Tramalot: Enhancing Croydon’s Tramlink

1. Thanks PoP. So some service intensification is possible. But not much is said about depot/stabling options, other than that it can be very difficult and Elmers End might be a short term stop-gap for initial changes. What is known / interpolated about more genuine depot capacity? – Therapia Lane looks to be quite full irrespective of intensification and a new Sutton line.

2. Final section: road us -> road use

   [Thanks, corrected. LBM]

3. Given the prospective number of trams needing to use the town centre loop, and the obvious disadvantage of turning services back short of the main traffic generators, is it time for TfL to take a leaf out of Manchester’s book, and think about options for a Second City Crossing? Metrolink will have theirs completed about 25 years after the initial routes opened, so mid-2020s sounds about right for Croydon.

   Experience in traditional tram cities such as Toronto, Melbourne, Berlin or Dresden shows the benefit of having multiple routes and plenty of junctions, not just to maximise penetration but to provide diversionary options in the event of disruption. However, to date very few of Europe’s second-generation light rail networks have built multiple cross-centre routes. Further afield, Dallas is now looking at developing a second core for exactly the same reasons.

4. Re Chris J

   But would you put the 2nd crossing route to the north or the south? All of the options look quite disruptive.

5. Adding the Frith Road loop is not without its problems. The junction with Drummond Road would need to be light-controlled. Drummond Road carries at least three bus routes plus all traffic from West Croydon to Reeves Corner, plus all the traffic exiting from the Centrale car park, plus the delivery lorries that have finished servicing the Centrale shops.. A set of lights might well cause traffic to back up all the way to West Croydon as well as clogging the car park exit.

   For anyone attempting to look at this on a map, traffic heading down Tamworth Road towards Reeves Corner is diverted left through a covered way into Drummond Road before it reaches Frith Road. The length of the covered way is simply too small to register on most maps.

   At the time that the Waddon Flyover (a clunky concrete structure) was built, I remember that the houses in Waddon New Road that would face it had notices in their windows saying ‘No Berlin Wall’. The flyover (like its Berlin counterpart) has attracted the usual graffiti. If the flyover is to be rebuilt, could the replacement be something more elegant and less attractive to spray-criminals?

   Spelling suggestion for the article – in the first sentence of the para after the heading ‘Beyond 2030’, the word ‘us’ needs an ‘e’ to make it ‘use’.

6. RayK,

   Actually you misunderstand the “Berlin Wall” bit. The original proposal was to hide the flyover with a large wall that was nicknamed the Berlin Wall. It was this wall that the residents were campaigning against. They probably weren’t over-happy with the flyover either but that was a separate issue.

   The solution to the “Berlin Wall” problem was simple. It didn’t get built. Needless to say the money saved went back to the treasury.

7. “Effectively the spur from Church Street to just short of Centrale would become redundant.”
   It’s nowhere near as long as that!

8. I believe one of the key issues both for Croydon and the trams is the overall lack of east-west routes. The flyover is a good distributor of cars, but because of it’s design and route, is hopeless for trams. There are few if any other options. Is it already time to create Croydon’s pre-metro (like the Brussels underground trams)?

9. @PoP – ” Probably most awkward of all, one is trying to integrate 10tph from East Croydon to New Addington into a pattern that involves 12tph from Wimbledon to Sandilands.” Awkward only if you are trying to achieve an even headway but at these frequencies, does it matter? [Yes, of course, one like to do this on a railway but surely the better comparison is with a bundle of high frequency bus routes?]

10. Introducing Firth Street as a loop I presume would still require westward running along Church Street. At what point does this need to become tram only?

    What is to stop double tracking (most) of Crown Hill and George Street?

    If Firth Street then had East and West facing junctions at southern end then you can avoid the single track central loop. (and still serve Centrale on Firth and East Croydon station). In theory might create fewer conflicts with other road users.

11. Given that the single platform at Wimbledon is now becoming two within the same length, would there be room to have longer trams there anyway?

    ps. We seem to be discussing things SO far away, though then I realise it is already 2015 … :O

12. @Alison
    “Given that the single platform at Wimbledon is now becoming two within the same length, would there be room to have longer trams there anyway?”
    Almost certainly. The opposite face of the platform can take an eight car train. (160m) Even the longest tram on Tramlink is no longer than 33m.

13. “As a policy decision it seems that TfL are not prepared to have two trams coupled together.” Seems? Surely if it is policy it has been done or not? And if so on what grounds?

14. It strikes me that TfL don’t know what to do with Croydon Tramlink. Tacking on loops and breaking long established service patterns smacks somewhat of desperation because there is no money for anything more substantive and meaningful. The only way you tackle the constraints identified in the article is that someone has to take a brave pill and propose a more radical extension / expansion of the system – ideally with a N-S route that would give more routing options and give a new way through the town centre. I recognise there are a lot of busy roads in and around Croydon but the issue has to be faced at some point. There is a massively busy corridor north towards Streatham via Thornton Heath and multiple options as to where you might send trams from this point. Try catching a 109 bus and you’ll see what I mean – 19th busiest bus route in Greater London with over 10m pass jnys a year. An ideal candidate for a tram conversion. Other routes like the 50, 60 and 250 which also run northwards all carry substantive flows.

    Hopefully we might get a politician who is prepared to find the resources to do something genuinely beneficial to Croydon and its neighbouring areas and which would allow a sustainable expansion of Tramlink into a wider South London tram network. It’s not as if the potential isn’t there but it will take some real bridge building with Borough politicians and their residents to get a step change in attitude and then get something built. Without this I think Tramlink will simply grind to a halt because the initial simplicity of the network with its easy links into the town centre will have been killed off thus reducing its attractiveness to people. It’s worth noting that all the Westfield developments have car based access as their primary mode and Croydon’s is no different even if they are lobbying some money at TfL. The last thing Croydon needs is more cars no matter how you prettify the pavements and plant trees.

15. Of course route 109 is the rump of the route brought in to replace the Purley to Embankment trams.

16. Graham H,

    I would argue even headways on the new Addington branch to dovetail in with the trams to Wimbledon do matter. For starters on their inward journey to Croydon you want if possible to avoid trams having to come to a halt on a steep slope short of a road crossing (Woodbury Close). Unlike high-frequency bus routes only one tram is permitted to cross a road junction during one phase of the traffic lights so in order to avoid unnecessary delays it is best if this is avoided. Having trams delaying other trams at road junctions will lead to erratic intervals on individual routes.

    Probably the best reason for even intervals is to give certainty, or high level of likelihoodness, when changing from one route to another so a journey is predictable.

    Christian Schmidt,

    “As a policy decision it seems that TfL are not prepared to have two trams coupled together.”

    This one sentence caused quite a few email discussions when present in the draft script. It was worded as “it seems…” because there were lots of indications of separate units not being TfL’s future preferred practice without any conclusive evidence.

    Ever since the aborted attempt to introduce walk-through trains on the Victoria line TfL appear to have desired to have all rail-based vehicles walk-through except for the future Northern line and Jubilee line clones. London Overground, S-stock, New Tube for London, new DLR stock are all going this way.

    I have also heard a comment from a TfL spokesman, which sadly I cannot remember in detail, suggesting that never again would they go down the route of separate carriages. Mind you maybe that ought to be filed alongside “we will never again order an Underground train with a separate cab”.

    I think one reason, predicted and borne out on the London Overground, for wanting walk-through trains (and trams) is that passengers are much better distributed along the length of the train or tram.

17. @Walthamstow Writer : just as it is generally acknowledged that building new roads induces additional journeys, the reverse can also hold true and removing road capacity can un-induce* journeys and traffic “evaporates”.

    So an advantage of a tram scheme will actually be because it takes away road capacity, a proportion of road journeys “evaporate” and it encourages modal shift to other modes of transport, the tram being one of them. There is still road congestion of course, but overall mobility is improved.

    Of course, I don’t expect anyone in TfL to say this publicly. As demonstrated by the cycling superhighways, removing road space can be a massive political issue but in addition to Boris wanting it, there was also a distinct “pro” lobby providing a counter-argument to the “antis”.

    I think it is an interesting point to pose – how would a tram scheme removing road space get a sufficient “pro” lobby from the general public? It was the “antis” who killed the West London scheme but I don’t recall there being any particularly coherent “pro” advocacy at the time from anyone but politicians, and they don’t really count as they aren’t going to proceed if they have no supporters.

    *I’m not sure of the correct term here but from an electrical engineering point of view, the opposite of “inductance” could be said to be “capacitance”…

18. @Christian Schmidt:

    Tramlink’s trams are bi-directional, with a cab at each end. Coupling them together means you end up wasting quite a bit of space on the inner cab ends, as well as the space between them where the two units are coupled together. This gives roughly 5-6 metres of wasted space in the middle of the tram. It also means trams would take twice as long to clear junctions.

    Another reason for not coupling trams together is simply that it would mean doubling the length of every tram stop on the line. For some stops (e.g. Sandilands), this simply isn’t feasible.

    A “pre-metro” approach seems like the better option compared to the two additional loops being considered. However, the geography of the area does not lend itself well to such projects: Croydon sits in the bottom of a river valley, which means water ingress is likely to be an issue. Furthermore, there are two major railway lines cutting across the line’s path, not to mention the shopping centre.

    The biggest problem is that Croydon’s town centre is long, and broadly follows the original Brighton Road* corridor, while Tramlink cuts across this, hence the need for a loop in the first place. It’s like trying to serve all of central London – from Heathrow all the way east to Stratford and Canary Wharf – using Thameslink alone.

    I agree with others who have posited a north-south tram route instead, to act as a feeder. Unfortunately, there’s no more disused railway to recycle for this, which leaves us with street-running trams.

    I feel that shoving the cars and trucks under the ground instead of the pedestrians and public transport users may be an easier sell. It makes for a much more pleasant environment, and keeps through traffic out of sight. It also opens up more options for street-running trams while removing a major problem with them: congestion.

    * (The Brighton Road today is the A23, but this has been diverted onto some bypasses and other newer infrastructure. The main road to Brighton originally passed through the centre of town. Part of an unfinished 1960s ring road system – a quarter of it was never built – also complicates matters.)

19. I think one of the reason many of the schemes proposed in the comments is that there’ll be significant opposition simply due to the fact that the entire scheme involves hacking up a road.

    One of the reasons that the existing Tramlink wasn’t stopped in its tracks was because it was only Croydon town centre that needed major roadworks. The remainder of the scheme was on disused railway lines. This I think could prove to be the downfall of the Sutton Tramlink, it only uses up roads. I mean, that was the downfall of the Uxbridge Road tram, local residents couldn’t see the benefits of years of disruption on the Uxbridge Road.

    The other tram scheme that everyone raves about is Manchester Metrolink, and that does a similar thing, only using roads to get across the city centre, but further out using disused railway lines. This generally allows for a faster tram and much less disruption in construction.

20. glbutu,

    It almost seems inevitable I feel obliged to try and dispel a myth and to repeat this comment every time we mention Croydon Tramlink but it is very far from true to say that except for Croydon town centre the scheme was built on disused railway lines. Yet again, IT WASN’T.

    The only section of disused railway line was from approximately Blackhorse Road tram stop to just short of Lloyd Park tram stop.

    Most of Croydon Tramlink was build on underused but still operational railway lines. Notably Elmers End – Blackhorse Road (where the railway line used to continue to the original Addiscombe station – not to be confused with Addiscombe tram stop) and Wandle Park – Wimbledon which was built on the line from West Croydon to Wimbledon. There was even a rail replacement bus service during the construction of Tramlink. These lines closed because of tramlink. For the most part, it was not a case of tramlink taking advantage of already closed lines.

    In a similar vein, I am not aware of any disused railway lines being used in the construction of Manchester Metrolink but I may be wrong.

21. @glbotu – being slightly tongue in cheek, I wonder if appealing to people’s greed would help sell the advantages of a tram scheme? Estate agents will price up a property if it is convenient to a tube station. I don’t know if there is a similar premium based upon proximity to a bus stop, I suspect less, but I think having a tram stop nearby may have a similar impact to tube stations when it comes to the value of the property.

    So an argument based upon a few years of hassle, but then we expect the value of many of your houses to increase faster than the market, may sway some people’s opinion 😉

22. @GLbotu – and one didn’t notice these arguments in the cases of Brum, Sheffield and Nottingham. (Edinburgh can be disregarded as an aberration). I suspect that much of the argument about disruption was simply a case of anti-tram campaigners snatching at any passing factoid to support their cause (after all, at the time, they would have had few actual cases to quote…). As Reynolds953 implies, the opposition from shopkeepers and other frontagers goes strangely quiet once the trams are actually passing their doors. .

