Peckham extension proposal - is this for real?

Yes, Londoners will support that in their droves.

BTW why this obsession here with the Tube 'taking over' long established NR lines?

Shouldn't the long-term plan be to bring the Tube up to NR standards?

If I've understood the logic here, it is that I haven't got something (in this case lots of tube lines) then no one else should have it, indeed if they have got it, it should be taken away from them. I doubt if many people would want to live in the grudge society.

Turning to the more serious technical issues, the case for replacing NR services with extensions to LU is twofold: firstly, it removes what are basically unprofitable, capacity-consuming short distance services from the mainline network, and secondly, it offers better connectivity to (ie no NR/LU interchange) for many more passengers. The costs are of course enormous, but SE London (specifically the Dartford loops) offers a case where this might be done relatively cheaply and with the added bonus of reducing congestion at London Bridge. In the bad old days before Oakervee thought that it was a good idea to cut XR at Abbey Wood that would have happened. Sir Horace Cutler* has much to answer for.

GH

*He who sold the original Fleet Line routeing for a knighthood.

@tsm - well said. One can only hope...

Graham H

Graham - I think he meant gauging standards - dimensions of stock. And, given that NR services from outer suburbs can be vastly quicker than all-stops LU services, there is the element of a fast run into London with a change as a quid pro quo (or a good brisk walk for the health and constitution!).

I understand that longitudinal seating means more people have to stand but my plans for tube in SE London mean that people would not be standing for very long! My plans envisage that Blackheath and Lewisham will be major interchange stations between Bakerloo (for Southbank and West End) and District (for City and Canary Wharf) at Blackheath, and Bakerloo and Met (for City) at Lewisham. Slade Green to Blackheath would be 17/18 mins and to Lewisham 20 mins. Crayford to Blackheath would also be about 17/18 mins and Hayes to Lewisham about 22/23 mins. And because these are the termini, these people would get seats anyway. So the longer you are on the train, the more likely you are to get a seat!

Talk about a tough gig! Theres being the Devils advocate, but thats in another league! Where on earth did you manage to start with justifying it? I remember it being mooted at the time, even then as a child it was clearly anything but a transport solution!

I'm not sure we should blame the powers that be at the time of the New Works program for a failure to provide money for projects. The scheme came along after the Great Depression and rearmament became a factor by the time it got off the ground, yet much of it went ahead. What killed off things like the full Northern Heights program and Central to Denham was the new Green Belt policy after the war (naturally progress on the New Works between 1939 and 1945 was limited due to the little matter of the war!). Considering the amount of expansion since the late '40's its a wonder anything got extended/built at all.

The real culprits are those holding the purse strings who decided not to go with the Crossrail-style tubes and extensions set out in the various London plans and post-war studies.

I don't think there was the interest in passenger services through Snow Hill after WWI, nor the demand. Naturally getting anything done once its mothballed has been an uphill struggle over the decades. Even London Overground just a few years ago was dismissed on thr basis it would be a waste of resources and largely empty. On this very site there were voices of dismissal.

If South London gets its through routes via the central areas maybe long-suffering North London sardines could get full size trains and multiple destinations?

Yes indeed that is partly what I was referring to. It was the age of the New (and Expanded) town and the car and the era of 'moving out' (a social/cultural phenomena as much as a planned one). Money wasn't there for rail because the demand wasn't there and there were other things to spend money on such as modern shopping centres (not malls obut 60's/70's modernist open air ones) and roads. While relatively small amounts of money were difficult to find even for reopenings like Homerton station, motorways, by-passes and duelling of roads sprang up like there was no tomorrow and most of it was outside London. Here too it wasn't just about London's shrinkage from 8.6 to 6.3 million but about the difficulties of getting the urban motorway and renewal plans passed all the protest. We could have had the motorway box and no St. Pancras. I remember reading in Modern Railways as late as the mid-1980's a government minister's proposal (Stephen Norris? Or was that something similar even later?) to replace most of the rail lines in london with expressways.

