Sorry, I didn't respond to your second point in my first reply, hence
this second reply!

On 28 Mar, 14:22, Andy wrote:

On Mar 28, 12:54 pm, Mizter T wrote:

(snip)

I don't think it likely that Thameslink passengers from the south will
pass through London Bridge and go up to Farringdon for Crossrail
rather than changing to the Jubilee from London Bridge, though this
will certainly look like a good move for those coming from the
Wimbledon/Sutton loop (or other similar south London suburban start
points if the Thameslink service gets rejigged). Even if the
interchange at Farringdon is very easy,

(Apols - it appears I never finished my sentence above! I'll leave it
hanging - you get the gist.)


I wasn't really thinking of the Thameslink passengers from the
Brighton / Croydon - London mainline, who as you say have
alternatives. I was thinking of the Wimbledon / Sutton loop (or
wherever in the future) passengers. Farringdon is only be a few
minutes from Blackfriars and connections will certainly be easier to
Docklands than they currently for the non London Bridge Thameslink
passengers.


That's all very true. At the moment there really isn't a decent route
for such passengers - alight at Elephant & Castle then crammed
Northern line to London Bridge and change to the Jubilee is the most
obvious I suppose. Other more imaginative routes could involve walking
from Blackfriars to Bank for the DLR, though if you were to do that
you might as well walk (or even get the bus against the flow) from
Blackfriars to Southwark station (Jubilee), or walk or bus it from E&C
to Southwark.

Depending upon what happens to the Thameslink service pattern in south
London it could even take some of the strain off of the Northern and
Jubilee lines, other mainline services into London Bridge and
generally relieve London Bridge somewhat as an interchange point by
diverting Docklands-bound commuters up to Farringdon for interchange
with Crossrail.

On Thu, 27 Mar 2008, lonelytraveller wrote:

But Crossrail includes 8 underground stations, most with two entrances
(doubling many of the costs), the rebuilding of several miles of Great
Western Main Line including two grade-separated junctions (Heathrow and
Acton Yard), the electrification of 11 miles of GWML (requiring the
rebuilding of about ten bridges in Slough), rebuilding a of a fair bit
of GEML, rebuilding of ca. 30 stations (about half will be completely
demolished) and so on. It's a much larger project.

Yes, so they could reduce the costs by doing it at tube guage,

AIUI, doesn't make as big a difference as you think these days.

and having single entrances for the stations,

Which would then be bottlenecks.

and raising the level it runs at through farringdon so that they can
re-use the tracks for the moorgate branch of thameslink.

Which would involve two more phenomenally expensive portals.

tom

--
Change happens with ball-flattening speed. -- Thomas Edison

On Thu, 27 Mar 2008, lonelytraveller wrote:

On Mar 25, 9:53 am, "Grumpy Old Man"
wrote:
The Real Doctor wrote:

On 24 Mar, 23:10, Adrian wrote:

You have clearly never lived in a city where good spacious (1,000 sq
ft per person) affordable housing is available to middle class
workers. Or, enjoyed one where a normal comfortable journey to work
is 40 minutes or less.

And how many people do you think will find good, spacious, affordable
housing as a result of this line. It'll knock quarter of an hour,
tops, off the journey onto London - are those fifteen minutes really
deterring millions from moving to good, spacious, affordable housing?

The only way to get good, spacious, affordable housing in Britain is to have a
smaller population. It's gone up 50% in the past hundred years.

The housing crisis is more about the fact that everyone wants to live in
their own home now, while before people were content to have their
entire family live in the upstairs floor of a standard victorian terrace
house.

I don't think that's true. I don't remember people living like that in the
80s, when we didn't have a housing crisis. My understanding is that it's
largely about people leaving home earlier, and getting married later (and
less, and divorced more), which increases the ratio of households to
people, and so drives up demand for housing, and thus its price.

The advent of buy-to-let hasn't helped, particularly in hotspots like
London, where a fair chunk of the supply of housing has been taken off the
market and transferred to the rental market. Hence why rents are now 'so
cheap', as people, who are conspicuously not paying my rent, tell me.

tom

--
Change happens with ball-flattening speed. -- Thomas Edison

On Fri, 28 Mar 2008, John Rowland wrote:

Tom Anderson wrote:

And there's quite a few more trains west of Paddington planned, which
would require platforms Paddington doesn't have.

