Tim Roll-Pickering:
I thought when Mill Hill East was opened the Northern Heights plan was
still officially an option, albeit on hold, and Mill Hill East was just
seen as bringing forward part of the plan because of the war.

My understanding it that it wasn't just "an option", but a definite plan,
albeit on hold.
--
Mark Brader "Sixty years old and still pulling a train!
Toronto That's more than I can say about most
people I know." -- Frimbo

In message , Mark Brader
writes

( the Aldwych Theatre train):

It was then altered to start at Strand (Aldwych), at 11:13 pm (later
11:28). From 1908 it called at all stations. [RTTC2] I don't see
anything to say when it stopped running.

End of 1908, according to Croome's monograph on the Piccadilly line

Not altogether surprising, though - Aldwych is right on the far easterly
corner of "theatreland", so Covent Garden, Leicester Square or TCR have
always been more convenient for the majority of theatre-goers.

--
Paul Terry

On Tue, 4 Apr 2006, MIG wrote:

Peter Smyth wrote:

According to the Hendon Times, Mill Hill East services will be reduced
to a shuttle to Finchley Central off-peak and weekends from October
2006.

And closure following closely no doubt. Yet another service reduction
disguised as "reliability", even though for the time being there will
still be through services at the busiest and potentially most
problematic times. Why don't they genuinely improve reliability by
doubling the track?

Ooh, i know this one - because it would cost a fortune.

tom

--
The revolution is here. Get against the wall, sunshine. -- Mike Froggatt

On Tue, 4 Apr 2006, Aidan Stanger wrote:

John B wrote:

MIG wrote:

Peter Smyth wrote:

According to the Hendon Times, Mill Hill East services will be
reduced to a shuttle to Finchley Central off-peak and weekends from
October 2006.

And closure following closely no doubt. Yet another service reduction
disguised as "reliability", even though for the time being there will
still be through services at the busiest and potentially most
problematic times.

If the result is to make a substantial reduction in total Misery Line
misery, which it should be, then it seems like a good plan...

It would be a good plan if they did it right! There's no excuse for
sticking with a pathetic 15 minute frequency. What's the advantage to
having the train waits at the terminus for most of the time???

The MHE branch doesn't go far enough to be of much use to many people,
and having some trains go to Mill Hill East does make the service less
reliable. Converting the branch into a shuttle service makes sense, but
they should double the frequency (or better still, if as you say the
main service is every 4 minutes, run the MHE train every 8 minutes).

If they could do this reliably, so that every other mainline train made a
really good connection with a shuttle, this would be excellent.

There's presumably room to throw in a passing loop halfway along the
branch; that would cost money, but be cheaper than doubling, but would
allow the frequency to be doubled, so that every mainline train could link
up with a shuttle. Making this work reliably would be a challenge, but on
such a short and lightly-loaded line, one that could be met, i imagine.

If they shortened the train length proportionally, it wouldn't even cost
any more to run.

What's the train length got to do with it? Going from 15 to 8 minutes
would be done by cutting down waiting time, not running more trains, AIUI.

The interesting thing to consider is how the MHE branch can be made more
useful in the long term. One idea I put on my website is to have it as a
branch of Crossrail Line 2, and extend it to Watford Junction via MHB,
Edgware and Stanmore.

Is that on the old Northern Heights Alignment?

This would mean that nobody in North London would have to detour to
Euston to catch a train to The North,

Er, provided they can get to the High Barnet branch of the Northern line,
and they don't want the ECML or MML!

and more passengers would be attracted to the outer ends of lines, where
there's plenty of spare capacity.

Not sure i get that bit - anyone at Watford is going to catch a fast train
to Euston, not sit on a tube train that stops at a dozen places on the
way.

Does anyone else have any other ideas for it?

Extend the parkland walk .

The trouble with resurrecting the Northern Heights plan is the green belt;
the intention was always to drive development of new suburbs in the north,
as the Met did for Metroland, but post-WW2 planning policy has put the
kybosh on that. If the illustrious Mr Prescott or his successor waves a
wand and lets the golf courses and subsidy sinks of Bushey be buried under
an avalanche of Barratt boxes, this plan might regain wings.

