London’s Railways– a future where the snail belongs in the garden, and eating sardines does not remind us of the Northern Line

INTRODUCTION

The scene below will be familiar to many of us:

(copyright, Getty Images)

It’s a full and standing deep tube train. It takes ages for the people to get off, and there’s a chance you won’t get on. When you do get on, you have no personal space, so heaven help you if the person next to you is playing loud music or wearing strong perfume. In short, NO FUN.

So what’s the alternative?

Well, you could go and live in an isolated farm in the country like this:

(copyright www.macwallpapers.eu)

But if we all did that, the countryside would soon look like this:

(copyright citytransport.info)

So it’s probably a good idea to build a lot of these instead:

(copyright Wikipedia)

And to a certain extent that is what we are doing. But I worry about whether our plans are strategic, or whether we are simply leaving the issues for our grandchildren to solve.

WHY THE LONDON TERMINI ARE WHERE THEY ARE

In the 1830s, Isambard Kingdom Brunel invented the railway. Not true, but he and many others sought to bring the railways to north and west London from far afield. But the railway had a point at which it could not penetrate: the New Road, what is now Old Marylebone Road, Marylebone Road, Euston Road and Pentonville Road. This was a bypass to Oxford Street and High Holborn built across fields in the late 18th century. Just as today, people had built as far as the bypass, so there was no way further into the city. A Royal Commission was set up basically preventing the building of railways in the area shaded red below:

What about going underground, you say? If you had had that idea in the 1830s, you might have been rich, as the world's first underground railway didn't open until 1863 - as it happens, underneath the New Road. So that's why the termini are where they are.

TERMINI – WHO NEEDS THEM? AND WHO DOESN’T?

In the 19th century, the termini were ‘cathedrals of steam’: they showed the companies who owned them as great entrepreneurs. Today, they act as the entry and exit points of the visitor, and there is some fantastic architecture to be seen, of which there are two examples below:

St Pancras Station, copyright BBC

The Shard from London Bridge Station

But to the daily commuter, the termini are more often than not an inconvenience: if they are heading for the City, the West End or Canary Wharf, they will need to catch another train unless they are coming into Cannon Street, Liverpool Street, Fenchurch Street or perhaps London Bridge, for the City, or Charing Cross for the West End. And remember that the daily commuter can come from as far afield as Bristol or Norwich. People in a hurry don’t want to be left at a crowded station a long way from their next train.

DIFFERENT TYPES OF TRAIN IN LONDON

Simplistically, there are three types of train:

1.  urban trains operating solely within the M25:
   
   
       Northern Line train, copyright Wikipedia
2. metro trains operating to 25 or so miles beyond the M25:
   
   
   
   
   Thameslink train, copyright Wikipedia
   
   
3. long distance trains.

East Coast Main Line train, copyright Wikipedia

I will make three assumptions now, to which I will refer in the rest of this article:

1. It’s a good idea to take long distance trains to termini, as this gives visitors a good impression of the capital. They also spend money there, in the same way people do at airports;
2. Urban trains will see only small changes in the next 50 years (such as the proposed Metropolitan extension to Watford Junction);
3.  Metro trains will see large increases in capacity in the next 50 years, as it is here that we can reduce the crowding on the urban trains, and create capacity at termini for long distance trains by diverting metro trains.

I will also set two related objectives:

1. Passengers on metro trains should not need to change at a traditional terminus: their journey should take them directly to at least one of the West End, the City and Canary Wharf;
2. Passengers on long-distance trains should be able to change at a distributor station to allow them to continue their journey on an urban or a metro train which would take them directly to at least one of the West End, the City and Canary Wharf.

WHERE WOULD DISTRIBUTOR STATIONS BE SITED?