23. The East Didsbury was a disused/closed railway alignment. Rochdale-Oldham also used a mile or so of former railway alignment where it ties into the Bury route. Bury, Altrincham and most of the rest of Rochdale-Oldham are converted railways.

    However, to be pedantic about the status of the railways at the time of tramway construction (I’ve heard it suggested that the Birmingham Snow Hill – Wolverhampton Low Level line is still technically a railway, the closure order never having been made, making Midland Metro an illegal obstruction) misses the point being made by the OP – Tramlink isn’t on-street much. Even the New Addington branch runs parallel to the road, rather than on it, for much of its length. Would a N-S route be as successful, or will it face the issues that Cross-River and West London trams faced?

    A big problem with West London Tram was that, to justify the capital expense, it needed to be faster than the stopping buses. As such, inter-stop distances were planned to double, making the tram less convenient than the slower buses it would replace, while only just getting the speed of the limited stop buses it would also replace. Would that apply to a N-S Croydon route? Sutton Tramlink’s high number of proposed stops suggests not.

    The on-street nature of a N-S Tramlink route becomes extra bothersome north of Thornton Heath Pond, where it would have to share with A23 traffic. And then there’s finding a route for it across central-Croydon. However there’s potential there for it to be possible.

24. @Graham H – I don’t see how Brum could have had objections to on-street trams. There are none in the city (though they are building tracks through the city centre)! Oh, you mean Wolverhampton – again, just the centre, which was the point wrt Croydon, that it was just the centre that saw on-street.

    Nottingham has a lot of segregation in the suburbs and taking the full 3-line network into account the on-street bits are limited to bypassed local centres, the city centre, and the one-way loop (which minimises the impact). There’s a lot of former and current rail alignments used by NET. Sheffield has the least segregation (and performs badly in ridership for it) – I imagine it got through as the city needed it.

    West London tram was somewhat unique as a tram scheme, though the problem could apply to many other places in London. The buses the trams would replace were very frequent, and the frequency reduction (because more capacious vehicles) and further-apart stops made convenience worse, while far-more extensive traffic-flow changes than any other UK proposal (inc Edinburgh) was needed to get the trams to not have worse journey times than the pre-existing express buses.

25. Perhaps the solution north of TH Pond is for trams to run via Thornton Heath town centre, Parchmore or Melfort Roads, and from there back up towards Streatham Vale? North of Norbury, the A23 is wide enough that without the bus lane, the trams would fit. It would, however, involve replacing a whole lot of different bus services with trams.

    The other likely problem with going north is finding space for a terminus. The A23 corridor north of Thornton Heath Pond is heavily developed – Streatham seems like the ideal destination, but north of the Common that’d mean running through the entire (horrendously congested) town centre. Turning east at TH Pond towards Selhurst, or west towards Mitcham, or even both, give you a few more options – as well as improving connections to perhaps under-developed land, which perhaps enables more ways of actually paying for it all.

26. @PoP

    Apologies for being less than accurate in my assessment of the Wimbledon-Mitcham-Croydon route (as disused rather than underused), but as Anonymous@11:24 suggests, my point was one of not having significant on-street running for the more successful tram schemes.

    @Graham H

    Your point is pertinent with regards to Sheffield Supertram and Nottingham Express Transit, although I’d suggest that a more significant portion of Midland Metro is on the former Birmingham Snow Hill – Wolverhampton Low Level line. I’d also question (especially in Supertram’s case), how much “On-Street” is “Interacting with Cars”. This is the other point, that certainly the 109 Bus Tram Route would fail on, namely that without shutting the A23, there doesn’t seem to be a huge amount of space to actually avoid running down the middle of the carriageway. It’s all London, where space is at a premium.

27. @Anonymous:

    I think this is why Christian Schmidt posted about a “pre-metro” option: i.e. burying the trams under the roads.

    Croydon’s physical layout doesn’t make this particularly easy, and it’s probably too late to build East-West tunnels under the new / upgraded shopping centre itself given the timescales involved. That just leaves the Wellesley Road (or parallel) axis, running roughly N-S.

    I feel it should be the cars and trucks and other traffic that is merely passing through Croydon that should be diverted out of sight: Machines don’t mind having to work a little harder to climb ramps into and out of tunnels. Humans, on the other hand, do. As there’s already an underpass on Wellesley Road, it seems more logical to extend this, rather than demolish it and move all that traffic back up to the surface, just so trams can travel down there instead. Besides, you’d have to install an awful lot of lifts.

    We’re now beyond the “quick win” stage with Tramlink. No future extension is going to be cheap, and all options will involve some major disruption.

    Pragmatically, I think it makes more sense to look for new ‘nuclei’ for small, local tram networks, and let them grow into each other organically over time. That means looking away from Croydon and at other ‘quick win’ tram conversion projects, such as Romford-Grays* via Upminster, which would make Thurrock Lakeside a lot easier to get to, improve orbital journey times, and (in theory) provide a useful feeder service, while also simplifying operations for the affected TOCs.

    There are plenty of other possibilities, but I can already hear the sound of blades being sharpened by the mods.

    The trick is to concentrate on building cheap and cheerful tram projects, until a critical mass of tram infrastructure is reached as the various networks become interconnected. At that point, it becomes much easier to justify projects like running trams right into central London, as there’ll be connections to depots and stabling yards out in the suburbs already available. (This is why standalone projects of the “Let’s run trams down Oxford Street!” variety collapse very quickly: where do you build the depot?)

    * (A flyover or dive-under would be needed now, but this is hardly a show-stopping obstacle.)

28. @gblotu – sorry, I thought that you were referring to construction disruption rather than operation disruption. I entirely agree that you cannot build a tramway without opening up the highway, not least to move utilities, and the building north from Croydon would necessarily mean (partial) closure of the A23 from time to time; whether operating that route would cause disruption is another matter.

    @Anonymous – yes, I did mean Wolverhampton. A propos stop spacing on WLT, it may be that the opportunity was being taken to rationalise existing stop spacing; as I recall from living along the route, on average, the stop spacing, inherited from the 607 and the 7 before it, was something like half the standard adopted by the motorbus services – something that still obtains today – I recommend a trip on the 243 north of Holborn to see just how close ex-trolleybus route stop spacing can be.

29. @GH Yes bus stops are roughly where the old tram stops were with route 7 (aka passing loops on the single track tramway), from the end of double track at the western end of Southall Broadway to the start of double track through Uxbridge at the bottom of Hillingdon Hill. On the long single track tram section with no passing loops, through Hayes End, there is a bus stop where the former Hillingdon tram depot existed.

30. So the consensus view is that trams in the UK can only work where they take over a railway line (derelict or still working but performing badly)? Dearie me – what a dire lack of imagination and foresight people have. All those daft Europeans, Americans, Australians and Hong Kongers with trams running down actual roads. Clearly their systems are complete and utter disasters (not!).

31. @WW: Anyone who says you can’t should be sent to Portugal….

32. @glbotu

    “The other tram scheme that everyone raves about is Manchester Metrolink, and that does a similar thing, only using roads to get across the city centre, but further out using disused railway lines. This generally allows for a faster tram and much less disruption in construction.”

    That’s not strictly true, Manchester Metrolink is a mixed bag. The Bury, Altrincham and East Didsbury lines are the only ones to exclusively use former heavy-rail trackbeds (albeit linked via street running through the city-centre).

    The Oldham-Rochdale line runs predominantly along an old railway alignment, but has sections leaving the trackbed and running through the streets in Oldham and Rochdale town centres.

    The Eccles, East Manchester and Airport lines however do not use any former railway infrastructure and run along a combination of reservations alongside or in-between roads, or running directly on-street.

33. Anomnibus,

    Conventional economic agglomeration theory as applied to networks is that the most cost-effective option is nearly always to expand what you have got rather than try and replicate the same elsewhere and hope they join up. If it were telephone networks that couldn’t communicate with each other (e.g. someone on Croydon exchange couldn’t phone someone on the Romford-Upminster exchange) it might be easier to visualise this concept. Like a small telephone exchange not linked to the outside world, a small standalone tram network would generally be of limited use.

    Each time you build a new satellite tram system you risk encountering a load of startup costs (e.g. depots with expensive wheel-lathes and lots of new track) and dilution of expertise. Besides it is probably easier to sell the idea of expansion of a popular existing local network than attempt to promote a new controversial one. Extending an existing tram network generally gives many more journey opportunities than building a new one and certainly does on a bang per buck basis.

    Judging by attempts in the past few years to introduce new tram networks to London, I would suggest recent history appears to be against the idea whereas organic growth (of tram users) in Croydon has worked very well albeit a bit slowly at first and despite very little encouragement or support.

    As long as there are realistic schemes for expansion or meaningful capacity improvements I would suggest that these should have priority and any financial analysis would probably back that case up. If the day ever came when there were no more sensible enhancements that could be made to Croydon Tramlink then that would be the time to look again at other schemes in London.

34. @Walthamstow Writer

    The Europeans, Americans, Australians and Hong Kongers have something that we sorely lack: space. If you go look at the Amsterdam Trams, or the Koln Stadtbahn (apologies if my knowledge of LR networks further afield is less than perfect), these all run on central reservations in the middle of 4 lane roads. We don’t have the luxury of 4 lane roads with central reservations, we either convert a road to full tram use (as was done with many of the roads in Nottingham), or we accept mixed use (as in Croydon Town Centre), hence the relative success of trams that use limited street running, and lack thereof of trams that use it extensively in this country.

    @PoP

    Surely that’s missing the fact that any new Tram system that is segregated from the existing Tram system is still wider linked by the Tube/DLR/Rail. It’s not like being unable to call someone on a separate network, because you can, just via a different network. I assume no-one would make a journey from Romford to Wimbledon by Tram (well, no-one other than Tram Enthusiasts). I agree it’s not going to do anything for the residents of South London though.

    But that’s a totally different discussion. The merits of a wider London Tram network are probably for another time, but could be interesting with a view to an “Outer Tram Ring” or something.

35. @Graham H

    I’m kind of talking about both I guess, because both are relevant to the discussion.

    (apologies for double post, if someone wants to smush this one into the one above, that would be grand)

36. @ glbutu

    Hong Kong has more space than London? That is a remark worthy of further discussion, although I doubt this is the place for it.

37. @glbotu,

    Yes, I take your point but I would argue it is about perception. People who are happy to catch a tram are often less than happy to take a bus. They also wouldn’t so readily use the tram then catch a train to Selhurst or Norwood Junction – or, more relevantly, to Crystal Palace. However they would more be much more willing to change trams to get to their destination.

38. @ Milton Clevedon

    Are you saying there was once a tram depot in Hillingdon?? I don’t think there was. I know only of Acton and Hanwell

39. @Walthamstow Writer:

    “So the consensus view is that trams in the UK can only work where they take over a railway line (derelict or still working but performing badly)?”

    No, I haven’t claimed this. Technically, there’s no reason London couldn’t slap tram tracks down almost every road in the city. Politically and pragmatically, on the other hand, street-running trams sharing road space with other vehicles are a much harder sell than segregated trams.

    Unlike those other cities you mention, London is a mostly low-rise, low-density city. As a result, shopping facilities tend to be clustered: if you need something the corner shop doesn’t sell, you have to go ‘into town’ to get it. Contrast with cities like Rome, Paris, or Copenhagen, and you’ll find supermarkets, cafes, bars, and whatnot on almost every street, including minor side streets. Contrast with, say, the A2 through Deptford: once clear of the High Street area, you’re in almost exclusively residential territory until the next “High Street”.

    [Off topic portions snipped. LBM]

40. @glbotu – itis quite important to distinguish between construction disruption, which lasts only a short time (except in Edinburgh) but does equire at least half of the street to be closed to all traffic, and operational disruption to other traffic whichmay be quite limited, even in narrowish streets – a (pleasant) trip to Bern, or Freiburg or Gent,would make the point. When trams were replaced by buses, the public were solemnly assured by the “experts” of the day, how much less disruptive it would be for buses to “swim” (to use the then fashionable term) in ordinary traffic. We all know better now – a bus service in two lane streets is just as disruptive as a tram, because it has to stop from time to time and in busy urban streets,the opportunity to overtake it on the wrong side of the road is limited. (I started to write a further comment on the issue of kerbside parking but realised that unless thetram tracks are reserved, it’s an irrelevancy).

41. @Dr. Richards Beeching:

    Hong Kong’s population dropped to around 600K after WW2, so almost everything you see in its high-rise skyline is post-war. Very few old buildings are left. While it does have a number of narrow streets, nobody builds massive skyscrapers right next to each other like terraced Victorian housing.

