On Mon, 13 Apr 2009, John Rowland wrote:

MIG wrote:
On Apr 13, 12:43 pm, "Ian F." wrote:
"MIG" wrote in message

...

Are these the improvements that are due to resignalling but being
attributed to splitting the line in order to justify the
inconvenience caused by that, but then attributed to the signalling
as well to justify the disruption caused by the signalling work,

It always puzzles me why they think no one travelling south to north
wants to go to the West End. Often there are hundreds of people
changing at Kennington, with just a few left on the train to go to
the City.

I think that's purely because terminating at Kennington from the
Charing Cross direction is much easier operationally (from the City
requires reversing in a siding, not that that isn't done in plenty of
other places).

There's a rather nice diagram of Kennington on my site at
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acro.../stations.html
In particular, Charing Cross reversers don't have to share track with any
City trains, whereas City reversers have to share track first with Charing
Cross-Mordens and then with Morden - Charing Crosses. LUL are well aware
that the West End is much busier than the City outside the peaks, but for
fit people a cross-platform interchange is practically as good as a through
train.

I can understand why thery run most trains to Bank in the peaks - because
of the track layout, plus the lesser fact that the Bank/CX demand ratio
his higher in the peaks than off-peak.

What i don't get is why the off-peak pattern runs all through trains to
Bank, reversing *everything* from CX. There, the density of trains is much
lower, so the track issue is surely irrelevant - even with the awkward
layout, you could surely run all trains to CX, and have space to reverse
Banks? Since in the off-peak the Bank/CX demand ratio falls dramatically,
this would serve people much better.

The existence of the cross-platform interchange to the Vic at Stockwell
may be relevant here; a huge number of people coming from Morden who want
the west end change there, IME. If they're going to do that anyway, then
running trains up the CX branch is not so important.

tom

--
Information is not knowledge. -- Albert Einstein