For each terminus, I’ve looked at possibilities for a related distributor station for current long-distance services. The output is shown below:

Terminus	Distributor station
King’s Cross	Finsbury Park
St. Pancras	West Hampstead
Euston	None
Marylebone	None
Paddington	Ealing Broadway
Liverpool Street	Stratford
London Bridge/Cannon Street/Charing Cross	None
Victoria	None
Waterloo	None
Fenchurch Street	None

Looking at current expansion plans, amending them and adding in some of my own (and of others), I end up with this:

Terminus	Distributor station
King’s Cross	Finsbury Park
St. Pancras	West Hampstead/Mill Hill East
Euston	Watford Junction
Marylebone	West Hampstead
Paddington	Old Oak Common
Liverpool Street	Stratford
London Bridge/Cannon Street/Charing Cross	New Den
Victoria	Clapham Junction
Waterloo	Clapham Junction
Fenchurch Street	Limehouse

 LET'S START FROM NEXT MONTH'S TIMETABLE

Why not now? Well, next month gives us an extension of the East London Line to Clapham Junction (the bit in dark blue on the map below), and two urban trains per hour will no longer terminate at London Bridge:

So the metro and urban trains arrivals at the main line termini at peak look like this:

Terminus	Metro and urban peak hour terminating trains
King’s Cross	11
St. Pancras	0
Euston	11
Marylebone	4
Paddington	10
Liverpool Street	37
Charing Cross	15
Cannon Street	11
Victoria	23
Waterloo	33
Fenchurch Street	19
London Bridge	21
Moorgate	12

I've added in Moorgate to the list of termini above for reasons which will become clear later. But one fact is immediately obvious: there are a lot more metro and urban trains in the south and east than in the north and west (thanks to Stephen Colebourne for pointing this out). This must direct our plans to create more capacity.

COMMITTED IMPROVEMENTS 1 - THAMESLINK

The Thameslink Programme takes a line between London Bridge and King's Cross, and puts 24 trains per hour on it by 2018. The line exists now, but cannot operate at peak hours largely because of conflicting movements with trains heading to Charing Cross. Before the work started, the line could support eight trains per hour.

This is the current plan for the Thameslink service pattern:

No	South of London		North of London		Length	Times
1	Brighton	semi-fast	Bedford	semi-fast	12-car	all day
2
3	Brighton	stopping	Bedford	semi-fast	12-car	all day
4
5	Three Bridges	via Redhill	Peterborough	semi-fast	12-car	all day
6
7	Horsham		Cambridge	semi-fast	12-car	all day
8
9	East Grinstead		Bedford	semi-fast	12-car	peak only
10
11	Caterham	fast north of Norwood Junction	St. Albans	stopping	8-car	all day
12
13	Tattenham Corner		Welwyn Garden    City	stopping	8-car	all day
14
15	Tunbridge Wells	via Tonbridge	Bedford	semi-fast	12-car	peak only
16
17	Ashford International		Luton	semi-fast	12-car	peak only
18
19	Maidstone East	semi-fast via Catford	Welwyn Garden City	stopping	8-car	all day
20
21	Sevenoaks	skip-stop via Catford	Luton	stopping	8-car	all day
22
23	Bellingham	stopping via Catford	St. Albans	stopping	8-car	all day
24

So what does this do to the urban and metro terminators? Frankly, not as much as one might have hoped: some of the services don't exist today south of the river.

Terminus	Urban and metro peak hour arrivals post Thameslink	Compared to today
King’s Cross	11	-4
St. Pancras	0	0
Euston	11	0
Marylebone	4	0
Paddington	10	0
Liverpool Street	37	0
Charing Cross	13	-2
Cannon Street	7	-4
Victoria	23	0
Waterloo	33	0
Fenchurch Street	19	0
London Bridge	16	-5
Moorgate	8	-4

But a couple of things:

1) There's no benefit in reducing capacity at Cannon Street or Charing Cross, so it makes sense to switch a few London Bridge terminators there.