However, linking it to the ELL would be folly, IMHO; better would be to
link it to the GN electrics from Finsbury Park to Moorgate. A graded
junction at Moorgate would allow this to be done without conflicting with
mainline traffic to KX; the branch to Moorgate itself might need some
upgrading to cope, but the frequency would be well within the capability
of modern (ie early 20th century signalling systems). Of course, this all
comes to pass anyway under my glorious plan to drive the tunnel further
south from Moorgate, under the Bank and the Thames, to link up with the
lines at London Bridge ...

tom

--
The revolution is here. Get against the wall, sunshine. -- Mike Froggatt

In article ,
Aidan Stanger wrote:
ISTR passenger timetables are not printed for the Northern Line!

I think that the MHE branch has a timetable publically available.

A timetable exists - and is printed - for the whole line, but that's
a pedantic point.

--
"Get your head out of there or I'll fart"
-- things you don't want to hear in bed, #12

"Patrick" writes:
I think this is a classic case of even though the numbers make sense,
they don't take account of people's mental processes. A through
journey is ALWAYS going to be more attractive than a journey where you
have to change, and if the idea is to get people out of their cars, you
have to make the system as attractive as possible.

Indeed. Here in Toronto, the TTC now explicitly takes this factor into
account when planning route changes. In this annual planning document
(archived on a fan site)

http://transit.toronto.on.ca/archives/reports/2005.pdf

you will find this weighting table on page 9:

each minute of in-vehicle travelling time 1.0
each minute of waiting time 1.5
each minute of walking time 2.0
each transfer 10.0

And I think the TTC has it right. (I just wish they'd followed the same
principles in 1966, but that's another story and off-topic for this group.)

I don't live in London, and I've been on the Mill Hill East branch exactly
once, so I don't presume to say what the Underground should do with it --
but I do say that total trip time and operational convenience are not the
only things they should have been thinking about.
--
Mark Brader, Toronto | "It's been proven. Places stay clean until somebody
| drops the first piece of litter." -- TTC poster

My text in this article is in the public domain.

MIG wrote:
John B wrote:
Kev wrote:
This does sound like the thin end of the wedge. Ask people who used to
use the Watford Junc to Broad St (Liverpool St) and Watford to Croxley
service what they think of this.

OK, so in the first case a poor frequency service has been replaced
partly with the current NLL clockface 4tph timetable (set for further
improvements under TfL Rail) and will be replaced further with the ELLX
between Dalston and Shoreditch. In the second case, the link is set to
be rebuilt with more useful connections.

During London's decades of stagnation and decline, many useful rail
links were short-sightedly destroyed. The ideological antipathy of a
progression of governments and transport ministers towards public
transport didn't help matters.

However, it's now clear that the default mode for public transport in
London is one of expansion not contraction. Since Mill Hill East isn't
an Aldwych or an Ongar but somewhere with decent loadings, it would
therefore be hard to see why anyone would choose to close it...


But once it loses the through service it will have poor loadings.
Aldwych is right in the centre of London, but that didn't save it. I
don't suppose for a moment it would have closed if it had a through
service (or why not close Temple, St Pauls or Chancery Lane?).

Not sure of the logic here - St Paul's and Chancery Lane are extremely
busy during the week.

Roding Valley, Chigwell and Grange Hill are still open, despite having
much poorer demand (only about enough to support a bus service, let
alone rail).

Mill Hill East annual entry + exit: 0.875m (~1500 weekday entries)
c.f. Chigwell: 0.19m (~400 weekday entries)
or Chancery Lane: 11.326m (~20,000 weekday entries)
or Temple: 6.659m (~11,850 weekday entries)

--
Dave Arquati
Imperial College, SW7
www.alwaystouchout.com - Transport projects in London

Ian Jelf wrote:
In message .com, John
B writes
Well, it closed because it wasn't very well-used and needed its lifts
replacing with ones that met modern safety standards at a cost of
£millions.

I'd qualify that by saying that Aldwych would have had much higher
loadings if services from it had gone somewhere more useful than just
Holborn (possibly even if train had continued North of Holborn as the
celebrated "Theatre Specials" did in the very earliest days of the
Piccadilly). If Aldwych station had been on an east-West line between
stations at Charing Cross and Ludgate Circus then it would have been a
much busier place, dealing with large numbers of commuters in the week
and taking much-needed pressure off Covent Garden.

