In article ,
(Paul Corfield) wrote:

On Fri, 19 Dec 2014 12:37:05 +0000 (UTC),
d wrote:

On Fri, 19 Dec 2014 05:37:22 -0600
wrote:
In article ,
() wrote:

Still, at least looking at pictures of the trains someone had enough
sense to specify 3 sets of doors per carraige, unlike the dorks who
specified the 378s on the Overground.

They followed the design of the 376s of course, though they were 5-car
from the start.

The point was that no-one foresaw how busy London Overground would
become. Well they should have done really. A short cut from north london
to canary wharf (almost) and south of the river via the up and coming
areas of Hoxton and Shoreditch I would have thought would be a dead cert
for packed trains.

Let's turn this on its head. If anyone, no matter how talented, had
created a business case for approval by the TfL Board or the DfT that
said "give us £150m for bigger trains" because we predict demand for
Overground services will rise by over 150% they'd have been laughed
out of the room. Such a claim would just be seen as ludicrous and
without much foundation.

The UK tends to work on solving crises of capacity once they've
happened rather than building things big enough in the hope that the
demand might materialise. That approach is engrained at the Treasury
and won't change anytime soon. You need evidence that there is a
problem to fix to justify expenditure not forecasts that might come
true one day. I'm not saying which approach is right or wrong merely
that there are significant constraints to getting the "logical" thing
done quickly.

The scale of Overground growth has been astonishing. If anyone had
said to me that you'd have peak hour crush loading on the Barking -
Gospel Oak line to the scale we do have I wouldn't have believed it.
If someone said you'd get 80-100 people alighting off peak at
Blackhorse Road on trains from Barking I wouldn't have believed that
either but it happens all the time. On the few occasions I see the NLL
at Highbury in the peak I am flabbergasted at the scale of the
crowding.

This TfL paper from a couple of years ago nicely summarises the change
in demand for Overground routes with specific reference to the ELL.


http://www.tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms...ard-London-Ove
rground-Impact-Study.pdf

I agree. The change to LO is truly extraordinary. I remember the South
London too, one of London's charming rail backwaters with hardly any
passengers. Not any more. I think it transferred to LO after that paper.

--
Colin Rosenstiel