London Banter - View Single Post - Planned engineering work between Acton Town and Hammersmith this weekend

Recliner[_2_] · January 6th 13, 10:26 PM posted to uk.transport.london

wrote:
In article
,
(Recliner) wrote:

wrote:
In article ,
(Paul Corfield) wrote:

On Sun, 6 Jan 2013 10:37:46 -0000, "D A Stocks"
wrote:

wrote in message
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Why oh why don't they let airport passengers use Heathrow Express or
Connect as an alternative
They do, don't they? = or are you saying Heathrow Express wasn't
running either?

Not routinely. It only happens on limited occasions when travel
options are very limited or rail replacement vehicles are in short
supply due to the volume of work on any given weekend. Even then it is
often only Heathrow Connect that can be used as HEX don't seem to want
people overloading the Express service. I expect money is also a
factor.

Previous closures of the Heathrow branch itself has seen coaches used
express from Acton Town to Heathrow because of their superior luggage
carrying capabilities. Buses are still needed for the all stns
service. No matter how you try to do it there are no convenient
locations for rail replacement transfer in West London.

Hammersmith - busy, overcrowded, overloaded bus stns, congested roads.
Acton Town - local roads struggle to cope with the volume of buses,
pavements too narrow for waiting passengers.
Ealing Broadway - similar to Hammersmith but with less room in the
ticket hall. Oh and a 1 way system past the station making drop offs /
pick ups difficult.

However the tracks and bridges on the 4 track section really do need
work doing to them. Unfortunately you can't run trains while doing
that.

Is it really not possible to close only two tracks at a time more?
The most inexplicable was the choice of such a busy weekend at
Heathrow for a blockade.

You had a number of options at various prices for the journey. You
took a choice for the price you were prepared to pay, and that's the
service you got.

I am off to hide under a table as I can feel the wrath of Rosenstiel
approaching!

When I found out about the works (daughter's boyfriend tipped her
off while we were away) and looked at the TfL journey planner from
abroad it didn't seem an unreasonable alternative via Acton Town
and Ealing Broadway. In particular it seemed to compare OK with any
via Paddington option.

Reality turned out to be rather different with the inexplicable
decision to terminate Heathrow shuttles at Northfields and the
abysmal lack of support for large numbers of passengers with
luggage there, at Acton Town and at Ealing Broadway (best of the
bunch). There was a tendency for what staff there were to hide in a
room giving out occasional PA announcements with blank platform
information screens.

Actually, you were lucky that both lifts at Acton Town were working:
judging by the Picc's Twitter feed, those lifts fail rather often.

Actually, after looking at the queue, I carried the cases up the stairs.

I wonder if reversing capacity at Acton Town was limited, hence the
decision to terminate some of the shuttles at Northfields?

That was the claim which I find hard to credit given how long the waits were
for trains at Northfields and Acton Town. The signalling didn't appear to
allow reversal in platforms and the PIS was non-existent unless you could
hear the announcements.

Presumably there were two Picc shuttles and one District shuttle running
into a station that normally has mainly through trains? A few trains do
reverse there, using the sidings on each side of the station, but certainly
not three shuttles from the west, so I'm not surprised that the capacity
was very limited. What might have been cool would have been to allow pax to
stay on the train during the reversal, thus getting them to the opposite
platform without using the stairs or lifts, but I suppose that's not
allowed.