On Wed, 26 Mar 2008, Andy wrote:

On Mar 26, 6:53*pm, Tom Anderson wrote:
On Tue, 25 Mar 2008, Mr Thant wrote:
On 25 Mar, 23:49, Tom Anderson wrote:

The Jubilee?

To Docklands. AIUI the Jubilee between London Bridge and North
Greenwich is already one of the most congested bits of the network.

Right. And how is Crossrail going to relieve that? By letting people on
the North Kent line from east of Abbey Wood change there? That's not
exactly a huge fraction of the Jubilee's passengers, is it? And don't they
already have the option to do Greenwich - Docklands by DLR? Not that
that's exactly a high-capacity route itself.

There will also be the East London Line extension feeding passengers in
at Whitechapel. These passengers who would currently goto London Bridge
for the Jubilee line.

Oh, i see. So, Kent - New Cross Gate - Whitechapel - Canary Wharf?
They'll make two changes and a sort of spiral round Docklands?

True. All of which could be done without the tunnel, for a fraction of the
price.

And without increasing any capacity from the termini to where people
work/shop/go out/etc, which is the whole point of the current iteration
of the project.

Entirely agreed. But the point i was making in the text that's been
snipped is that the Crossrail project doesn't deliver significant
increases in capacity outside central London, and none that couldn't be
provided much more cheaply.

But it is the central London section that needs the capacity, as the
Underground can not distribute passengers arriving from the mainline.
How much cheaper would it be to provide the extra capacity across London
without the joining the lines to the west and east? Passengers taken
off, for example, the Central line at Liverpool Street / Stratford will
give more capacity for passengers from the West Anglia lines.

Absolutely. Sorry that i haven't really made myself clear about all this -
i think Crossrail's a good idea (although not as good an idea as some
other options which were dismissed - but that's another story), i just
think it's misleading to say it'll increase capacity on the lines it's
assimilating.

Again, could be done without the tunnel.

And where do you plan to build the extra platforms at Paddington and
Liverpool Street?

Liverpool Street isn't limited by platform capacity, it's limited by
capacity through the station throat. Rebuilding that is entirely
possible, although of course not trivial. I don't know about
Paddington, i have to confess. But since all we're talking about is
lengthening trains, why do we need more platforms?

Paddington has at least three platforms that are of limited length
(12-14, plus 11 which shares the country end track with the entrance to
platform 12). If you lengthen the trains to 8 or 10 coaches, I don't
think that any of these platforms can cope. Liverpool Street also
suffers from some of the same problems, with platforms 16-18 limited to
8 coaches. At both locations, the trains serving these platforms will be
the ones sent down the crossrail tunnels.

Right. Problems which could be solved without recourse to a tunnel.

Do we know how much of the budget is for this? My understanding was that
Oxford Circus wasn't going to be rebuilt; the Crossrail station would be
essentialy separate. It thus has a slightly marginal effect on
overcrowding - the people relieved onto Crossrail will no longer be
clogging the place up, but plenty of other people will. No idea about TCR.

Slightly marginal? The two Crossrail stations adjacent to Oxford Circus
will have enormous entrances at the ends nearest to it, exactly to
attract the crowds away without overcrowding the actual Oxford Circus
area. In theory at least they're hoping to attract away a lot more
passengers.

If you're going into Oxford Circus to get on the Victoria line, this isn't
going to make any difference whatsoever. The new bit being added, however
enormous, will only decongest the existing station to the extent that they
can abstract passengers away from the Central line.

The difference in getting to the Victoria line is that it will be easier
to enter the station.

Yes, yes, but the extent to which it does that is only the extent to which
you take passengers off the Central, that's what i'm saying.

It will also mean that Oxford Circus doesn't need to be expensively
rebuilt to add capacity for entrance / exit.

It might. It probably will still need it!

tom

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