    HK’s tram ‘network’ is actually just a single (very long) line that was built along what was originally the coast. The line opened in 1902, so the trams were therefore plying the streets long before all those skyscrapers appeared.

42. @DRB
    Yes there was – though it might have had a shortish operational life. Perhaps someone else can say how long it lasted for tram use.

    The 3/- LUT history book by Brian Connelly: ‘The L-U-T- a short History’ (a blue 36pp booklet published 1964 by the Tramway & Light Railway Society, I’m looking at my copy now) shows the depot, in the map at the back of the book. I remember looking at original large scale maps showing the tramline and depot, and the passing loops elsewhere, in the British Library, when researching bus vs tram route 7 stop locations during the early 1970s, and then seeing it, still standing as a building and used as a vehicle or trades depot, on a passing 207.

    I suspect the tram depot was authorised during the LUT expansionary period but not really needed after expansion slowed and stopped in the later 1900s. The Southall South Road-Uxbridge tram line opened on 1st June 1904. It was 2 miles 35 chains double track, and 3 miles 12 chains single track. It is the latter section where it is possible to define the almost perfect correlation between 1900s tram passing loops and latter day bus stops – and the bus stop near the long single track line past the depot.

    I don’t think anyone had questioned why the bus stops were where they were, until my research in the 1970s… (Unless you are aware of the stop regularisation scheme tried in about 1935 along the Seven Sisters Road – a latter-day leaflet was issued about that.) In practice, along the Uxbridge Road, the modern day bus stops were defined by the potential tram frequency plus a bit of operational redundancy for the single track, and some more recent traffic engineering. Well, it’s one way to define your 2010s bus stop locations! After all, there wasn’t much housing there in the 1900s – perhaps it grew around the loops/stops!

    Returning to the main theme, Croydon Tramlink had huge problems defining stop locations along the various original lines, with topography, local sensitivity and practicability being an unholy combination of issues. Given that stop locations can seriously affect patronage and running times and hence fleet requirements, it is actually a very important subject.

43. @MC – – Wilson’s History of LUT mentions the Hillingdon depot (which opened for service when the Uxbridge route started), together with an adjacent substation, but no depot is listed in Oakley’s history of LT trams, so it had clearly gone by 1933. BTW, on stop spacing, I was referring to the lines east of Southall, which were double track from the outset (and,as noted, a similar close spacing of stops occurs on most other ex-trolleybus/tram routes).

44. @Graham H, @WW I’ve seen buses used creatively on narrow streets – see Florence (which also has a tram, but again mostly running segregatedly). And even if a bus ends up being no less disruptive than a tram, it’s not going to be any more so.

    Honestly I struggle to see the value of a tram if it’s just replacing a bus (trolleybus if we want to talk about emissions) and running along the same street lanes. It’s less flexible and more expensive with no gain I can see in terms of capacity, journey time, or effect on other road users.

    Where the majority of the run can be segregated – whether that’s Amsterdam style in the central reservation or along a former railway line – then a tram gives you the same capacity as a bus in a smaller footprint (and in the rail case may be cheaper than converting to a busway), so I can see the advantage there.

45. @Pedantic of Purley:

    I think @glbotu sums up why I don’t think a multiple nucleus approach is a problem.

    To borrow your own communications analogy: when I make a phone call to London from Rome, my mobile phone connects by radio to a cell mast, which then shunts the call onto a fibre-optic cable, where it might then go via a satellite dish to get to BT’s network, where it’s then shunted back onto their own High Speed fibre-optic network, until it gets close to the destination where it’s shunted once more onto the ‘classic’ copper wire that runs the last mile to the destination. It’s not just one long copper wire from end to end.

    “As long as there are realistic schemes for expansion or meaningful capacity improvements I would suggest that these should have priority and any financial analysis would probably back that case up.”

    My point is precisely that there aren’t any such schemes available. We’ve clearly hit “Peak Tramlink”. Any further extensions, to places like Sutton, Streatham, or anywhere else remotely useful, will all require long stretches of on-street running, often along arterial roads. Alternative routes are difficult to find for some of these.

    Major surgery is also clearly going to be needed in Croydon, Wimbledon, or both, if either is to be served effectively by such extensions. Your own articles even suggest surgery would be needed on the Beckenham Junction branch sooner rather than later, and that’s certainly a requirement for the oft-mooted Crystal Palace branch to be built.

    The capacity issues at Therapia Lane depot aside, we now know that there has been serious consideration given to not one, but two additional “Croydon Loop” projects. “Half-baked” doesn’t even begin to describe such Heath Robinson ‘solutions’.

    *

    If the ultimate goal is to create a London-wide tram network , I think it’s best to attack the problem in bite-sized chunks. You need political will and support to build this kind of infrastructure at all, but few politicians will stick their neck out for long-term infrastructure construction projects that will be completed long after they’ve retired from public office.

    Smaller, quick-win projects are much easier to sell politically, while their lower capital costs also make them easier pills for the taxpayer to swallow. (That it often means paying more over the long term doesn’t appear to be an issue for HM Treasury. After all, they’re the ones who thought PPP and PFI deals were a good idea.)

    [Minor snip for language. PoP]

46. @lmm – there are two, maybe four, advantages of trams over buses:

    – they can carry more people per square metre – this is a function of their smoother ride – you can pack ’em in without everybody toppling onto each other when the vehicle swerves or brakes…
    – passengers appreciate the smoother ride
    – you can fit a tram into spaces than you can’t with a bus because you can control its path very accurately
    – trams last 2-3 times longer than buses (but of course require extra infrastructure)

    These points don’t give trams a universal advantage by any means, but for higher volume flows, they are hard to beat.

47. Anomnibus,

    You clearly have a view and I clearly have a different view. I can’t agree with some of your assertions and the over-emotive language isn’t helpful. I feel we would get nowhere arguing the finer detail so perhaps we had better leave it there.

48. Hillingdon Tram Depot- the history of this is given in volume of C.S.Smeeton’s “The London United Tramways” published by the LRTA in 2000. From 1908/09 it became a store for surplus rolling stock, some cars were scrapped there after World War I, and from 1923 the company leased it to various other businesses; at one time it was used for the manufacture of Dodgem cars. London Transport sold it in 1964.

49. @lmm. There is the ‘visible infrastructure’ effect too. Even the higher-ups in TfL acknowledge that this effect is real. Buses are a total mystery to a very large proportion of the population, because they are not confident that they know where they are going. Those tram tracks in the street plus the superior info at the stops helps to overcome that anxiety. I don’t know whether this would apply to trolleybuses too, but people are more likely to look down than look up.

50. @Pedantic of Purley:

    Agreed.

    @Graham H:

    It did strike me that converting the most popular articulated (‘bendy’) bus routes to use articulated trams instead could make sense even if they ran entirely on-street. This might even work as a way to get a tram project approved: you have proven passenger demand, and you can also point at the green credentials.

    I suspect you’d need more than one line to make the up-front investment (depots and other ancillary infrastructure) viable, but that just brings me back to nuclei and critical mass. I’m repeating myself; time for me to step away from the keyboard.

51. A brief comment regarding tram/trolleybus routes and bus routes.

    I’ve a map of the system shortly after WW2 and many of the routes are still bus routes today.

    Whether cause or effect, the tram/trolleybus routes are often on fairly wide roads.

    The “mystery” of the bus system for some people is a fact. I find being able to take a bus with some confidence of getting off at the right place only happens once I have a grip on the local geography.

52. Thank you both for the info on a tram depot in Hillingdon. This is a revelation to me.

53. fandroid
    (buses)because they are not confident that they know where they are going.
    Made much worse, recently, in London, by the removal of intermediate calling-place lists in the destination boards.
    I would like to know [Snipped for politeness, once again. LBM] who thought that less useful information was a good idea, or did it just “happen”?

54. I think I must be living in a different world to other people. There is plenty of evidence that you can make street running trams work perfectly well. All we suffer from in the UK is an ignorant media and a great deal of nonsensical fear amongst ordinary people who have no real knowledge of trams or who just have a rampant fear of their “freedom” to use their car being restricted. There are, of course, plenty of vested interests to stoke that ignorance and fear. We would need a massive campaign to win hearts and minds but we do have evidence of decent tram services running in the UK, never mind elsewhere.

    Yes there are some places that have wide streets but that is not a universal truth and trams manage to fit through all sorts of environments without wreaking havoc on the inhabitants. I also find it incredulous that anyone can rationally argue that we should carry on with a policy of running diesel double decker buses on corridors that easily support 7m+ pass jnys per annum. The sheer numbers of vehicles of London’s busiest bus routes is just a madness when you could run the same routes with fewer trams and provide a more comfortable and accessible service for people. I fully endorse Reynolds 953’s point about a transfer of road space triggering a reduction in motor vehicle usage. The use of trams provides a high quality alternative that is proven the world over to be more attractive to motorists and “bus haters”.

    London’s current strategy seems to be to substitute diesel buses with lumbering hybrids that carry fewer people and take up more road space or possibly all electric deckers that will struggle to carry 80 people if we’re lucky and barely 55 people seated. This means you need even more vehicles to cater for a given demand level meaning more drivers, more garage space, more maintenance cost and a likely much higher purchase price. How to turn the economics of the bus network completely on its head! It’s insanity and it’s not sustainable given the inevitable pressures to reduce / remove subsidy from the bus network.

    And can we stop the lectures about London’s density please. If London is somehow not “dense” then why on earth have we got such overstretched transport corridors right across the capital? Nearly every part of the capital has huge transport flows by rail and by bus and in some cases by car and it’s not all people travelling from outside. There are huge flows inside the city and between multiple centres. It isn’t all to Zone 1. Many of those corridors would easily justify tram services whether run on street or not. I’ll shut up now because my sense of what is needed and achieveable, albeit with a battle along the way, is clearly vastly different to other people’s views.

55. Just to complete the Hillingdon depot aspect, using the Smeeton source quoted above, it was built as Milton Clevedon surmises, when the London United Tramways were intending to extend their tramway from Uxbridge to High Wycombe (!) and it was first leased out for other purposes in 1923, once it was clear that such extensions were not going to take place.

56. @glbotu
    Only a relatively small proportion of the Amsterdam tram network runs on central reservations. Almost all of the inner part of Amsterdam – and many parts of the outer areas – run as conventional street running trams, often on quite narrow streets. The same is true in cities such as Lisbon and Vienna. It’s quite misleading to think that trams work in other European cities because they have plenty of space. It’s more that while we were getting rid of tram networks in the fifties and sixties, on the basis that cars were the transport of the future, much of Europe, still recovering from the war, had not yet achieved the same levels of car ownership and trams were still seen as essential. By the time the seventies arrived and wealth had caught up, the idea that cars were the unalloyed transport of the future had become modified and there was more political pressure to retain tram networks. Hence the core networks were not reinstated or reintroduced, as has happened in the UK, but were the original networks retained and modernised (and often extended). It was much easier to modernise what you had rather than replace it with something different.

57. @ Mark H ” Whether cause or effect, the tram/trolleybus routes are often on fairly wide roads.”

    Odd thing was that once the overhead wires and traction poles had been removed many of these streets suddenly seemed to be smaller and less wide !

    If we compare Croydon Tramlink with the DLR we see how Tramlink is basically still basically the same network as when it opened while the DLR also opened as a small network but the people behind it had a skill in developing small extenstions and upgrades which meant its network kept growing for many years .

    In fact one problem with the Cross River Tram was that it was also a standalone scheme . However, if Tramlink had followed the DLR example then while construction of the initial scheme was underway then small extenstions to say South Croydon of line from West to East Croydon Station and thus double tracking route would have created a North South route able to be extended outwards at both ends thus re-creating route towards Cross River Tram in stages ( e.g Streatham then Brixton then Camberwell etc.).

    The same problem affected West London Tram but we now have possibility of perhaps looking at conversion of Greenford to West Ealing line to tram/ light rail .

    While Old Oak Common provides an opportunity to develop a network in West London alongside development for Crossrail / HS2 which like the DLR could be built before the NIMBYs move in !

58. @WW
    No one is saying that street running trams won’t work, just that there are political and practical pitfalls against them. All the foreign places you mention have no plans to run trams on a 2-lane road that forms the main arterial through southern suburbia, but your Streatham idea does – for a start the M23 would have been built in some form in any developed country outside of the UK, clearing the A23 of non-local traffic.