Okay, i thought it was path-for-path. There will be more actual trains
under Crossrail?

There have to be. Extending the line makes the existing line desirable
to more punters - if it didn't, there would be little point in extending
the line in question.

If the trains were longer, that would do it, though, wouldn't it?

tom

--
Change happens with ball-flattening speed. -- Thomas Edison

"Mizter T" wrote in message
...

Depending upon what happens to the Thameslink service pattern in south
London it could even take some of the strain off of the Northern and
Jubilee lines, other mainline services into London Bridge and
generally relieve London Bridge somewhat as an interchange point by
diverting Docklands-bound commuters up to Farringdon for interchange
with Crossrail.

At the risk of going off at a slight tangent, are Thameslink services on the
Wimbledon loop constrained currently by the single platform and
bidirectional working at Wimbledon? Given the eventual proposed Thameslink
frequencies, will the decision to give a platform over to Tramlink come to
be regretted ?

Paul S

On Fri, 28 Mar 2008, Mr Thant wrote:

On 28 Mar, 00:06, Tom Anderson wrote:

I'm very slightly dubious about this. Where are the trains run using this
capacity going to run to? More trains on the GE fasts? More WA trains?

West Anglia:

"On the Great Eastern route, it has been assumed that a 6 tph service
would operate in the peak period between Gidea Park and Liverpool
Street. On the West Anglia route via Hackney Downs, an additional 6 tph
are assumed to operate following the opening of Crossrail. "

http://billdocuments.crossrail.co.uk...%20Pattern.pdf

Okay, lovely. Despite having used it for a year, the WA route is one i
don't have a good feeling for flows on. It certainlty looks like an
underexploited route to me. More trains, hurrah!

And the first lot of trains mean a net increase in service on the
Shenfield route.

"4.2 However, for the purposes of planning, it has been assumed that
Crossrail would release paths on both the Great Eastern and West Anglia
routes into Liverpool Street."

I'd like to hear more about this assumption, i have to say. On the West
Anglia, fine, but i'm simply skeptical about the possibility of running
more trains in total over the GE route.

Okay, i thought it was path-for-path. There will be more actual trains
under Crossrail?

Interesting question. I think the peak provision remains the same but
they'll be running more trains off peak. Sounds like it shouldn't be a
problem, but AIUI due to freight and the platforms at Paddington being
taken up by intercity services which are busy all day, there's not
capacity to run it at the moment.

And yet there is in the peaks? Freight might run mostly off-peak, but the
density of it just isn't high enough to have that effect.

I suppose in the peaks, you have some leeway for things going wrong and
running late, because the peak only lasts a few hours, and you can sort of
overspill, if that makes any sense.

Is TLnK getting Victoria trains? I haven't been keeping up, i have to
confess.

Not directly, but Victoria and London Bridge/Blackfriars serve a lot
of the same places.

Right, got it.

tom

--
Change happens with ball-flattening speed. -- Thomas Edison

On Thu, 27 Mar 2008, Andy wrote:

On Mar 27, 11:59*pm, Tom Anderson wrote:
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:

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.

But can we agree that it will provide extra capacity at the terminii
where the current trains will be removed? On top of any possible
increase in the lines that it serves directly.

Yes.

But i'm still going to maintain that it's capacity that can't be used,
because the bottleneck is not the terminal capacity!

Unless you mean capacity for passengers rather than trains, in which case
you're quite right.

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.

But at what proportion of the cost?

At what proportion of umpty-billion pounds? A pretty small one.

To add a double track railway junction at each end of the Crossrail
tunnels is considerable easier than fitting extra platforms / new
layouts into the existing sites. The junctions can be placed where there
is room without the expense of buying the land etc. You only need to
look at the costs that seem to be involved in adding just one platform
at King's Cross. The point is that the extra capacity is needed in
central London and this can only be provided by building a tunnel.

The capacity increase is going to come from longer, not more, trains.
Extra platforms or whatever would not be needed; existing ones would need
to be extended. This is not free, but it's also not expensive, at least on
the Crossrail scheme of things.

