On Thu, 25 Oct 2007, wrote:

On Oct 25, 9:26 pm, Terry Harper wrote:
On Thu, 25 Oct 2007 18:17:04 +0100, Tom Anderson

wrote:

It frequently strikes me, when considering the geography of the terra
incognita called 'South London', that there is an amazingly large region
with no railway stations in the Walworth area.

Isn't this down to the tram network that existed in South London, which
limited penetration by the Underground and also overground railways?

Perhaps. There was certainly a tram route along the Old Kent Road. But
surely the main age of growth of the railways was before the age of trams?

Maybe a tram map from c.1900 might help?

Good idea. I don't have one to hand, but next time i come across one, i
shall examine it.

It's also an area that will benefit from the Crossriver tram if that
ever gets off the ground. Though a station at Camberwell Green (and
perhaps another at Walworth) on the Blackfriars line would also be
welcome.

Absolutely. But even then, there's a huge railless region to the east of
that line.

That area is actually pretty well served by buses, though.

Oh, of course. I wasn't saying there was no public transport in that area,
just nothing that goes on rails. The Old Kent Road is a bus superhighway.
This must be a response to the lack of trains, rather than a cause for it,
though - there's no reason you couldn't have had bus services like that in
Islington or something, where plenty of railways got built.

tom

--
I don't know kung fu, I AM kung fu.

In message om,
Offramp writes
On Oct 25, 11:51 pm, Ian Jelf wrote:
In message . com,
Offramp writesOn Oct 25, 6:17 pm, Tom
Anderson wrote:

Thornton Heath ... is like a cross between Threads and The
Equalizer ...

A phrase I seem to recall coining many years ago to describe my one and
only visit to Wembley Central.......

And far too good to be reserved for a single usage. I have mentioned
the phrase before as one that I liked, probably here.
I wasn't claiming copyright it anything! :-))

If I did a guide to London then that phrase would be the description
of a 'no-star' rating for an area.
Tell me, have you ever been to Rotherham?!
--
Ian Jelf, MITG
Birmingham, UK

Registered Blue Badge Tourist Guide for London and the Heart of England
http://www.bluebadge.demon.co.uk

In message , Tom
Anderson writes

There was certainly a tram route along the Old Kent Road.

The tram network in South London was very extensive and included
services along most main roads in the inner south-east of London.

But surely the main age of growth of the railways was before the age of
trams?

True, but back then there were inner-city stations on a number of lines
and most of these were closed at an early date as a result of
competition from the trams. But of course there were then, as now, some
areas that were not served by railways, and that's where the various
tram networks really came into their own.

--
Paul Terry

On Oct 26, 11:45 am, wrote:
On Oct 26, 5:40 am, Mr Thant
wrote:

On 25 Oct, 18:17, Tom Anderson wrote:

incognita called 'South London', that there is an amazingly large region
with no railway stations in the Walworth area. If you draw a line through
Elephant & Castle, Kennington, Oval, Stockwell, Brixton, Loughborough
Junction, Denmark Hill, Peckham Rye, Queen's Road Peckham, South
Bermondsey, Bermondsey, Borough, and back to Elephant, you have an area
within which there are no other railway stations of any sort (other than
disused, anyway)

The Aylesbury Estate? Notorious for being a railway ghetto. The Cross
River Tram has a branch straight through this area.

The Aylesbury is in the area described above.





Anyway, are there any other notable rail deserts like this? There's one
around Dulwich, but a lot of that's open ground, so it probably has fewer
people in it. There's another huge one in the Thames Gateway, south of the
District line, north of the Beckton branch of the DLR, east of the
Stratford branch (a year ago, east of the NLL), and west of, crumbs,
Dagenham Dock?

Chelsea. If you're standing on Albert or Battersea Bridge you're a
good mile from any sort of station.

I'm trying to figure out how to program a computer to find these
automatically. And then overlay them on a population density map or
something.

If you have the NR and tube station overlays (from Keyhole BBS) loaded
into Google Earth, it's pretty easy to see where the gaps are. I see a
big one south of Woolwich, a big hole north of the Olympic site (where
Lea Bridge used to be). There's a huge one around Richmond Park. The
East London Line extension cuts through the middle of a big hole too.

Northern Havering is pretty poorly served, too. Rise Park, Noaks Hill
and Harold Hill are all a good mile or two from either the Shenfield
line or the Hainult branch.

Jonn

There's a difference between the areas which simply lack lines and
stations and the Elephant, Peckham etc area, which is that the latter
is surrounded by stations which have services that only run at certain
times, such that if you go out by train, you can't necessarily get
home.

In Havering, you can trek across to one of the lines at any time of
any day and find trains running (OK, replacement bus).