    On-street corridors to Sutton and Purley and Thornton Heath Pond have the benefit – like New Addington (and Eccles, Ashton and Wythenshawe) of linking into an existing, and successful, network of trams (because they use the benefits of trams over both trains and buses, rather than just being a shiny bus network like Sheffield, or stops-too-much suburban rail route like Midland Metro). This makes them different to WLT, CRT, Oxford Street, etc that failed to happen. However there’s still issues – the capital cost of conversion of the corridor either needs to 1)increase ridership, 2)increase capacity, 3)increase connectivity or 4)decrease journey times to justify itself. 1) is a problem on highly trafficked bus corridors unless 2) happens in a big way, which is hard to do on highly trafficked bus corridors and only single length trams running at 10-12tph. 4) is next to impossible on the N-S cross-Croydon, but there’s potential on the Sutton route.

    There’s a lot of potential for the Brighton Road tram route, but a lot of problems. The fact that no long-term planning document even proposes anything for Tramlink other than South Wimbledon, Sutton and the turn-back-on-the-edge-of-the-centre loops suggest, however, that the once-proposed Streatham/Purley extensions have been found to be crayonistic plans that look good on paper, but struggle when confronted with business plans, cost-benefit analysis, road traffic, getting the trams across Central Croydon, political will and/or other dealings with reality.

    @Graham H – re Uxbridge Road stop density: for sure it was stop rationalisation and makes sense in the abstract, but it contributed to the local negativity about the scheme – locals, justifiably, felt that they would suffer a lot of disruption (especially where private cars would be forced to divert off it) for what was little gain, if any, with many bus users seeing the proposed tram service as worse than what they have.

59. By ‘street running trams’ I should clarify that to mean trams that run almost entirely on streets, not trams that run some of the time on-street (which is the whole point of trams, after all!)

60. So if terrain conditions preclude an underground pre-metro section, and there is no roadspace available for an increase in on-street tracks, then is there a block on going ‘up’ to a raised north-south route a la DLR?

61. @Alison
    I don’t think ‘trams-on-stilts’ would be very popular in Croydon – the place is only just getting away from the reputation for 60s-tastic car-centric flyovers and underpasses.

    I would have thought the N-S aignment via London Rd, North End and High St would be a pretty good tram route, as it is not that busy – through traffic is routed via Wellesley Rd or Roman Way.

62. Returning for a moment to PoP 14 Aug. at 08:51, PoP says “For starters on their inward journey to Croydon you want if possible to avoid trams having to come to a halt on a steep slope short of a road crossing (Woodbury Close). Unlike high-frequency bus routes only one tram is permitted to cross a road junction during one phase of the traffic lights so in order to avoid unnecessary delays it is best if this is avoided.”

    Trams already frequently come briefly to halt at the junction on that steep slope approaching Woodbury Close, from the Addiscombe direction in particular, because of either an Addington-bound tram is crossing its path but more often because a tram from Addington is let in front of it (and vice versa). That is a minor inconvenience that is well understood when normal running is not as it should be because of disruption elsewhere.

    Where PoP says “only one tram is permitted to cross a road junction during one phase of the traffic lights”, I am sure you will realise that he is referring to only one tram travelling in the same direction. It is common practice to permit trams travelling in opposite directions to cross roads at the same time.

    However, I have to say that I have known trams that have ‘bunched’ to be permitted across junctions such as at the Addiscombe/Chepstow Roads intersection one after the other during the same (or perhaps slightly extended?) traffic light phase. There, in the outbound direction, buses caught up perhaps between trams on Addiscombe Road can also clear the crossing at the same time.

63. P.S. When I mentioned buses being ‘caught up’ between trams, you need to visit the location because it’s all a bit of cat and mouse along the stretch of Addiscombe Road shared with the buses, especially when the bus drivers don’t pull correctly into the kerb at their dedicated bus stop to permit a tram to pass. The tram therefore has to hang around for the bus to depart its stop before it (the tram) can reach its own stop just beyond. Needless to say, the tram drivers are politeness itself and just put up with it. One would think that they work for the same company. Most heartening…

    As an example, this Google street view is at the Lebanon Road bus stop with the tram stop beyond:

    http://tinyurl.com/ntzuj5l

64. Regarding the off-street (or re-use abandoned/displaced rail alignments) vs on-street argument – I first heard this before or around the time of Tramlink’s gestation.
    It came from a comparison of Manchester Metro with Sheffield “Super”Tram. The assertion was that the former was a success whilst the latter was a failure, and claimed the reason was that the Metro used existing (allegedly well-known) routes whilst Sheffield created routes based on planners assumptions about likely desired routes.
    There are so many holes in that argument (only increased by the intervening 20 years or so) they’re hardly worth listing here !!

65. Graham Feakins,

    Correct me if I am wrong as you know these things better than me, I have only observed the trams coming to a halt east of Woodbury Close since the timetable with route 4 (Elmers End – Therapia Lane) was added. Which seems to me to show the importance of a “good” timetable with even regular intervals on all lines as opposed to the “bad” one we have now.

    I think you also highlight how critical the East Croydon – Sandilands section is now and how it will be more so in future. People tend to focus on the town centre and get hung on additional loops to turn trams around before reaching the town centre but, to me, the East Croydon – Sandilands capacity issue and the lack of plans to address this is a bigger concern. As you point out this is also a major bus route. I really don’t know what the answer to this is.

66. @Mike P -some of the planners I know who were involved in the Sheffield system layout used to claim that, in fact, if they had been listened to, the system would have served additional housing estates and been a success. But may be they would say that, wouldn’t they?

67. PoP – I think that you are correct in saying that Route 4 has magnified the problem. Even if a westbound tram is let through the junction and beyond the worst of the slope, it may well be held up just behind a tram at Sandilands stop, with Woodbury Close ‘minor crossing’ (it’s a cul-de-sac) in between the two trams.

    One suggested answer to the conundrum you pose would be to make the junction a triangular one and create a tram route which would thus reinstate the original railway alignment of the Mid Kent line, directly connecting today’s Addington and Addiscombe/Beckenham/Elmers End routes and so avoiding Central Croydon altogether. Not only would this reduce/eliminate the significant traffic flow changing trams between those routes at Sandilands but, as suggested in the past, would be a useful routeing for any extension to Crystal Palace.

68. @Walthamstow Writer:
    
    [Over-generalisations snipped. LBM]

    Like the mythical unicorn that is the Bakerloo Extension, I honestly don’t see Tramlink extending any further in the foreseeable future. It’s already had 15 years. The DLR had already reached both the City and Lewisham in the same timeframe, among other places.

69. Anomnibus,

    Yes, but you not seeing Tramlink extending any further in the foreseeable future is based on what? The only extension that was seriously talked about (to the point of going out to consultation) in the past 15 years was to Crystal Palace and that peaked at just the wrong time (financial crisis). Then I think, rather belatedly, it was realised that the eastern side of Tramlink would not be able to handle yet another branch running from East Croydon to Sandilands due to predicted rising demand on existing routes.

    The only way I think you can be correct is if you don’t count the new town loops as extensions. I cannot believe the Dingwall Road loop will not be built with £15 million of the £28 million being provided by the developer of Croydon’s new shopping centre – unless that doesn’t go ahead.

    Also, it depends on whether you consider Sutton Tramlink to be an extension of Croydon Tramlink or not.

    The schemes mentioned above at least have some years of planning behind them whereas, as far as I am aware, there is no other scheme in London that has been developed to that extent and hasn’t been abandoned.

    There is also the mandatory caution about there is not much point in developing a tram scheme if the local borough doesn’t support it so that wipes out large areas of London as having potential for trams.

70. Some comments here:

    – Tram tunnel in suitable terrain: Amsterdam Metro anyone? A Dutch saying goes: “Amsterdam, that old city, built one poles…”. Rotterdam is pretty much the same… So why can’t you build one in Croydon up on a hill?
    – some steets in Amsterdam are two way, with a single lane down the middle and carrying trams (and cars/trucks) in both directions…
    – Lisbon… Go pay a visit…

    All this stuff about on street running is just nonsense, it’s a nice to have… Trams are perfectly capable of moving any stray vehicles if required (except perhaps a loaded tipper truck) when required.

71. There does seem to be a common pattern on LR regarding possible tram projects in London.

    Phase 1. Someone says “the project will fail / is failing / has failed because of issue X”.
    Phase 2. Someone else says “trams run in place A in spite of issue X”. (Where place A is anywhere but London).
    Phase 3. The discussion then moves onto the detail of why place A’s solution to issue X might not work in London.

    What people in phase 3 are missing is that there is (I believe) a hidden prejudice in London against trams (which may well date back to LGOC, or the Boer War, or something), and the only schemes that have a gnat’s whisker of a chance are those where issue X is tiny, easily fixed, and preferably costing less than some tiny threshold (which I cynically put at about £75, but other figures are available).

72. It’s not just tram projects here that have huge hurdles to clear. It seems that any infrastructure project has to be proven beyond all reasonable doubt to be financially viable. It could be argued that this is a good thing…!

73. @ Malcolm – and the institutional issue you point at is even worse because the mindset reinforces the perpetuation of using buses where they’re not appropriate, of believing the tube can’t be expanded in any meaningful way and Crossrail is the only answer in town. It strikes me as ridiculous to be lumping future solutions almost exclusively into one massively expensive scheme that is very vulnerable to Treasury wavering. I know we may eventually get some tube upgrades but we’ll be lucky if they have any long lasting positive effect by the time they actually materialise. We really do need a far more varied and nuanced set of solutions to the demand crisis the transport network faces.

74. Historical street-running tram networks have been in place for a long time and only need to justify their operating and maintenance costs.

    To build a new tram network you need to justify several million in capital expenditure, plus several years of severe disruption. Whilst there are numerous tangible benefits to street-running tram routes, I think the business case for the initial investment is really difficult to make when a high frequency bus service can do a slightly less-good job without any.

    Thus segregated sections, former rail alignments and the like tend to play a larger role than they do in historical tram networks, because they help provide the additional benefit that justifies the capital cost and disruption.

    Manchester is an interesting case – for whilst some of the newer extensions don’t involve old heavy rail routes there is still greater segregation than you find historical tram networks. Manchester has the luxury of a less dense urban landscape than London, with more verge and central reservation space to convert for tram use, plus a far lower premium on land values where acquisitions are needed.

    Hidden prejudice? Maybe, but I can see why the BCRs for large investment in tram networks in London might not stack up.

75. @The other Paul. I think you are absolutely correct in questioning my claim of “hidden prejudice” (against trams). Although I feel there is such a thing (as I think do quite a few commenters here), I cannot prove it, and your rational alternative explanations for the paucity of approved schemes make very good sense. I particularly note the point that high frequency buses do only a “slightly less-good job” with next-to-no investment in fixed infrastructure.

76. I think you could build a quite extensive network of tram lines in London. But it would not be able to run on an idealised segregated basis.

    The West London tram scheme was a scheme of two halves. West of Southall the road is a dual carriageway lined with 30’s suburbia. While there was no wide central reservation to convert there still would have been one lane free for traffic.

    The problem was east of there. The designers wanted large junctions to ensure trams would not be caught by turning traffic and proposed lots of demolition to widen junctions. In narrower sections they wanted to ban people from even stopping in front of their homes or business, or close them to all traffic and divert traffic down residential streets.

    It was the desire to segregate the tram from traffic as much as possible that led to the schemes downfall. They were too ambitious in their plan.

    I never understood why the scheme had to run past Ealing Broadway to Shepherds Bush, when the Central Line already connects them.
    It would have avoided a large amount of narrow streets in the most densely built up part of the route.

    A tram line that had ended at Ealing Broadway would have captured all those who change to the tube there and only had to contend with th e congested parts through West Ealing and Southall. Either they could have accepted the tram sit in traffic in these sections, or they could have looked at a tram metro line under Southall and maybe West Ealing.

    The West London tram is a lesson in how to not build a transit scheme. In it’s desire for faster running times than the bus, it added cost, a great deal in disruption and massive traffic diversion off the main road through residential streets.

    There are plenty of places to run trams in London. Apart from suburban dual carriageways, there are all those wide streets with long bus lanes. Of course that means you better not run buses down those streets as well. In areas with no bus lanes and narrow roads then, the trams will have to just sit in traffic.

    Ideally any future route would utilise as much off road space a possible and then wider roads, where segregation is possible, leaving only a small proportion to run on ‘busy’ narrow roads.

    What I do doubt is the ability of trams and buses to share the same route (mainly due to the required frequencies of both in London). It would need Oyster to allow timed transfers to tram so bus passengers can change to tram. New street running trams would require a major re organisation of the bus network.

    Unlike a lot of cities London’s bus network offers a high frequency network offering routes in all directions, linking particular key destinations and neighbourhoods. Unlike many cites abroad where bus routes serve long corridors and people are expected to change.

    People could find themselves losing one seat rides to having to make two or three changes, losing time in interchanging in what they gain in a faster tram.

    To make trams work in Inner London, I suspect you’d need an agreed rolling programme that converted who sectors of London streets, so multiple tram routes could run at once.

