["Followup-To:" header set to uk.railway.]
On 2014-06-10, d wrote:
On Tue, 10 Jun 2014 17:29:39 +0200
"tim....." wrote:
"Recliner" wrote in message
...
Graeme Wall wrote:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-27764476

There's already a thread in uk.t.l, with a link to this more detailed
consultation document:
https://consultations.tfl.gov.uk/crossrail/june-2014

whatever happened to the simple option of connecting Waterloo to KX?

This tunnel all the way from Wimbledon to Tottenham looks like a recipe for
it never getting built (because it is too expensive)

Given how busy north and south london mainline railways are I'm not sure
crossrail 2 is viable from a service point of view.

The line from Wimbeldon to Waterloo and platform space at Waterloo are
the main restriction on capacity further out. That's why the regional
proposal for XR2 (which seems to ahve now been adopted - the Metro
option appears to have been put up as a "pick any card, but not that
one") included tunneling out to Wimbeldon.


With bored tunnels, extra plain tunnel is a relatively small part of
the cost once you've got a TBM and all the supply chain sorted
out. Stations are very expensive, especially since they need to be
virtually all new becasue the existing central LU stations are mostly
at or very close to their safe capacity.

It seems that the ideal approach for the southern end would be to run
a bypass tunnel from near wimbeldon to Waterloo for the SWML (and
Portsmouth Direct etc.) long-distance trains, with the inners and
some of the outers running through the existing surface stations
before entering a cross-city tunnel outside Waterloo. Unfortunately,
that would either take unaceptably long or cause unacceptable loss of
capacity during construction.

Perhaps they should just build the hackney tube instead.

From what I've read on London Reconnections, it seems that TfL has a
policy of no new tubes: all new lines are to be built to main-line
loading gauge. That's for two reasons:

1) Capacity: there's so much supressed demand that any new line worth
building would fill up too quickly.
2) Safety regs: current regs
require a side walkway for new tunnels, and so the tunnel already
needs to be much larger than tube gauage.

Of course, they could build the Hackney tube to surface line
standards, but then what do you do to sort out Waterloo? Part of the
point of Thameslink, XR, etc. is to reduce the number of suburban
services terminating at the London termini, to get more efficent
useage of space.