The Green Belt was very much before the defence of Covent Garden and the like though, it had its origins in the 30's and when urban rail transport was still very much in vogue. It's the reason why the Central didn't continue to Ongar as a properly electrically-powered non-shuttle through continuous built up area. Its the reason why London is not as populous as New York and as large as Tokyo. That is, unless you consider 'London' to be the traditional commuter designation covering c. 27,000 sq.km with a population of over 22 million, roughly the size of Greater New York (19 million) and Greater Moscow (18 million) basically a very big populous city with massive green areas. It certainly operates like one and should always have been considered in planning terms as one big entity.

dw54 At the risk of going even further off thread, certainly by the late '80s, NSE saw itself as standing in for the missing "Home Counties PTE". It was very clear that with substantial percentages (40% of employed people in many cases) commuting daily from the Outer Metropolitan Area (over half the central London commuters came from beyond the GLC boundary by 1990) and quite significant numbers coming from places as far afield as Peterborough and Bath that London's economic hinterland went well beyond the classic built up area. We even went so far as to produce a summary of our plans for coping with the rise of long distance commuting - "20/20 vision" - that was so controversial that DfT ordered all copies to be hunted down and destroyed. Mine is still tucked safely away however.

In fact, the trend has if anything speeded up. Even in the '80s, firms were moving back office work from London to the near ROSEland such as Southend and Basingstoke and this led in turn to more travel between central London and the surrounding area. With the speeding up of InterCity services, we found that places as far away as Leeds and Manchester became economic outstations of London (ie attracting many second order support services to London's financial markets, such as financial retail services). Britain is well on the way to becoming a very large city state characterised by a series of economically interlocked conurbations.* As GW and even EC bidders are finding, they are no longer facing a traditional intercity market but a outer suburban one, characterised by frequent stops and high percentages of daily business travellers. Splitting LM from WC was no accident (well, only a small one).

GH


*Actually, I'd go further and say that "London" stretches as far as at least Dublin and Edinburgh/Glasgow, where many firms relocated back office functions, call centres and the like in the '90s.

castlebar - I agree; matters are made worse by many of these towns being one-trick ponies; when that pony dies, what is left? The other side of the coin is what is known in the jargon as the agglomeration effect - you gather enough industries and connected sources of employment to give people in the area a real choice as to where to work without having to move or commute too far. So far that really applies only to "London" and to a limited extent Manchester, Bristol (another London suburb?) and Leeds. HS2 will probably reinforce this and come close to turning London, Manchester and Leeds into a single employment market over time. The real losers are the second string major cities - Brum, Liverpool, Sheffield, Bradford and those smaller settlements with nothing much going for them in the first place - Scunthorpe, Rotherham, Wigan and the like.

GH

Back in 1982 approx, I undertook a study of HQ relocation for British Telecom International. IIRC, Swindon came in first, Milton Keynes 2nd. But it didn't go ahead because the MD and senior management couldn't agree which level to separate the London-based and decentralised organisation. BT's CEO wouldn't accept the MD/BTI being located away from London, and so on it went down the hierarchy.

The GM of Maritime Services also had me look at his smaller bit of the HQ. In that case, Croydon came up tops.

We were still at Holborn Circus when I left to return to "a land down under": a land of flies and pies; rusty rails; droughts and floods; Vegemite and BBQs; and Ministerial announcements and photo opps ad nauseum.
 
Certainly the IC125s rewrote the commuting map. I'm well aware of people coming in from Doncaster and beyond; Rugby was not uncommon; Bath, etc.

But the fact that I can participate actively in these conversations, despite being located almost diametrically opposite Britain demonstrates the contemporary possibilities. Only major drawback: I can't join the crew for a beer after an Open House or Model Rail Exhibition.

Well, BTI didn't move in the end.

The WRAtH plans have a business case based on 5-car trains. My gut feeling is that the reality will be standard 345s running via Heathrow - and no "windows" at EB. One question would be whether a station would be constructed to serve the Sipson area just north of Heathrow.

Yes, I meant Sipson - which was to be on a mooted figure of eight route - but lies along the existing line. Nothing cynical that I can see about it - other than cost.

I'd hope a station around Poyle/Colnbrook industrial/employment area also would be provisioned.

Nuffin'! Must've been reading too many "official" dox - my brain clearly was under the influence of DafT-vader forces!!