2) There's a project to expand the capacity between Alexandra Palace and Finsbury Park. So Moorgate's capacity won't actually change after Thameslink comes on line. So a better position is this:

Terminus	Urban and metro peak hour arrivals post Thameslink	Compared to today
King’s Cross	11	-4
St. Pancras	0	0
Euston	11	0
Marylebone	4	0
Paddington	10	0
Liverpool Street	37	0
Charing Cross	15	0
Cannon Street	11	0
Victoria	23	0
Waterloo	33	0
Fenchurch Street	19	0
London Bridge	10	-11
Moorgate	12	0

COMMITTED IMPROVEMENTS 2 - CROSSRAIL 1

Crossrail 1 is a another project due to deliver in 2018. It will link east and west London via a tunnel from Royal Oak (west of Paddington) to east of Whitechapel in the East End. The route map is shown below:

(image courtesy Wikipedia)

The objectives are multiple:

1) To give a direct route from Heathrow to the West End, the City and Canary Wharf;

2) To bring a further 1.5m people within 45 minutes' commuting distance of the central business districts above;

3) To relieve pressure on the Circle, Hammersmith & City and Central Lines.

For a start, let's look at the planned opening service pattern (or the best I can surmise):

West London	East London	Number of trains per hour
Paddington	Abbey Wood	7
Paddington	Shenfield	7
Heathrow	Abbey Wood	3
Heathrow	Shenfield	3
Maidenhead	Abbey Wood	2
Maidenhead	Shenfield	2

This may create good finance for a project, but it doesn't make sense for a number of reasons:

1) If you terminate the trains at Maidenhead, where do you put the western depot? And how do you deal with the fact that more people travel west in the morning peak than east? Terminate eastbound trains here also?
2) This terminates 14 trains at Paddington, which could euphemistically be described as "somewhat wasteful"
3) The termination of 12 trains at Abbey Wood does not make sense when a service from Gravesend could be taken over.

Added to this one can easily see the service to Canary Wharf running at capacity from day one. So let's in the first place follow the plan of the Route Utilisation Strategy (RUS):

1) extend to Reading (which probably saves money once the Great Western wiring is complete);
2) increase the Heathrow capacity to ten trains per hour;
3) move ten metro trains per hour from terminating at Euston to running across Crossrail by building a link west of Paddington.

Let's add in the RUS-suggested idea of extending to Gravesend, and we can take over four more trains per hour in the east - but this mean Crossrail having its own tracks, as the alternative would be to adapt Crossrail's trsins to run on third rail traction, which seems to be retrograde. The pattern we could end up with is:

West of London	East London	Number of trains per hour
Watford Junction + beyond	Abbey Wood	3
Watford Junction + beyond	Gravesend	2
Watford Junction + beyond	Shenfield	5
Heathrow	Abbey Wood	3
Heathrow	Gravesend	2
Heathrow	Shenfield	5
Reading	Abbey Wood	2
Reading	Shenfield	2

So what does this do to the metro and urban terminators? Again, moving the lost Cannon Street and Charing Cross terminators from London Bridge, we see this:

Terminus	Urban and metro peak hour arrivals post Thameslink & Crossrail 1	Compared to today
King’s Cross	11	-4
St. Pancras	0	0
Euston	1	-10
Marylebone	4	0
Paddington	0	-10
Liverpool Street	25	-12
Charing Cross	15	0
Cannon Street	11	0
Victoria	23	0
Waterloo	33	0
Fenchurch Street	19	0
London Bridge	6	-15
Moorgate	12	0

One of the reasons for moving the Euston urban and metro services to Crossrail 1 is to allow High Speed Two to arrive at a redeveloped Euston. But the metro services used to run via the Bakerloo line to Watford Junction, as shown below in this poster from RetroRail::

And, of course, they could again. If we were to move metro Chiltern services from Wycombe to Marylebone on to Crossrail 1 this would allow a potential expansion of long distance services into Marylebone - but that's the subject of another article. For now, let's give the final legacy of Crossrail 1 as below:

Terminus	Urban and metro peak hour arrivals post Thameslink & Crossrail 1	Compared to today
King’s Cross	11	-4
St. Pancras	0	0
Euston	0	-11
Marylebone	0	-4
Paddington	0	-10
Liverpool Street	25	-12
Charing Cross	15	0
Cannon Street	11	0
Victoria	23	0
Waterloo	33	0
Fenchurch Street	19	0
London Bridge	6	-15
Moorgate	12	0