As it was, the station was - as has been said elsewhere of very little
use. I always regret this as I seem to spend an inordinate amount of my
life going to and from the Aldwych / Strand area but seldom from
anywhere where the branch would ever have been useful and I suspect I'm
not alone.......

I occasionally have cause to go from the western Central line to the
area around Aldwych, but the frequency of the shuttle would have to be
pretty high to make it quicker than just walking from Holborn - the walk
is only a little over five minutes, so I'd need an average wait of less
than about 3-4 minutes along with a 1-2 minute journey time for it to be
tempting (and that excludes the time it would take to exit using the
lifts at Aldwych rather than the escalators at Holborn).

The branch seems to be at its most useful now - as a film set. It
probably gains far more revenue for LU in its current job than it ever
did as a passenger branch.

--
Dave Arquati
Imperial College, SW7
www.alwaystouchout.com - Transport projects in London

"Dave Arquati" wrote in message


The branch seems to be at its most useful now - as a film set. It
probably gains far more revenue for LU in its current job than it ever
did as a passenger branch.

What an excellent point, which had never occurred to me!

MIG wrote:
Dave Arquati wrote:
MIG wrote:
John B wrote:
Kev wrote:
This does sound like the thin end of the wedge. Ask people who used to
use the Watford Junc to Broad St (Liverpool St) and Watford to Croxley
service what they think of this.

OK, so in the first case a poor frequency service has been replaced
partly with the current NLL clockface 4tph timetable (set for further
improvements under TfL Rail) and will be replaced further with the ELLX
between Dalston and Shoreditch. In the second case, the link is set to
be rebuilt with more useful connections.

During London's decades of stagnation and decline, many useful rail
links were short-sightedly destroyed. The ideological antipathy of a
progression of governments and transport ministers towards public
transport didn't help matters.

However, it's now clear that the default mode for public transport in
London is one of expansion not contraction. Since Mill Hill East isn't
an Aldwych or an Ongar but somewhere with decent loadings, it would
therefore be hard to see why anyone would choose to close it...

But once it loses the through service it will have poor loadings.
Aldwych is right in the centre of London, but that didn't save it. I
don't suppose for a moment it would have closed if it had a through
service (or why not close Temple, St Pauls or Chancery Lane?).
Not sure of the logic here - St Paul's and Chancery Lane are extremely
busy during the week.


I was mentioning non-interchange stations that have a through service,
in the same general area as Aldwych, which didn't, and wasn't as busy.
I'm suggesting that the lack of through service reduced demand for
Aldwych rather than its location.

As other posters have suggested, Aldwych was probably doomed from its
birth. If Aldwych were reopened today with through services to
Cockfosters (which in itself is physically difficult), I think demand
would still be poor for two reasons:
1. The frequency with which Aldwych could be served would be limited by
capacity considerations on the rest of the line (it's not as though you
can just slot extra trains in the timetable between Holborn and Arnos
Grove, and the existing trains are busy with people heading to and from
places like Piccadilly Circus). In turn, sending trains to Aldwych would
pose reliability problems.
2. Even if served by a relatively high frequency, it's just too near
other Piccadilly stations to be particularly useful - even Holborn is
only a few minutes' walk away, and Covent Garden is much more useful for
the key theatre-going market.

The first of these applies equally to Mill Hill East, particularly from
a reliability point of view. The second does not.

Roding Valley, Chigwell and Grange Hill are still open, despite having
much poorer demand (only about enough to support a bus service, let
alone rail).


At least partly because they are a pain to get to by train, either a
long way round (and infrequently) via Hainault or changing at Woodford.
If some expensive repairs cropped up which no one was keen to fund, I
suspect that the line would be under threat.

Demand at those stations is surely limited by local geography rather
than frequency - there are so few people living in their catchment areas
(at least on foot). Even if a high-frequency through service were
provided, it would probably be carting around air. The only way
significant demand increases might occur would be through park-and-ride,
and even then there are other equally suitable stations either south of
Hainault or on the main Epping route.

This would also seem to be a major consideration at Mill Hill East - low
population density around the station severely limits demand, and even
park-and-ride (or bus feeder) demand would probably be limited to
passengers from quite nearby because of the poor road connectivity of
the area.

--
Dave Arquati
Imperial College, SW7
www.alwaystouchout.com - Transport projects in London