    Unless there is a mass building programme of new tube lines covering zone one to three, the only future for inner London is conversion to tram to cope with the rise in population.

77. Rational Plan,

    Of course there are plenty of places in London where you could run trams. I think most people would agree with that. But how many places are there in London where TfL could be confident that the local authority would support them? And they can’t just be Ealing-style fair-weather supporters. So far I think we can only rely on Croydon, Sutton and Merton.

78. @Rational Plan – there is a bit of a tube and rail “black hole” along the Uxbridge Road between Acton and Shepherd Bush and at its epicentre (roughly at the north end of Askew Rd) it is about a mile walk to the nearest station on Central, District or Overground lines, depending what direction you head.

    The tram would have plugged that fairly large gap but I agree with you that the public just saw problems with the narrower sections such as through Acton High St.

79. @poP
    “Each time you build a new satellite tram system you risk encountering a load of startup costs (e.g. depots with expensive wheel-lathes and lots of new track) and dilution of expertise.”
    @glbotu
    “Surely that’s missing the fact that any new Tram system that is segregated from the existing Tram system is still wider linked by the Tube/DLR/Rail. It’s not like being unable to call someone on a separate network, because you can, just via a different network. ”
    No, Pop’s point was that you get operational economies if you have one integrated system rather than lots of little self-contained ones. Even if the extra rolling stock requires a new depot, some basic facilities can be shared (wheel lathe has been cited – major repairs and overhauls for example).
    London Transport understood this, taking great pains during the long drawn out (and never completed) transition from trams to trolleybuses to ensure that both networks were always completely connected – the isolated Woolwich/Dartford TBs being a notable exception forced on LT by the dire condition of the tram infrastructure they inherited.

    But it is unlikely that any expansion of the existing Croydon tram network is possible if it simply feeds more trams into Croydon’s core. Following Manchester’s example, a second cross-centre line might be contemplated (Although, to quote Chris Mitch, “I don’t think “trams-on-stilts’ would be very popular in Croydon “. it could use the xisting flyover!)
    Or a second main line with a connection to the existing network for working to and from the depot (Sutton Tramlink?)

    @Anonymous
    “I’ve heard it suggested that the Birmingham Snow Hill – Wolverhampton Low Level line is still technically a railway”
    As far as The Hawthorns it is still very much an operational railway – the trams only using half of the quadruple trackbed

    The perception of trams being better than buses was very evident when I was in Edinburgh this weekend. The tram I was on stopped at Haymarket, and a couple dashed to board it. Paying on board that’s £10 each (a fiver if they had time to buy a ticket from the machine)

    Not ten yards away was one of these
    https://www.flickr.com/photos/57537453@N02/19981859424

    Note the fare. It takes 20 minutes – ten minutes less than the tram!

80. @Rational Plan
    In it’s desire for faster running times than the bus, it added cost, a great deal in disruption and massive traffic diversion off the main road through residential streets.
    But it was also in pursuit of a real benefit; without which there is no case for spending hundreds of millions on it in the first place.

    As I suggested above – we have a street-running public transport vehicle, the bus, and even if it does a slightly less good job than a tram, it has the significant benefit of the infrastructure being already in place and requiring no new investment. You need more capacity? You run a few extra buses at the fraction of the cost of a tram network!

    I’ve spent many hours sitting on buses running through Acton, and I can vouch for the fact that the place is a painful traffic jam for most of the day. Doing something about that was a major benefit of the WLT scheme, and it required segregation of trams, otherwise they’d just end up sitting in the same traffic the buses do today and there’d be no point.

81. PoP says “ But how many places are there in London where TfL could be confident that the local authority would support them? [re a tram project]”

    For “confident” it may be necessary to stick to the three you name. And in a few boroughs, experience (and known local sentiment) show that TfL could be confident that the LA would not support trams. But there are 33 London Boroughs, so doesn’t that leave a fair few where support at least cannot be ruled out?

82. @ PoP – I think you could probably add Southwark to your list of pro tram boroughs. They were supportive of that (albeit half baked) private sector tram proposal for a service down Walworth Road. Now I suspect there is an element of Southwark supporting anything rail based that would add capacity and accessibility for their borough but you can make the same point about Sutton. If there were reasonably well developed plans for trams taking over from buses on main corridors I rather suspect Camden, Islington and Hackney were probably be in favour. You might even stretch to Harringey to replace the 29, 149, 243. 259 and 279 buses (wholly or in part). The real nasty problem areas are the City of London, City of Westminster and RB Kensington and Chelsea where money talks over everything else and there is little / no rationality about public transport. I also suspect you’d hit problems with Tower Hamlets, Newham, Hammersmith and Fulham, Wandsworth and Lambeth because of creeping gentrification that demand tubes and Crossrails and nothing else. Outer boroughs like Brent, Ealing, Harrow, Barnet and Redbridge probably wouldn’t know a tram if one fell from the sky.

83. Walthamstow Writer,

    For the most part I do not feel qualified to comment but surely Camden was extremely unhelpful when it came to Cross River Tram. I recall some rather strange routing in the Euston/King’s Cross area to overcome some of the their objections.

84. @PoP – whilst not dissenting from your understanding of Camden’s attitude, I thought that many of the problems of CrossRiver Tram in the Euston area stemmed from a genuine difficulty in making the right turn across the Euston Road towards KX – a difficulty that buses face in spades today. If only the |British Library had been built somewhere else….

85. @Graham H at 14 August 2015 at 18:09
    ” trams last 2-3 times longer than buses”
    Often cited by UK tram promoters, where current practice seems intent on disproving it: Midland Metro’s last T69 cars were reported as withdrawn this week after 16 years of use, and Manchester has completely dispensed with its 1992 and 1999 built fleet.

    Blackpool meanwhile kept 75 year old cars in front line use until relatively recently, and Milan is quite happily using around 100 of the once 500+ fleet of 1929-1930 Peter Witt cars. Compare also Stagecoach, which is still running 20 year old Volvo B10Ms, until the law makes them illegal at the end of December.

86. Sorry if this is already mentioned in the comments.

    Is the maximum capacity through Croydon symetric or asymetric? To me it seems like the eastbound route has potential for a few more trams than the westbound that has to deal with all pedestrians.

    The cost of the two proposed loops could perhaps instead cover the cost of a new westbound route, for example a bit to the south of the current one?

    Re the intersections and longer trams – there is a far less expensive solution. Just put an extra transponder under each long tram – one transponder in the front and one in the same distance from the rear as the lenght of the current trams. That way the front transponder can tell the intersection control systems that there is an approaching tram, and the second transponder can tell the intersection control systems that the tram has just cleard the intersection.

    Re Sutton tram link and South Wimbledon – why not just end the pain by making some kind of second route diverging far closer to Wimbledon station and let that new route have a stop at Wimbledon station, but on street level rather than rail level? That would be ideal both for Sutton and extra Croydon services. AFAIK it’s well established that the Northern line Morden branch doesn’t have any spare capacity so it seems silly to feed more passengers to South Wimbledon station. (If that line actually had spare capacity it would probably be better to install two tracks outside of the Morden depot and connect them to the Thameslink Sutton loop tracks and with a mixed-mode setup extend the Northern line Morden branch to Sutton on existing tracks. That won’t happend for the same reasons that it’s a bad idea to feed to South Wimbledon station).

    Re bus 109 mentioned in the comments – that is afaik the “bus extension” of the Victoria line from Brixton. AFAIK a hypothetical extension of Victoria line has had an article here at LR and the conclusion is that Victoria line doesn’t have any free capacity so it would be (more) overcrowded if it would be extended. The same would probably apply if bus 109 would be replaced by a tram.

    It’s time for a more grand plan that takes in account that the real capacity problem is in central London. The reasons for that buses and trains are full even in the outskirts is of course that central Londons infrastructure doesn’t have room for more trains or buses, so therefore it’s no meaning to run more trains and buses when any extra train or bus can’t reach central London anyway. “Crossrailize” more existing rail lines that currently go to central London termini – that way those rail lines can have a “metro” frequency, thus increasing capacity.

87. Midland Metro’s T69s and Manchester’s T68s were all built by Ansaldo Breda, a company notorious for its poor build quality and low reliability, thus the shorter than hoped for life of the stock.

88. @ other paul. I can see that faster journey times are needed to justify the cost. But like all big infrastructure projects you need to pick your battles, other wise you could happily bulldoze surface railways and new roads through the suburbs, instead of the insane costs of tunnelling.

    To get a successful scheme built you need to minimise disruption to residents, otherwise they’ll fight you all the way. Though short of a new tube line, someone will fight you all the way, and even then….!

    I think the only angle that will work for tram schemes, is the increase in capacity offered compared to buses.

    The only trick will be to minimise the amount of route that can’t be separated, and where you have to have it in mixed traffic, either try to run the tram down a quieter road, rather than forcing road traffic to divert, or have it mix with traffic, but closing off streets to other vehicles and junction widening, that requires demolition.

    A less ambitious West London tram line might have been built. If they only had to fight people in Southall it might have got through. Once it was open and if the traffic diversion problem was not as bad as portrayed, then they might have got Shepherds Bush as a second stage.

    Build what you can, where you can. Small victories are better than none. If you succeed, your detractors will melt away and will suddenly have supported you all along and if it is a disaster, then you did not waste as much money.

89. @MiaM – “Re bus 109 mentioned in the comments – that is afaik the “bus extension” of the Victoria line from Brixton. AFAIK a hypothetical extension of Victoria line has….. and the conclusion is that Victoria line doesn’t have any free capacity so it would be (more) overcrowded if it would be extended. The same would probably apply if bus 109 would be replaced by a tram.”

    Just for historical interest, the 109 bus route WAS the bus that replaced the trams (routes 16/18) on the Purley – Croydon – Brixton – Embankment artery in the first place. Moreover, so far as I know, because the 16/18 tram route was so busy, it was the only route where the replacement RT buses on the 109 had to be timed to run in pairs!

90. @Rational Plan
    I think the only angle that will work for tram schemes, is the increase in capacity offered compared to buses.
    I guess this is the crux of it isn’t it? I like trams but I struggle to see how just swapping tyres for rails can possibly deliver enough extra capacity to justify the 9 figure price tag.

    To analyse:
    An average modern tram is roughly 30m long and carries 200-250 people.
    An average double decker bus is roughly 10m long and carries 75 people
    So you can get three times as many people in a tram but it takes up three times as much road space. Where’s the capacity gain?

    The need for vehicle spacing doesn’t help much, especially not in slow London traffic, and trams also need more clearance at stops and on corners. Many more passengers have to stand on trams and service frequency is lower. Sure, you save some driver and energy costs by having fewer vehicles but I really can’t see a business case for spending hundreds of millions of pounds tearing up roads to add rails and wires.

    I agree the West London tram was doomed for the reasons you mention, but I can’t see how there would have been a financially viable case for a less segregated scheme.

91. @the Other Paul – It’s probably a mistake to think of the tram/bus choice as a simplistic either/or decision. There are many – probably most – bus routes where the bus is as cost-effective a solution as you can get. Equally, there will be some corridors where buses cannot cope. It is not just a matter of capacity. Two areas seem particularly important:

    – stop dwell time is minimised by using a single long vehicle with multiple entrances/exits. Buses can replicate that only by running in a fixed convoy which is flighted at the stops; in practice,of sourse, they can’t do that and arrive randomly blocking each other’s arrival and departure. (if you want a clear demonstration of the problem,watch the cab rank at any London terminus).
    – because trams offer a greatly superior ride in terms of smoothness of acceleration and braking, they can offer faster journey times to the normal jerky bus ride that we are all familiar with.
    – thirdly (with apologies to Monty Python), trams can fit more easily into narrow spaces because their swept path is, unlike that of buses, predictable to the last inch.

    Ally these advantages to their ability to use former rail formations, a perception that trams are more “modern” than buses (it wasn’t always so!), and the public appreciation that the track represents a physical commitment to provide a service, and you have most of the explanation as to why, in the right circumstances, trams are “better” than buses. [I am still reeling from the tale earlier on this site of the Edinburgh punters rushing to catch a tram to the airport at £10* each, when a very short wait would have produced a bus ride at half the price .)

    * 10! TEN! Last time I complain about fares anywhere else…

92. @ The Other Paul – I think you are missing a whole pile of things that can add to the tram business case. You are also making some interesting assumptions about the relative capacity on offer. You’ve instantly assumed frequencies are worse – they don’t have to be. From reports on other forums the 109 can be nightmarish to use. There are simply not enough buses so passengers can’t board the first and face long waits. This syndrome is repeated London wide so people face extended waits and longer journey times. Trams would reduce this likelihood. As for standing then yes it’s maybe not ideal but that’s what peak transport looks like in London. As already said trams offer a smoother ride making standing an easier task and there is more space on the level for those using wheelchairs, pushing buggies or needing priority seats near doors.

