On Sun, 11 Mar 2007, David of Broadway wrote:
Paul Corfield wrote:
On Mon, 19 Feb 2007 23:57:05 -0500, David of Broadway
wrote:
Although London's rail network has pretty wide coverage, it has limited
capacity in comparison to NYC's. Our trains are wider and longer and most
of our major trunk lines (and some of the minor ones, too) have four
tracks. Given how crowded our trains get, if we had to give up our
express tracks and shorten and narrow the trains, the buses would become a
lot more popular, by necessity.
I'm a tad taken aback by your comments on the relative capacities of
London's rail network vs NYC's. Now I'm certainly not an expert on your
subway or rail network but surely your rail network (not subway) is but
a mere shadow of London's?
By "rail" I was including subway/Underground.
In that case, yes. But our overground trains are as big as, or bigger
than, NY subway trains.
But, including everything, you still might be right. It's difficult for
an outsider to get a good sense of your rail network.
It's pretty hard for an insider! The handful of lines north of the river
are simple enough - they're all basically like tube lines that happen to
stop at the Circle line, rather than continuing into town (barring the
North London and Gospel Oak to Barking lines). South of the river, though,
it's a different story - there's an untamed thicket of lines, all
criscrossing and interconnecting, and it's hard to believe anyone has a
solid grasp of it all. They're shown on this map:
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/pdfdocs/lon_con.pdf
Which i think gives some idea of the complexity of the topology. I'm not
sure how they wound up like that; for some reason, 19th-century railway
bods decided it was a good idea to build lines that were halfway between
radial and orbital, so now there's this matrix of overlapping spirals,
plus some more sensible radials. Maybe it was because the main station for
Kent, which is in the east, is Victoria, which is in the west. No idea how
that happened.
tom
--
Let us learn to dream, gentlemen, and then perhaps we will learn the
truth. -- Friedrich Kekule