"Dave Arquati" wrote in message
...
I agree that South East London needs better transport, and that
Crossrail
isn't it. (I think it's mildly ridiculous that it won't serve Woolwich,
for
a start). But I definitely don't think it's TL2000 - if I was living in,
say, Eltham and could choose between two trains per hour to Charing
Cross
and two more onto Thameslink, and four to Charing Cross, I'd choose the
latter.* The train services in South East London are appalling, and
sending
a few of them to Luton isn't going to change that. What the area needs,
short of an extension of the Bakerloo line, is proper turn-up-and-go
metro
services - something that TL2000 is going nowhere near providing.

Jonn

*Yes I've just plucked those figures out of the air.

How about that Jubilee Line extension from North Greenwich...


Same problem as Crossrail, to my mind - by coming to the Woolwich line that
far East, you limit the route of any possible extension to pretty much
heading out to Abbey Wood and beyond. Given that the Woolwich line already
has two routes to central London (via Greenwich, and via the Blackheath
tunnel), you'd end up with one suburban route with three different routes
into town - the exact opposite of what makes a useful high-frequency metro
connection.

What any tube extension should do is be able to seperate one route from the
rest of the network. For example, extending teh Bakerloo down the Old Kent
Road to New Cross and Lewisham would allow tube connections to (say) Hayes
and Bromley North, but leave the rest of the network intact. In contrast, if
you take the Jubilee to Thamesmead via Woolwich, you need to double track
the Woolwich line; if you continue it all the way to Dartford you could
avoid this, but then you end up with Greenwich and Deptford cut off.

The upshot of this seems to be that any tubes into North Kent of suburbs
shoudl avoid the Woolwich line like the plague. I'm already at a loss as to
how the post-Crossrail service pattern will look, and what will happen to
the Blackheath tunnel and Greenwich lines.

Jonn