    Most tram systems have impressive records for improving patronage, reducing car usage, reducing car parking space in town centres, improving the environmental performance of the transport network, encouraging inward investment, providing nicer streetscapes and generally making places more “liveable”. A lot of these benefits can be quantified these days or are recognised as being positive factors. I think you’d struggle to convince some people that a bus can do the same. I don’t discount the political problems but most politicians do espouse the sorts of improvements I’ve listed. They just don’t understand that trams can help provide them because they don’t have the requisite knowledge and experience. Ditto for residents in areas that might be affected by any scheme. Still we have people creating “merry hell” over the prospect of a bus running down a road or a single deck being replaced by a double decker so perhaps we should just give up and become Los Angeles instead with motorways everywhere. Oh hang on, those self same people don’t want big roads and motorways on their doorstep either!

    I come back to the same point – we have a transport system that cannot cope. We must add capacity in that gap between what a bus can offer and what Crossrail offers. Trams and light rail are the sensible answer to part of that issue. We have policy that is stuck in a rut that ignores tons of evidence from across the world as to what can work. There are no guarantees that a chosen solution will always work or be considered the appropriate answer – see how views of the DLR have changed with the “benefit” of hindsight. However I doubt anyone would agree to shut the DLR even if a Crossrail was built alongside the full network but with wider station spacings. And as for the comment about Crossrail being a “metro” – err hello? It’s going to run 24 tph at max with all the odd headways that PoP has mentioned. Yes it’ll be busy and crowded but it is not the Tube with 36 tph. It’s a different beast. We need policy that will effectively blend all the options together to raise the capability and capacity of the transport network. I just hope Ms Dedring at City Hall is deploying her fearsome logic and intelligence to come up with something that takes us forward and does use the breadth of options available.

93. “Areas [that] seem particularly important:– stop dwell time is minimised by using a single long vehicle with multiple entrances/exits. Buses can replicate that only by running in a fixed convoy which is flighted at the stops; in practice,of sourse, they can’t do that and arrive randomly blocking each other’s arrival and departure. (if you want a clear demonstration of the problem,watch the cab rank at any London terminus).”

    If I remember rightly, this was an important part of the justification for the West London Tram and there were technical papers on the TfL website showing at what point additional buses provided a diminishing return of capacity as they got in each other’s way at stops and other places. It would be interesting to try to get hold of these papers, or any similar technical documents on this subject, or to find out of TfL have done other work on this. There seemed to be many corridors in London where additional buses do not add significant extra capacity because they simply start to interfere with each other.

94. @ Guano – I can’t point to specific evidence but I’m pretty sure I’ve read something along the lines you suggest about excessive bus frequencies being counter productive. You only need to look at certain bus routes to see what can happen with buses playing leap frog with one another. The passengers don’t exactly get a decent service. We can see already that TfL consider multi door boarding on surface transport routes as beneficial. Tramlink obviously has it but so did the bendy buses and so does the NB4L. This is because stop dwell time is an absolutely crucial component in determining resource efficiency in order to meet a given demand level. We also have 20+ years worth of effort to change the nature of ticketing transactions to get dwell times down or remove transaction times for those using rail services. With reference to the 109 corridor being able to serve stops at Brixton station in a matter of seconds rather than umpteen minutes would certainly be advantageous.

95. @WW/Guano – one wonders how Istanbul route 34 (quoted by straphan) copes with a bus every 30 seconds – perhaps it doesn’t, and from what I recall of public transport there, Idoubt if anyone wold care…

96. @[list of people who have disagreed with me]

    I feel I have been a little misrepresented in my absence, maybe I wasn’t clear enough. I largely agree with new tram schemes. I think they’re a good idea. I just think that spending money on planning a tram scheme that will likely be rejected on the grounds of disruption and not apparently offering a huge benefit is not a good idea. ie: My explanations were ones of “why I think it won’t get built”, rather than “why I think it’s a bad idea”. The general public, who will have a say in this (as that is part of the ol’ legal procedure), won’t be able to see past the years of disruption, for something they will likely see as a glorified bus.

    Would there be any benefit to a “second city crossing” via Waddon and Beddington, junction at Mitcham, down past the sewage works, along the A232 and Duppas Hill Road, joining back just before East Croydon tram stop at Park Lane. Takes the pressure off the Croydon Town centre loop and goes along lots of nice wide roads with lots of scope for segregation.

97. @Graham H
    “Edinburgh punters rushing to catch a tram to the airport at £10* each, when a very short wait would have produced a bus ride at half the price .)
    * Last time I complain about fares anywhere else…”

    You been on Heathrow Express recently? £21.50, again with a £5 surcharge for paying on board.

    The flat tram (or bus) fare in Edinburgh (unless you are going to or from the airport) is a very reasonable £1.50. The £10 “on board” tram fare is really a penalty fare by another name, charged for any distance on the tram if you didn’t buy a ticket before boarding. It doesn’t apply on the buses.

98. @timbeau – thanks for that; as you gather, I found £10 an astonishing number. A propos HEX,I’m pleased to say that I have never had occasion to use it, being domiciled south of Guildford; even a limo to Heathrow from here costs only £60 for up to four people.

99. @glbotu
    ” “second city crossing” ”
    I think you’re suggesting something similar to my idea of using the Croydon flyover, although whether a route via Beddington Lane would attract many users of the existing main line seems unlikely. Running alongside Purley Way between Waddon Marsh and Waddon would be cheaper and attract more custom.
    However, if you’re going along the A232, why not go all the way to Sutton? The beginnings of a real network start to emerge.
    (and also raises the interesting possibility of re-purposing the Croydon – Sutton railway instead)

100. @timbeau “(and also raises the interesting possibility of re-purposing the Croydon – Sutton railway instead)”

     Probably those using the 6 tph to Victoria would disagree with you…………….

101. Also, my reasoning for the location of turning off the A232 is that that’s the point at which it goes from being wide and providing locations for trams to being narrow and not doing that anymore.

102. @glbotu
     “Probably those using the 6 tph to Victoria would disagree with you…………….”

     possibly, although a more frequent tram to East Croydon or Sutton, where there are fast trains to Victoria, might be acceptable to some.

     Given the choice between the largely fictional 6tph I am supposed to have to Waterloo, or a frequent and reliable tram to a railhead on the SWML, I know which I would choose.

103. Re Timbeau,

     Where are you going to terminate those 6tph instead? – a large rebuild of West Croydon? How are the passengers meant to get on trains at East Croydon when passengers are already getting left behind?
     I can’t imagine that Train + Tram for Vic – Wallington would be the same price (or less) as just the train. At least 4tph are 10 car in peak which suggests there are plenty of punters.

104. Extra 6tph, some of which are 10-car

     More trains to places like Caterham or Uckfield, if they can be squeezed through East Croydon.

     Are Waddon, Wallington, and Carshalton Beeches really generating sixty coaches-worth of passengers in the peak hour? Or are most of these 10-car trains full of people who have come from further afield and would really rather go to Town via Mitcham Junction instead of round the houses?

     14 tph on a 3-platform terminus (or possibly four, if you reinstate Platform 3) at West Croydon doesn’t look over-ambitious, and in any case some of the paths from London might actually be used for extra services through East Croydon e.g to Caterham or Uckfield) if they can be fitted in.

     If it really is a non-starter, the A232 corridor (or the B271, as Carshalton High Street is rather narrow) is also possible.

105. There is some discussion about the limits to increased bus frequencies is section 2 of this document.

     http://web.archive.org/web/20130208154719/http://www.tfl.gov.uk/assets/downloads/wlt_april-2004-tfl-board-paper.pdf

     I think that more detailed analysis of this factor in the context of West London Tram used to be available.

106. @guano – thank you for the link. The implication of the paper is that 30-40 bph is the practical limit nowadays (cf the 109B/109W which offered something like 40 bph on the common section of the route – advertised as every 1-3 minutes)

107. I haven’t read the paper but surely the limiting factor is for buses is traffic junction. You can easily have traffic lights on a full sequence of three minutes. I believe there is a set of lights at Kew Bridge that has a 5-minute sequence. If a bus is going to be held at a set of traffic lights for 2 to 3 minutes – or not – then running a service above around 20bph is asking for trouble.

     In routemaster days the number 8 route ran 3 buses every 8 minutes in the peak according to the timetable which I understand was the maximum in recent years though I do remember the 109 being advertised as every 1-4 minutes which is probably the best you can do with traffic lights on the route. At Cambridge Circus you could see the effect of a number 38 bus getting through the lights or not. Basically you needed a bus through each sequence of the lights. If you didn’t then you would have two buses very close together with the inevitable subsequent bunching for the rest of the journey.

     At the moment trams do not have this problem because they are given priority at the lights and only one tram is permitted (in each direction) through one phase of the lights. Of course you could give buses priority but this starts to get difficult when there are multiple bus routes over the junction. Also it is a lot easier to programme the lights to give priority to a few long high-capacity trams than it is for lots of low-capacity buses.

108. @ Guano / all – the full TfL paper with lots of supporting info and the WLT business case is still on the TfL website as past Board Papers back to 2000 are still there.

     https://tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/documents/Agenda-29Apr-20041.pdf

     You need to page down a bit to find the WLT paper as all the papers have been merged into one overall PDF.

109. @Graham H @WW @Guano and others
     I like to see a bit of discussion stimulated!
     I was being a little facetious in the last post comparing bus and tram sizes; I do agree that there are capacity benefits to tram conversion, but I also think these are hard to articulate convincingly, and if I were a politician, or even a transport commissioner, I’d be wary of committing hundreds of millions of pounds of investment on their basis.

     Going back to what @Rational Plan said though, I struggle to agree that the WLT would have had a business case without segregation East of Southall, and/or without a service at all East of Ealing. As many have alluded to, realising the benefits of trams involves things like separate traffic light phases, surely impossible without segregation at junctions?

     “Just get something built” is a good mantra, but each project still needs to have a convincing standalone investment case. Hundreds of millions of pounds of cost needs to generate more than that (preferably at least twice that) in benefit. Just being cheaper than a Crossrail doesn’t mean it’s a better use of money.

110. Re I think I’m a Subscriber

     Extra 6tph, some of which are 10-car

     More trains to places like Caterham or Uckfield, if they can be squeezed through East Croydon.

     Are Waddon, Wallington, and Carshalton Beeches really generating sixty coaches-worth of passengers in the peak hour? Or are most of these 10-car trains full of people who have come from further afield and would really rather go to Town via Mitcham Junction instead of round the houses?

     a) The space is need for all the stopping services further in not via Mitcham where passengers already can’t board some services so starting them further out etc. so if they are already full at East Croydon isn’t going to help.

     Are Uckfield or Caterham Passengers going to want to do all stops?

     b) they can’t get more through East Croydon for the time being and even after Windmill Bridge Jn and the Station are rebuilt the extra paths will be fairly prescriptive and will have even less effect and interaction on the stopping services.

111. @WW 24tph is absolutely metro frequency – I believe it’s what the Northern line runs. “It’s not the tube with 36tph”… the tube isn’t 36tph; right now (with the Victoria running a reduced service) I don’t think it’s above 30tph anywhere. There is a plan to run 36tph on *one* tube line. And I believe Crossrail has plans to increase its frequency in due course.

112. TheOtherPaul,

     Please don’t write things to “stimulate discussion”. You have done this before and it didn’t go down well. Say what you mean or don’t say it at all.

     Imm,

     Northern line is a bit complicated but runs 30tph from Kennington to Morden and has run 27tph to Morden even before the upgraded signalling.

     As you say, Victoria line reduced at present but normally manages 34tph over most (will be all) of the line. There is a plan to run 36tph on both the Victoria (2016) and Jubilee (2019) lines. The Jubilee line fallback plan is for 34tph. There is a plan to run 33tph on the Northern line (36tph if they split the line). So maybe 33tph by 2020 and possibly 36tph by 2024. The Central line already runs at 34tph (albeit briefly in one direction) and consistently above 30tph in the peaks.

113. I wonder if there’s anyone building double-decker articulated low-floor trams. Or even if such beasts are technically feasible at present.

     Such a tram would be longer than an ordinary double-decker bus, so you could get away with dual stairwells — one for each direction — as well as providing plenty of space downstairs for standees, pushchairs and wheelchairs.

     This might be a better fit for routes that need to run on particularly congested roads: all the benefits of a double-decker’s small footprint and raw passenger capacity, with the space benefits offered by a ‘bendy’ bus for mobility-impaired passengers. It might even be a viable solution to Croydon’s constrained town centre loop: no need to extend the platforms (much): just make the trams taller.

