When Crossrail will be open "it will be immediately full"

but given CR1 has two 'peak directions' concurrently that could become a serious limiting factor. I fully expect even the expanded TCRd to seize up regularly.

Thank you all for those erudite responses. Clearly there is much more to this transport planning business than first appears. Is there a perceived difference [from a planning point of view then] between people milling around an interchange underground and people leaving a station to go up to street level? Clearly escalator capacity is less important if you're not leaving the station but platform capacity becomes more important and that relates to tph presumably?

Arun

An important factor is to consider the need to cater for growth in designing infrastructure. Ticket halls, gatelines, tunnels and escalator shafts have to allow for many decades of possible growth. The other factor is to ensure there is appropriate evacuation capacity designed on a worst case basis so people can get from the lowest platform level to the street within a defined time period. This may be via escalators or via separate fire protected escape routes. You will note that parts of the expanded Kings Cross and Victoria tube stations have been equipped with fire doors to seal off parts of the stations.

Double ending stations also gives much more flexibility to cope with emergency evacuations. It also gives capacity when the inevitable work to maintain / refurbish / replace escalators has to happen - people can be diverted to other escalator banks or ticket halls. Platform capacity has to cope not only with planned tph boarding and alighting but also have scope to deal with service perturbation where you may have larger than expected crowds waiting but also wanting to alight from trains. I expect that when people first step inside Crossrail stations they'll be surprised at the scale of them but I'm also convinced they'll be very busy, very quickly. The Jubilee Line stations were designed for growth but some are already showing some signs of strain in the rush hour - Waterloo and Canary Wharf are two I know of.

Lol, I must have been tired when I wrote that. Once Crossrail arrives, I can see HEx surviving by merit of it's first class services and quicker journey time. However even if Heathrow connect is lost, there would still be a capacity increase, a 4 car unit compared to 10 car unit does yield a significant increase in the amount of passengers that can be carried.

It is decades since I used HeX... What length are the platforms? Will they take 10-car services?

Heathrow Express have 4 and 5 car trains. I assume the cars are 200m in length? Whenever I use HEx the trains are either 4, 5 or 8 cars long. I've never seen a 10 car train in service, perhaps someone else on here has.

With regard to the Heathrow Express service, people should be aware that nobody has any power to do anything to the current setup until the HEX rights expire in 2028 (I think) - and it all goes back to the original deal done by BAA and British Rail which enabled the branch to the airport to be built in the first place. Basically BR would pay for the electrification and resignalling from Paddington to Airport junction and BAA would finance the building of the tunnels into the airport. Because tunnel building is not cheap, BAA were given the right to run a 4tph express service from Paddinton to Heathrow for the next 30 years (to cover the building costs of the tunnel via the hidden 'fare surchage' included in every ticket). Privitsation & franchising had no effect on this agreement (much like Network Rail inherited British Rail's legal requirement to provide a specified number of freight paths between the Channel tunnel and the WCML - regardless whether they are used or not) for at least 4 decades after the tunnel opened.

Therefore we are in a situation that however much NR, TfL First Group or anyone else wants to get rid of the HEX operation they have no ability to force this to happen. True they can always wave a very large amount of money under BAAs nose to try and get them to give up their rights early, but the bottom line is BAA cannot be compelled to do so until towards the end of the next decade.

There is also the issue that the tunnels into and the stations at Heathrow itself are 100% owned by BAA - not NR. Thus even if you did get BAA to relinquish is HEX concession early, there is no guarantee fares would come down because as infrastructure owner of what is in effect a private spur, the track access charges they can impose do not have to confirm to NR norms.

In a discussion some months ago on (I think) another forum someone provided a link to an agreement signed a few years ago that confirms your statement about HEX. It also maintains the fare premium concept into Heathrow on Crossrail services for a number of years (quite possibly up to 2028 as you state). Clearly this is to prevent HEX being grossly undercut by a subsidised TfL Crossrail service and thus wrecking HEX's revenue base. Once the agreement has expired then the situation is open to change. I've tried to track down the agreement without success.

BAA still exist but are now called Heathrow Airport Holdings (According to Wikipedia). T123 and T4 are definitely TfL managed, while T5 is managed by HAH (not an acronym I would have chosen!). I think all three are owned by the parties that manage them, but I'm not certain.

christopher125 - that was my understanding, too - ie close enough to the present to be of interest to the next round of GW franchise bidders. As with Gatex, Ministers are going to be presented with an awkward choise - keeping the airport links so desired by their commercial friends, or releasing commuter capacity for their voters...

We never learn from the past! When the LNWR and Bakerloo decided to provide a service to Harrow on then on to Watford Jct the added 2 additional tracks which enabled a self contained service to be introduced.

CrossRail in my opinion is disaster in the making when it comes to the western end off the line for the following reasons

No decision yet (if ever) on the extension to Reading, Maidenhead where I live, is the wrong place for it to end ( another West Ruislip!)

No additional running lines !

Significant freight flows on GWML which already make commuter trains crawl from Hayes to Acton in and vice-versa in the evening peak period.

HEX/Heathrow Connect again taking up paths and delaying mainline and suburban traffic

Slower journey time as an all stations CrossRail trains are not gong to be that quick to Londono

Reduction in fast commuter services from the Thames Valley to Paddington

The dysfunctional First Great Western and their ticket barrier stormtroopers adding delays and making life more difficult than it need be.

Having the Thames Valley Branch lines run by First is not the best idea as they again impact on the Crossrail services through services and ECS workings

A fragmented railway with disjointed thinking with idiotic London politicians oblivious to the real world.


I really hope I am proved wrong - however,........!

XF

What impact will Crossrail have on other lines e.g. East London Line? Will they cope?

Arup summary

'The Impact of Crossrail on visitor numbers in Central London'

It says by 2026, there will be 250 million journeys and it is estimated there will be 65 million more than 2004 estimates (?). The report on visitor numbers shows increases at Bond Street, Tottenham Court Road and Farringdon as its main focus

So to answer the topic question, yes it will.

The problem, as always, is money. There is a significant obstacle to widening the GWML - and that's Ealing Broadway to West Ealing. Ignoring that bottleneck, you could quite conceivably manage 6 tracks all the way to Airport Junction, and probably beyond, if the will was there. Stemming from a similar discussion, a while back in RIPAs I proposed a GWML metro to solve precisely the problem you mention by essentially turning Paddington SSL into a carbon copy of Baker Street. As for the bottleneck, the only cheap option would be one of the reasons the Greenford branch was probably built - it bypasses this bottleneck using the New North mainline route, so you could have metro services to Heathrow via the Greenford Branch (missing out on Acton mainline, Ealing Broadway and West Ealing) but OOC to Ealing Broadway would have to be a branch, and you'd have to wonder if the Central Line to North Acton wouldn't serve as a adequate existing link.

...but yes, Crossrail needs a metro and a suburban set of lines. It's not getting them.