On 25 Oct, 18:17, Tom Anderson wrote:
Evening all,

It frequently strikes me, when considering the geography of the terra
incognita called 'South London', that there is an amazingly large region
with no railway stations in the Walworth area. If you draw a line through
Elephant & Castle, Kennington, Oval, Stockwell, Brixton, Loughborough
Junction, Denmark Hill, Peckham Rye, Queen's Road Peckham, South
Bermondsey, Bermondsey, Borough, and back to Elephant, you have an area
within which there are no other railway stations of any sort (other than
disused, anyway) [1]. That's a huge area, about equal to the area
encircled by the Inner Ring Road, and densely populated. It's shocking
there's no railway service there - but perhaps not suprising when you
consider that it's also largely a very deprived area. When the stations on
the Holborn line were open, it was a lot smaller, but still pretty huge.

Anyway, are there any other notable rail deserts like this? There's one
around Dulwich, but a lot of that's open ground, so it probably has fewer
people in it. There's another huge one in the Thames Gateway, south of the
District line, north of the Beckton branch of the DLR, east of the
Stratford branch (a year ago, east of the NLL), and west of, crumbs,
Dagenham Dock? Twice the size of the Walworth desert, although currently
containing a lot of industrial land. Most of the outer suburbs of London
are like this, i suppose - the surprising thing about the Walworth one is
that it's so central.

I'm trying to figure out how to program a computer to find these
automatically. And then overlay them on a population density map or
something.

tom

[1] You can of course draw arbitrarily large shapes like that wherever you
like, by avoiding stations, but this is no such trick - as evidenced by
the fact that the polygon you've drawn is convex, at least roughly.

--
Come on thunder; come on thunder.

I remember when I first moved to South London being surprised that
Camberwell had no station, despite the dense population, and evidence
of a former station at Camberwell.

Apparently there is no capacity for a station here, but I believe that
Southwark Council are pushing for one, and may agree to the closure of
Loughborough Junction to create the capacity.

Are there any updates on this?

In article , Tom
Anderson writes
I'm trying to figure out how to program a computer to find these
automatically.

The approach I've taken in the past is very simple. Start with a grid
representing the entire area (to make it easy, say 1000 x 1000 with one
unit on the grid being 100 metres). Set up a list of locations of all
the stations. Then:
for each grid cell
best := infinity
for each station on the list
d := (distance from station to cell) squared
if d best then best := d
cell value := sqrt (best)

You can optimize things slightly by using a lookup table for the square
roots rather than calculating them each time.

When you've finished, the grid holds the distance to the nearest
station. Convert it to a GIF and fiddle with the colour map and, for
example, you can have a map where places within 1km of a station are
green, within 2km are yellow, and more than 2km are red.

--
Clive D.W. Feather | Home:
Tel: +44 20 8495 6138 (work) | Web: http://www.davros.org
Fax: +44 870 051 9937 | Work:
Please reply to the Reply-To address, which is:

Offramp wrote:
On Oct 25, 6:17 pm, Tom Anderson wrote:

If a girl ever told me that she lived at Thornton Heath our
relationship ended with the full stop that ended that sentence. Apart
from the fact that the area is like a cross between Threads and The
Equalizer, the only way to get there is by abseiling down from a
rented Zeppelin.

Mottingham, famous only for its obviously fictional name, is another
can't-get-in, can't-get-out area.

So the railway station called "Mottingham" is where exactly (answers of
the form "one stop from Lee on the Sidcup line" are not helpful)?

Robin

On 29 Oct, 11:04, "Clive D. W. Feather" cl...@on-the-
train.demon.co.uk wrote:
When you've finished, the grid holds the distance to the nearest
station. Convert it to a GIF and fiddle with the colour map and, for
example, you can have a map where places within 1km of a station are
green, within 2km are yellow, and more than 2km are red.

I actually did a map like this on Friday:
http://londonconnections.blogspot.co...ndon-gaps.html

I loaded all the station locations into a MySQL database, then wrote a
PHP script to generate an SVG file. I didn't bother calculating
distances - it just does separate passes to make the quarter mile
discs appear on top of the half mile discs, which achieves a similar
effect.

U

--
http://londonconnections.blogspot.com/
A blog about transport projects in London

On Mon, 29 Oct 2007 11:04:56 +0000, Clive D. W. Feather wrote:


The approach I've taken in the past is very simple. Start with a grid
representing the entire area (to make it easy, say 1000 x 1000 with one
unit on the grid being 100 metres). Set up a list of locations of all
the stations. Then:

1 for each grid cell
2 best := infinity
3 for each station on the list
4 d := (distance from station to cell) squared
5 if d best then best := d
6 cell value := sqrt (best)

Why does the distance need to be squared in line 4?

--
jhk

"R.C. Payne" wrote in message
...
Offramp wrote:
On Oct 25, 6:17 pm, Tom Anderson wrote:

If a girl ever told me that she lived at Thornton Heath our
relationship ended with the full stop that ended that sentence. Apart
from the fact that the area is like a cross between Threads and The
Equalizer, the only way to get there is by abseiling down from a
rented Zeppelin.

Mottingham, famous only for its obviously fictional name, is another
can't-get-in, can't-get-out area.

So the railway station called "Mottingham" is where exactly (answers of
the form "one stop from Lee on the Sidcup line" are not helpful)?

Robin