     (As the trams are on a fixed guideway, you could potentially put the stairs on the tram stops instead of inside each tram, but there are obvious health and safety implications that would need to be considered.)

114. @Pedantic of Purley – re: Kew Bridge, there is a complex sequence of lights here but it is designed to favour motor traffic using the junction. Crossing 20m of road on foot means going across no less than 4 separate light controlled “sheep pen” crossings.

     Buses don’t wait for 2-3 minutes but if you are a pedestrian crossing the road, you will, so lots of people using Kew Bridge station ignore the “official” route and sprint or weave through gaps in traffic.

     Your point still stands, however and if they increased pedestrian convenience to cross the road in one or even two stages, this would be at the expense of road traffic waiting times.

     This section of road is part of TfL’s “better junctions” program and I await their plans with interest…

115. @PoP – “I do remember the 109 being advertised as every 1-4 minutes” -it seems both our memories were at fault! The October 1973 staff timetable shows the 109 as running every 1-2 minutes between Streatham Telford Avenue and Kennington Park in the peaks – surprising for such a late date, too.

116. @Anomnibus. Your (perhaps whimsical) suggestion of putting stairs at tram stops makes me think of toastrack trams, which adopted the same notion of trying to maximise passenger capacity. (But they also had conductors clinging onto the sides). Sometimes optimisation can go too far…

117. @Graham H – and hence why I said above ” Moreover, so far as I know, because the 16/18 tram route was so busy, it was the only route where the replacement RT buses on the 109 had to be timed to run in pairs!”

118. @Graham Feakins – “Always a car in sight…”

119. Go on, then, Graham H, what was the average interval between trams quoted by the LCC throughout its network and what was the average speed? Just for the enlightenment of others, you understand. They might not believe me.

120. Graham H,

     the 109 being advertised as every 1-4 minutes

     The staff timetable may well have said every 1-2 minutes as the objective. My point was is that in reality, once you have traffic signals at junctions, you are going to to sometimes be a couple of minutes late just because you failed to get through a sequence of lights. So on the timetable on the bus stop it could well have said every 1-4 minutes (I am sure it did) as that is what the travelling public could realistically expect.

121. @PoP – I feel that there’s an article needed to explore the merits or otherwise of traffic lights. Experiences are legion over the decades of where traffic lights failed at a road junction and a policeman or two on point duty took over, which invariably made things much slower in every direction (it was a common guess by delayed bus passengers when still out of sight of whatever junction concerned that was proved correct upon approach), but when the traffic lights failed and nothing was done, the traffic flowed far more smoothly than it had done for many a year through said junction, almost wherever it was in London. That phenomenon can still be witnessed today, despite the vast increase in vehicular traffic.

     To put that another way, my father once prided himself that he could drive to the River at Vauxhall from Shirley, Croydon and only cross eight sets of traffic lights. I remember where they were, too; the first set encountered was at Loughborough Junction.

122. I don’t feel qualified to write an article on traffic lights. Maybe someone else is.

     It is well-known and not disputed that traffic flows quicker without traffic lights. If the objective is to speed up the traffic at any cost then it makes sense to get rid of them. It is also well-known that roundabouts are more efficient than gyratories (essentially a roundabout with traffic lights). Hyde Park Corner is a classic example here. It is also well-known that putting a police officer on point duty (an interesting term that originated from the early days of the railway when junctions were controlled by the railway police) when traffic lights fail slows down the traffic. But then the police officer isn’t there to improve the traffic flow. He is there to reduce the chance of a road traffic collision taking place in a potentially dangerous situation. On the same basis you could argue that lollipop ladies slow down traffic – which is true.

     What traffic lights primarily do is reduce accidents and injuries and enable pedestrians to cross the road. In a similar manner it is also well known that pedestrian crossings generally do not reduce injuries. Pedestrian crossings generally exist to make it easier for pedestrians to cross the road. If the pedestrian crossing is not there then, it is well documented, that, more in some places than others, many people simply do not cross the road in the first place. So they exist to make the local area more accessible to people on foot.

     More pertinently, and back on topic, while the traffic lights already existed, they are very useful in Croydon to give priority to trams and to prevent motorists blocking up junctions used by trams. Of course I don’t think anyone would contemplate a tram crossing a road, level-crossing style, without traffic lights. Even that could be regarded as inadequate as it would mean that emergency service vehicles are not absoulutely forbidden to cross when the lights are red – as they would be with “wig-wags”.

123. @PoP “Of course I don’t think anyone would contemplate a tram crossing a road, level-crossing style, without traffic lights. ”

     Only Give Way lines here
     https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.3751068,-0.0848128,3a,75y,83.42t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sAkAx1FVhyCpuIghud3vvtw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1

     Brussels still relies on priorit’e a droit
     https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.7889602,4.3333508,3a,75y,177.05h,77.26t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sUZJaufe3x4WIFaqgMBcbcg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1

     https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.8270505,4.3444949,3a,75y,179.59h,89.67t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sgEb4rDEEuPD-HHFlEc6QiQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1

124. timbeau,

     I did clearly state “level-crossing style” so as not to include the examples you have given.

     I was thinking more of something like Beddington Lane, the Kingston Road at Merton Park or Lower Addiscombe Road (by Addiscombe Tram Stop). Here the tram is off-road except to cross the road in question. Two of them were originally railway level crossings and the other originally had the railway pass overhead on a bridge.

125. In relation to the original article, has any official consideration been given to extending the underused New Addington line to Biggin Hill Valley (i.e. not to Main Road above the valley…..I’m not that crazy!), terminating in the vicinity of Oaklands Lane? I would argue it is just as deserving as New Addington (i.e. an isolated but sizable settlement on the edge of Greater London with poor public transport links) and would have the advantage of being almost totally segregated, but at the cost of some Green Belt land.

126. Further to comments on the frequency of the 109 bus and the 16/18 trams, there were of course other services on the A23 between Brixton and Streatham. Until 1947 bus and tram maps quoted frequencies, and on this corridor they were shown thus in 1947.
     Trams 8/20 5 minutes
     10 5 minutes
     16/18 4-6 minutes
     22/24 6 minutes
     Buses 59A 10 minutes
     133 3-8 minutes
     159 4-6 minutes
     Using the lower figures where a range is quoted the total peak hour service between Brixton, Town Hall and Streatham, St. Leonard’s Church works out at 90 vehicles per hour. Between Christchurch Road and St. Leonard’s Church the 118 added another 20, and there were also 6 Green Line coaches.

127. @graham Feakins – never been one to refuse a challenge. I couldn’t track down average network speeds but I did find a reference to average speeds for the 68 and 70 (Waterloo/LBR to Greenwich ) which were 9.67 mph in the peak and interestingly, only 9.34 o/p. These routes were apparently significantly slower than the rest of the network because of the frequent lifting of Creek Bridge and single track sections between the Rotherhithe Tunnel and Tower bridge. On that basis, I would expect network averages to be around the 12 mph mark. London traffic speeds have, after a brief rise between the wars, remained much the same for the last 150 years, apparently.

     For the sake of comparison, the 16/18 took 73 minutes to get from Embankment to Purley; the present day 109 (their truncated replacement takes an hour to travel just between Brixton and Croydon.

     Frequencies are trickier, but the 16/18 pair ran every 3 minutes, with a peak overlay of 16EX/18EX every 3-4 minutes – roughly 38 tph. When you add in the other Embankment loop services (2/4 @ 15 tph + same again for 2A/4A peak overlay = 30 tph; 22/24 @ 15 tph; 36/38 @ about 25 tph; 30 tph coming through the subway; plus further routes such as the 14, there would be something in excess of 90 tph in each direction over Westminster bridge and Kennington would have received something like 150 tph in each direction.

     A similar analysis to 307’s one for the roads round Steatham could be conducted for, say, the routes radiating from Aldgate, where, before GE electrification, the Green Line alone offered 15+ bph.

128. @anonymously
     “has any official consideration been given to extending the underused New Addington line to Biggin Hill Valley ”

     Here is an account of the existing provision between those two points.
     http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/464.html”
     Note that:
     1. The road is so narrow that the timetable has to be tweaked to ensure two buses don’t meet on it.
     2. As you say, the route runs almost entirely through green belt land, so permission to build a tram track offline would be hard to get, and there is no prospect of any custom to be picked up on the way.
     3. The hills are quite steep – (picture of the bottom of Jewels Hill, looking towards Addington: Oaklands Lane. leading down the Biggin Hill Valley, is on the left) https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.3284574,0.0161667,3a,75y,249.77h,88.44t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sOUriAvP45EyDL-vpQ3fHGg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
     (note the signpost: The steepest gradients on Tramlink are 9% at Crown Hill (downhill only), and 7% on Gravel Hill)
     4. most of the route would be in the London Borough of Bromley, who are notoriously anti-rail (unless it is a fast train to central London).
     5. two single deckers an hour seems to be meeting demand on this route.

129. Just found this
     http://www.nce.co.uk/trams-trial/836380.article
     [Note: subscriber content only PoP]

     “The ability to stop safely on steep gradients is another key issue. On the first few test runs it was found the tram could not stop on the pedestrianised Crown Hill without using the emergency magnetic track brakes. Its 9% gradient is steepest part of the system. The reason was found to be debris on the tracks causing the wheels to skid. For the trams to stop using the gradual service brake, they have to slow down to 10km/h before they start the hill.”
     The required delicate approach to the hill described here is a classic example of the old adage that “your permission to speed is your ability to stop”, and why Pendolinos have to slow down when they reach Shap summit.

130. @timbeau….In response to your points:

     1) Any tram line wouldn’t use the road; it would travel through those invitingly empty fields next to it. Which brings us to….
     2) The Green Belt. I don’t wish to drag us off topic, but I would just like to point out that the Green Belt may no longer be as sacrosanct as it once was, given the scale of our housing shortage. Of course, this is going to generate huge opposition (from people who already own their own homes, no doubt), but there’ll come a time where people have to make a difficult choice about how much land they wish to leave undeveloped, at the cost of others’ economic well-being.
     3) Damn, foiled by geography once again! I always knew the Saltbox Hill side of the valley was terrifyingly steep (hence why I didn’t dare suggest extending to Main Road on the other side), but I didn’t realise the Jewels Hill side was equally steep. Is there any way one could make that gradient less steep if an alignment avoiding the road was chosen? How do trams in cities with steep valleys (Prague and Budapest spring to mind) manage?
     4) I understand why you caricature Bromley as ‘anti-rail’, but I think that is a little over-simplistic (see my comments on the Bakerloo extension as to why). After all, they let Tramlink into Beckenham, didn’t they? And they would still like DLR and/or LO to come to Bromley courtesy of the Bromley North branch (leaving the tricky issue of how you get there for TfL and neighbouring boroughs to work out ?).
     5) The classic chicken-and-egg transport dilemma….provide a token/rubbish service (cf Wimbledon-Croydon/Silverlink Metro; I could go on!), and hardly anyone will use it to justify increasing the frequency. But invest in and improve it massively (15 tph by 2030 to Croydon with its associated transport/shopping/employment links, according to the diagram above), and people will flock to use it.

     If I had had the misfortune to grow up in Biggin Hill, I would have made it a priority to learn how to drive the day I turned 17, rather than rely on the buses or my parents!

131. @PoP
     “[Note: subscriber content only PoP]”
     Curious – if you click on the link you do indeed encounter a firewall, but googling “crown hill croydon gradient” and selecting the fourth hit,, which is how I found it, will get you in.

     “Is there any way one could make that gradient less steep if an alignment avoiding the road was chosen?”
     The Coombe Road stretch of Tramlink uses a cutting for exactly this reason.
     http://www.croydon-tramlink.co.uk/php/gallpic.php?Cat=Driver+Eye+Views&Desc=Cab+View+-+Addington+Hills+cutting+Outbound&fn=/pictures/gallery/addington/CoombeLane/CVAddingtonHillsCuttingOutbound.jpg&By=S.J.Parascandolo&Date=13/05/2000&ID=811

     Given sufficient earthworks, an alignment from the top of the hill (Sheepbarn Lane/King Henrys Drive/Skid Hill Lane junction) slantwise down to hit Oakland Lane somewhere in the village itself would ease the gradient considerably, but this is getting into seriously heavy engineering and I can’t imagine what the BCR would be.

     “If I had had the misfortune to grow up in Biggin Hill, I would have made it a priority to learn how to drive the day I turned 17, rather than rely on the buses or my parents!”
     Compared with many places of similar size, Biggin Hill has a superabundance of public transport. The place has more buses in an hour than some villages get in a week!

