem is that it tries to straddle the fence between
inners and outers, providing both a high-frequency, short-distance service
in town, and a fast long-distance service at the fringes. Well, at the
western end: the Shenfield service is a straightforward all-stops
to-roughly-the-edge-of-Z6 service. It's the attempt to go to Maidenhead
and Reading that's causing schizophrenia. The ideal solution would be for
Crossrail to go to Slough on its own pair of tracks, leaving a slow pair
for trains that run fast to Slough and stopping beyond that to Windsor,
Henley, Reading, and perhaps even Oxford, and then a fast pair for trains
that run fast to Reading and then do whatever beyond that. Sadly, we don't
have six pairs to Slough, only four.

tom

--
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets
of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a
whole galaxy of multi colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and
also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw
ether and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all this for the trip,
but once you get locked in a serious drug collection, the tendency is
to push it as far as you can. -- Hunter S. Thompson, 'Fear and loathing
in Las Vegas'