Colin McKenzie wrote:
If tube tunnels were dug between West Ealing and just east of
Ealing Broadway, it would free up surface capacity at Ealing
Broadway station for the desperately-needed rebuilding.
Indeed. Ealing Broadway is an excellent example of the brutalist
architectural paradigm that gave us London Euston...
There are endless options, and I think a wholesale reorganisation
of services might be beneficial, because
- the area needs north-south rail services
Roll on the Park Royal interchange...
- the line parallel to the Central line is ridiculously under-used
Because there's no capacity at Paddington. Considering that 14tph is
going to terminate at Paddington, perhaps it would be sensible to see
if electrifying Old Oak West - North Acton - Park Royal and running
6tph up there to interchange with the Picc/Central at
PR might be
useful.
It would probably empty North Acton to
PR and Ealing Common to
PR, but
the branches beyond there would get much busier; if the buses could be
rejigged, the effects could get even better.
- passengers beyond Northolt are not best served by an all-stations
service
There's always the option of electrifying all the way to West Ruislip
and interchanging with Chiltern - though that would probably decimate
the Ruislip branch of the Central.
A better option would be to find a spare bit of brownfield land next to
the old GW line and building a largish carpark on it, with good access
from the A40. Then you could extend more tph from Paddington to the new
parkway station and abstract traffic off of the A40.
Plus there's also the fact that Greenford still has an NR service to
Paddington; if that does get cut back to West Ealing, adding a
mini-curve to the Greenford triangle and running some of that wasted
tph up _there_ could be investigated as well.