No more Olympia service

Now that's a great surprise ;D ;D

Wimbledon line trains have been crush loaded since time immemorial - there has to be a balance between resource use and genuine passenger need.

Croxley Green -Watford did have a purpose! - It was run in the hope some dodgy person might make a model railway layout based on the line ;D

Good to see that Olympia's best customers - booze and porn - will still have a rail service.

And LUL's still got it in for Ms Greening (MP for Putney) - despite the outcome of the consultation, apparently all the additional trains are going to go to/from Wimbledon, so the Putneyites will still be squashed

One wonders if it wasnt merely a shuttle how much better used it would be? For example if the outer circle service had persisted, the Mets shuttle from the H&C line had been rebuilt.

As it is, its potential is somewhat limited. A pity its going, but as long as it doesnt result in any opperational flexibility.

Great Idea, slugabed

Far better to extend it than cut it.

There used to be a link here....built,I believe as part of the GWR's E&SBR...behind the dairy.
I don't know if any trace remains but it was only 100yds or so of track.
I believe it closed as part of the Westway construction work,which obliterated the western junction....but I stand to be correctedd on this.

@ slugabed

You are entirely correct. As per two other contemporaneous threads, they would have been happiest if every surface railway had been concreted over and turned into a road. "Dedicated busways" are the vestigal desperate attempt to revive such concrete thinking, (pun intended). "Bustitution" came, and the buses soon went the way of the trains. Won't be so easy with dedicated expensive guided roadways though.

stonesfan is of course correct.

But with the closure of Banbury - Woodford Halse and the G.C., through freights were effectively finished on that route so the spare tracks along the Central Line were there, rusting and unloved through the 60's, but the bit by the dairy to build the Westway was the "priority lift". After that, the rest didn't matter so it was left for a few years to rust as it was "job done" on cutting another rail link. The Met certainly would not have survived beyond Rickmansworth, possibly not even TO Rickmansworth. The Bakerloo would have been expected to take all coach passengers arriving at Marylebone. See the other threads, THAT is how bad it was when one Government had been in power so long it felt it had a divine right to do what it liked.

Unfortunately, as has also been mentioned on the ChiltenMet thread, the incoming Labour Gov'ts in '64/66 were just as bad at listening to the public. It was in fact just as corrupt (remember Lord Kagan, Mr Milhench and the slag heap scandal).

Some of the decision makers of those days are still alive. Two at least are in the House of Lords whereas they ought to be in Wormwood Scrubbs. Which of course can be seen from the piece of track and Central Line in question.

Ah one of a long list of 'what could have been'

Development has encroached on the alignment along Du Cane Rd east of East Acton station; I don't know if the alignment remains beneath the Westway bridges.

It's a shame, as the West London Line is a strategically important route and a link to the GW-GC route would provide an alternative freight route to the West Midlands and beyond. And also to the East Midlands and beyond if they rebuilt the GC to Rugby.

It wont be long til the 2-track WLL will be at capacity and maybe then they'll look again at District extensions from Olympia.

I reckon they should tunnel north and take over the Central route from White City, and the Central can then head west under Goldhawk Rd or Uxbridge Rd. The advantage with this is that you could remove the Central flyover at Du Cane Rd that re-switches train direction, and that will release space to reestablish the link from the GW-GC route to the WLL.

Another option is to continue to Old Oak Common, an interchange that could well progress whether or not HS2 gets the nod, and go on from there to North Acton, or Willesden Jn...

Anyway I suppose someone somewhere is looking into all this...

I've always envisaged the obvious solution being to adjust the layout west of Earls Court by extending the flyover so that the "mainline" serves the inner roads, and the Wimblewares serve the outer faces, with another bit of grade separation east of there taking the westbound line over/under the mainline to head north.

...though, thinking about it, you'd probably want another line up to Olympia (for a full dual track link) if you were to incorporate it into a longer service, and that would need a diveunder to bring it into the southernmost road.

Which means you either have all that for cross-platofrm interchange, or you give it up and have the northern island serving the Wimblewares and Olympia and the southern island serving the mainline, in which case all you'd need is to lengthen and widen the existing flyover.

Reading the press release as opposed to all the documents makes me wonder will signposting from West Kensington station be improved to allow people to access Olympia that way? Its not a long walk but not obvious to someone who doesn't know the local area well.

Im going to be rhetorical and think probably not.

I'm going to Earls Court tomorrow. I'm going to use the Olympia service, perhaps for the last time....

We are being told that points are going back in. Also being taken out at Tower Hill and Mansion House - bay roads, Embankment moving to west of the station, and I'm sure someone mentioned taking Gloucester Road WB points out (they were handy the other day - being used all day owing to some failure at S Ken!)
Any light on these Tom?