FUTURE PROJECTS - CROSSRAIL 2

Crossrail 2 is a plan for a line from south-west London to north-west London. It started life as a Tube line relieving the District Line, the Central Line and the Victoria Line:

(image seen on beleben.wordpress.com)

While many commentators like this route, there are obvious failings:

1. It doesn't call at Euston, where HS2 will arrive in 2026 and potentially cause peak-hour crowding;
2. It does nothing (or very little) to alleviate crowding at the three stations with most terminating metro trains (in 2018 as now): Liverpool Street, Waterloo and Victoria.

So the favoured route is now this:

(image courtesy TfL)

My first reaction is to be a little bewildered. While this proposal will clearly help Waterloo and the Victoria Line, Victoria itself and Liverpool Street aren't helped much. And what on earth is happening at the north end? Hertford East to Liverpool Street has two trains an hour in the peak. Even extending all Cheshunt trains to Hertford East that's only six trains per hour. So do we terminate 18 trains an hour at Alexandra Palace? One thing we must not do is take over Moorgate trains: in the peak on the Welwyn Garden City trains, there are more people on Moorgate metros than King's Cross metros, so it would not be a popular move to create an Alexandra Palace to Moorgate metro. My belief is that this design is the outcome from someone being given a limited budget. I will come back to Crossrail 2 after looking a little more strategically at Canary Wharf.

CANARY WHARF - PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE

According to Wikipedia, around 90,000 people work in Canary Wharf, as opposed to around 315,000 in the City. But with 540 extra floors of office space in tall buildings planned for 2019, the 90,000 figure could double. Let's look at train capacity today:

Now there are a couple of invalid assumptions here:

1) Not all people on a train alight at Canary Wharf;
2) A number of people going to Canary Wharf arrive by bus, foot or bicycle.

However, when I overlay the 2019 position, the illustration becomes clear:

Despite providing all the extra capacity Crossrail 1 gives us (along with all the DLR trains being 3 car, and the Jubilee Line running 32 trains per hour in each direction), it takes longer for everyone to arrive at work. The answer is relatively simple in theory - 24 trains per hour on Crossrail 1:

THE NORTHERN CITY LINE

When I talk of the Northern City Line, I mean this part of the First Capital Connect Network:

(image courtesy First Capital Connect)

As explained previously, this runs 12 trains an hour at peak into Moorgate. This is split across the Welwyn Garden City and Hertford North routes, with some Hertford North traffic going to and from Letchworth. The 6-car trains are full and standing as far as Old Street in the peak, thereafter merely full.

While people are being carried to the City, many will be continuing their journeys to Canary Wharf, particularly with jobs having been moved from the City to Canary Wharf over the years and people not moving house. There is also the point that the line from New Barnet southwards is less than a mile to the east of the High Barnet branch of the Northern Line, so either line can appeal to tens of thousands of people. Extending this line to meet the south-eastern branch of Crossrail 1 can relieve the Northern Line, and create the capacity Canary Wharf will lack by 2019.

One rather immediate issue as you start to tunnel beyond Moorgate on the Northern City Line is that Crossrail 1 is immediately behind the end of the line. But that's not an issue, as the Crossrail station is double ended (at Moorgate/Liverpool Street) so moving the Northern City Line further east gives an interchange to National Rail, Crossrail 1,  and the Northern, Central, Circle, Metropolitan and Hammersmith & City Underground lines. From there it is probably easiest to four track Crossrail 1 to Whitechapel. One new station at Moorgate/Liverpool Street, one expanded station at Whitechapel. Three miles of tunnel - plus the work to make from Drayton Park to Moorgate suitable for longer trains - and a fantastic benefit is achieved. It  doesn't move any trains out of termini, but it does mean we need to rework Crossrail 2.

* Many thanks to Lemmo whose idea it was to expand the Northern City Line to Canary Wharf.