I would certainly agree that if you are going to build a
cross-central-London tunnel, you should connect it to some routes outside
the centre, though. I'm not arguing for a Paddington-to-Liverpool Street
mini-Crossrail. I'm just saying that the capacity increase outside the
centre of London will be small, and nothing that couldn't be achieved much
more cheaply without Crossrail.

tom

--
Change happens with ball-flattening speed. -- Thomas Edison

On 28 Mar, 15:56, Tom Anderson wrote:
I'd like to hear more about this assumption, i have to say. On the West
Anglia, fine, but i'm simply skeptical about the possibility of running
more trains in total over the GE route.

On the GE freight runs on the fast lines, so the Shenfield Metro has
dedicated track for most of its length, the only limit being at the
Liverpool Street end. Which means you could send some of the trains
somewhere else when they get to London, like say a great big tunnel,
you're onto a winner.

And yet there is in the peaks? Freight might run mostly off-peak, but the
density of it just isn't high enough to have that effect.

To be honest I'm only assuming Crossrail is going to increase the
overall number of trains because they're spending a lot of money
rebuilding big bits of the GWML further west. Need to do some more
reading.

U

--
http://londonconnections.blogspot.com/
A blog about transport projects in London

On Mar 28, 3:50*pm, "Paul Scott"
wrote:
"Mizter T" wrote in message

...

Depending upon what happens to the Thameslink service pattern in south
London it could even take some of the strain off of the Northern and
Jubilee lines, other mainline services into London Bridge and
generally relieve London Bridge somewhat as an interchange point by
diverting Docklands-bound commuters up to Farringdon for interchange
with Crossrail.

At the risk of going off at a slight tangent, are Thameslink services on the
Wimbledon loop constrained currently by the single platform and
bidirectional working at Wimbledon? Given the eventual proposed Thameslink
frequencies, will the decision to give a platform over to Tramlink come to
be regretted ?

Paul S

I think that there are constrained from getting much more frequent on
the Wimbledon to Sutton bit, due to the single platform. From memory,
services are approximately every 30 minutes around the loop in each
direction (even during the peak hours), giving 4 trains per hour
through the single platform. I suppose that the frequency could be
increased, but probably not to much more than every 15 minutes in each
direction without affecting reliability and pathing.

However (and I don't know if this is planned), there is the
terminating track at the north end of the platform where the Tramlink
platform is. This would allow a greater frequency on the Wimbledon -
Tooting - Thameslink route. There are a couple of trains that use this
already during the peak shoulders.

Tom Anderson wrote:
On Thu, 27 Mar 2008, lonelytraveller wrote:

On Mar 25, 9:53 am, "Grumpy Old Man"
wrote:
The Real Doctor wrote:

On 24 Mar, 23:10, Adrian wrote:

You have clearly never lived in a city where good spacious (1,000 sq
ft per person) affordable housing is available to middle class
workers. Or, enjoyed one where a normal comfortable journey to work
is 40 minutes or less.

And how many people do you think will find good, spacious, affordable
housing as a result of this line. It'll knock quarter of an hour,
tops, off the journey onto London - are those fifteen minutes really
deterring millions from moving to good, spacious, affordable housing?

The only way to get good, spacious, affordable housing in Britain is to have a
smaller population. It's gone up 50% in the past hundred years.

The housing crisis is more about the fact that everyone wants to live in
their own home now, while before people were content to have their
entire family live in the upstairs floor of a standard victorian terrace
house.

I don't think that's true. I don't remember people living like that in the
80s, when we didn't have a housing crisis. My understanding is that it's
largely about people leaving home earlier, and getting married later (and
less, and divorced more), which increases the ratio of households to
people, and so drives up demand for housing, and thus its price.

The fact that the population is rising has an effect, too.


The advent of buy-to-let hasn't helped, particularly in hotspots like
London, where a fair chunk of the supply of housing has been taken off the
market and transferred to the rental market. Hence why rents are now 'so
cheap', as people, who are conspicuously not paying my rent, tell me.

But the homes are still inhabited, the only difference is they pay rent instead
of the mortgage.