132. I don’t see why the whole West London Tram scheme should be treated as some Holy plan. it may be that the whole scheme depended on the line running all the way to Shepherds Bush, but I suspect not.

     I rather think the planners looked at eliminating buses from an entire corridor, rather than anything else.

     Ealing is a major break point along the corridor, as a destination in itself and a transport interchange to other orbital bus routes and to rail and tube lines.

     If the scheme could not stack up without the Shepherds Bush to Ealing section, why on earth build the line West of there in the first place?

     A low performing part of a proposal would have been for the chop long before they got as far as they did.

     While the Eastern part might have got heavier traffic level I suspect per mile it also would have been more expensive to build, due to higher amounts of utility diversion, the greater number of junction rebuilds and the bigger constraints in site access and traffic diversion ( dual carriageways can be contra-flowed).

     Also from looking at other schemes we can see how branches have dropped and shortened without some how damaging their BCR. Just look at the various permutations of Crossrail or in the dying days of the Cross River transit scheme, when they proposed cutting the line back to just South of the river to avoid the more difficult Central London bit.

     All I think is that if the scheme just started off going West of Ealing, they’d deal with people who wanted a faster link to Ealing Broadway and only have to deal with Southall as a point of conflict. Maybe every demolition and junction widening in that stretch was vital to the scheme (I suspect that some of them could have been redesigned), but at least the controversy would have been restricted to one area of Ealing Borough, rather an all borough fight to the death that it turned out to be.

     What enraged residents so much was the endless consultation about options that never seemed to change anything. There was no give on any junction or traffic ban and no one heading the scheme thought to drop the most controversial section, after the borough and the Mayor was behind them.

     The scheme died when at the local elections all but one of the boroughs Labour councillors was turfed out as people switched to the Conservatives on an anti tram ticket.

     While that election day killed the West London tram, it started the death spiral on Cross River tram, a scheme with initially much greater support and south of the river would have been much easier to build with such long straight and wide roads.

     It’s also why we’ve not seen any serious attempts at starting new networks. I suspect TFL will be interested to see how far they can expand Tramlinks empire across South London, much like the DLR.

     If they can build the Sutton line without serious political trauma, then you may see renewed interest across London.

133. @Rational Plan
     As a former Ealing resident for a little short of four decades, I agree with your overall analysis. Tram route 7 used to be single track/interlaced through Acton, which shows how tough it was even in the 1900s in that locality, though other parts east of Ealing would have been easier.

     Throw in:
     * high car ownership
     * a consultancy failure to understand that the Uxbridge Road is the only effective E-W public transport AND car corridor between the A40 and the A4 (I wouldn’t wish the Greenford Road as a real alternative!)
     * N-S traffic flows had no choice but to use the Uxbridge Road for even a short distance in order to do unavoidable dog legs
     …and you then have an unholy combination of insensitive tram planners and a car-owing and car-using population with literally nowhere else to go.
     Result – failure.

     There is also a school of thought which thinks that an Uxbridge-Southall-Heathrow tramway would have been largely welcomed – change at Southall for Crossrail etc. Even now, Southall Gas Works is becoming a major housing/regeneration site. The airport also generates huge car flows by airport/airline staff and passengers from the W and NW London zone..

     So arguably a different specification AND wider thinking outside old tramlines might have been more successful. A possible moral – don’t try to solve yesterday’s problems along yesterday’s corridors – what are the emerging gaps 10-20-30 years hence?

134. @PoP I apologise, it wasn’t my intention to stimulate discussion, so that was a bad choice of words. I conceded that something I’d written (probably without enough thought) was a bit facetious and I’m happy to have been corrected/further informed on the technicalities of tram capacity.

     As a general point, if my commenting is unsatisfactory I’d rather it was just modded than left to stand with negative comments about my presumed motives – a comment should either meet the rules or not meet the rules and be snipped. No need to make it personal.

135. Thanks for your tram frequency analysis Graham H; I wasn’t intending to present you with such a challenge! In fact, the LCC quoted an average speed of 12¾ mph on its trams, including stops. I think that the average bus speed today is noticeably slower – 9½ mph comes to mind.

     The frequency was quoted in its brochures etc. as a tram every 1¼ minutes taking into account its entire network, which gave rise to the “Always a car in sight” slogan you mention.

     “I did find a reference to average speeds for the 68 and 70 (Waterloo/LBR to Greenwich ) which were 9.67 mph in the peak and interestingly, only 9.34 o/p” – that route group was probably picked out, not only because of the route hindrances but because it was invariably run with the older/non-Pullmanised, lower-powered E/1 class tramcars. I agree that it might have been a waste to run anything more powerful with so many speed restrictions and so on along that route but as we know, the LCC was rather overtaken by the bus influence with the formation of London Transport – and the rest is (sad) history.

136. Can we agree that the basic advantages of trams over buses, depending on the system configuration, include the following?
     1) Absence of emissions at street level.
     2) Less consumption of energy due to lower rolling resistance.
     3) Faster journeys but only if on reserved track with traffic light priority at junctions.
     4) Additional capacity to be handled by each driver.
     5) Longevity of rolling stock.
     6) Benefits of fixed transport links on property.

     It is worth noting that planners of new French systems tend to seize the opportunity to limit traffic in city centres as a matter of policy.

     The existing Tramlink network ticks the boxes because it combines fast journey times on reserved track with visibility and convenience in Croydon. The increase in property values was commented on and came as something of a surprise considering the strictures of property owners during the planning/building phase.

     A ‘109’ tram route would probably only work if one was prepared to banish all through traffic from London Road and install reserved track throughout. In environmental terms this is highly desirable, but it is probably a political non-starter. This argument has been rehearsed on the Morden to Sutton thread.

137. There’s also the fact that a tram running in non-segregated roadway provides a less reliable than a bus, because it’s so much easier to obstruct. European cities with long-established tram routes running in mixed traffic can depend on decades of public awareness and public-spiritedness (and even then, I’ve seen trams delayed for lengthy periods by double-parked vehicles, and on one memorable occasion in Antwerp been told to move over to the left side of a tramcar to tilt the body away from an incompetently parked car). By contrast, in the UK, I’m sure there would be furious denunciations from Jeremy Clarkson and the Daily Mail of petty PC gestapo towing cars away for parking “three inches over the line”.

138. In Vienna (may apply to other cities,too) trams would “nudge” an obstructing parked car aside judiciously using whatever force was necessary.
     The swept route of the trams was demarked by a yellow line on the tarmac…if you parked with any part of your car over the yellow line you were ipso facto in the wrong.

139. @Rational Plan as a former Ealing resident I’m not sure the capacity would have been there east of Ealing if you only built the western part of the tram. Ealing is very consciously a suburb and not such an employment area in its own right (unlike shepherd’s bush). A tram that tipped out at Ealing Broadway would be adding passengers to already crowded tube and rail services – or to the same buses the tram was supposed to replace.

140. @Slugabed
     “In Vienna (may apply to other cities, too) trams would “nudge” an obstructing parked car aside judiciously using whatever force was necessary.”
     It might be a good idea to carry a small electric trolley jack, or similar, on board each tram, to lift such obstructions out of the way.

     “The swept route of the trams was demarked by a yellow line on the tarmac…”
     I think the swept area markings are fairly common in the UK too
     http://farm9.static.flickr.com/8374/8442715080_df1d2e9027.jpg
     https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.3736902,-0.1003462,3a,75y,304.17h,83.21t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1swnlLXAfKsU4uhiAfzaKnig!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1

141. Slugabed, you can do that with an E2 but I don’t know if a modern low-floor vehicle is robust enough for that kind of brute force tactic.

142. Trams pushing obstacles out of the way:

     It is a “well known fact” (and therefore not necessarily true) that streetcars in America “often” used such tactics.

     I would be interested if anyone has firm information (with dates) about this actually happening anywhere.

     Even if it ever did happen somewhere, I rate the chances of it happening this century in Britain (outside of a life-threatening emergency) as lower than my likelihood of winning a lottery million. (And I never buy a ticket).

143. In Nottingham the crowd shifted a car that was parked on the tracks:

     Link is here

144. Good point. And related you-tube things seem to show related instances. I should have restricted my claim (that it will never happen in Britain this century) by adding the phrase “by officially-sanctioned action of the tram driver”. In the Nottingham case the driver was probably as grateful as the passengers, but I reckon that s/he would not have dared say so.

145. @ Philip 1309 – with reference to your “fact” about the poor reliability of tram systems not running on reserved track can you point me to some evidence or research that supports your statement? My experience of tram systems that have extenstive street running is that they run perfectly well. There are loads of tram networks that have to deal with a mix of tram only streets, tram lanes in streets and mixed operation. Zurich is one such system and, IMLE, has exemplary timekeeping as do connecting bus services as the entire system is tracked and timed to connect on a regular headway.

146. @WW…My experience of trams in Melbourne (in a country that’s far more car-centric than the UK) is much as you described. Of course, all of these places have the advantage of legacy tram infrastructure, so road users over times have grown used to and have adapted to them (witness the famous Melbourne ‘hook-turn’). If you build new on-street tram infrastructure in areas that have never had them, or once did but have lost them long enough for people to have got used to their absence, then you’re bound to run into problems at the planning stage.

     @Malcolm….I’m sure there must be a story or two of vehicles being removed out of the way of an approaching train on the Weymouth ‘tramway’ (really a mainline railway that happens to run on the street!!!). I’m still amazed it lasted as long as it did (to 1986).

147. @Walthamstow Writer, 20 August 2015 at 22:49
     Agree sharing with and crossing traffic can be very reliable, once a system is up and running with other traffic used to the swept paths of the trams, and assuming the system has been designed well so car queues at junctions don’t block back onto tram lanes etc and appropriate priorities are given at signalled junctions. Reserved track is usually faster however as there’s no chance of uncertain amateur motorists slowing the tram down. Shared pedestrianised streets can be slow though. If the design doesn’t actively discourage people from walking all over the tracks at any point, tram drivers have to be very cautious.

148. Hooray – at last some acceptance that you can run trams on street without it being a complete disaster. I agree with the comments about legacy / familiarity but we will never get anywhere in this country if we can’t get past that issue even with whatever “local difficulties” the more rampant campaigners may dig up. I see part of the Kingston Council mini holland scheme has run into some of the most ludicrous opposition I’ve heard of in a long time – fears of crime, rampant psychopaths invading the area, WW2 bombs and other lunacy.

149. @Walthamstow Writer – yes, I’ve read some of the comments from Kingston. I think that some of the contributors misinterpreted TfL’s consultation for cycle paths as being a consultation for psychopaths.

150. @Reynolds 953….lol! Easily confused by some people when heard….”Kingston Council and TfL want to run cycle paths through the area” vs “Kingston Council and TfL want to run psychopaths through the area” :D.

151. @Phillip, Malcolm, WW et al

     Toronto’s streetcar network covers the city with 11 routes and 82 kilometres of service, most of it in mixed traffic. Streetcars carry 250,000 passengers each day, more daily ridership than the entire GO Transit, 7 line double decker 12 car commuter train network.

     Given the extensive streetcar network, parked cars in their path is relatively rare. However I’ve never heard about any streetcar pushing or nudging a stationary vehicle out of the way. They always await the police, and a tow truck, often meaning a 20-40 min wait. The reason as I see it is to avoid bad publicity and the media braying about touching private property &c &c.

     This however all goes to sh1t after it snows a lot, as people park their cars away from the curb as the plowed snow doesn’t allow them much closer, and the parkers don’t try hard to avoid infringing on the streetcar path. The police give up in such situations, and the papers always have images of 6-10 streetcars all lined up behind such vehicles stored in the streetcar lane, where they all remain all day.

     I might add that the heavy volume of traffic on the arterial routes downtown really slow down the streetcars (sorry WW!) over the entire network, to which Jean Q Publique blames the streetcar, not the route cause (sorry root cause) of single occupant vehicle volume.

     Toronto is very much a car city outside the core, although there are encouraging signs that many are eschewing cars and relying on transit +/- bikes instead, as well as choosing to live in town rather than the thin density suburbs.

152. Long Branch Mike 21 August 2015 at 16:57

     “Toronto is very much a car city outside the core” because none of the suburban GOtrain railways run an off-peak services more than every 30 minutes. Most run a handful of trains into Union station in the morning, and out again in the evening.
     I predict the airport service will pick up lots of local traffic at it two stops every 15 minutes.

153. @Anomnibus

     Actually, Hong Kong has two tram systems. The oldest one runs on Hong Kong island and these are double deck trams running along the street, mainly on a simple east-west routing. I believe that when this was built it was along the waterfront, but there has been substantial reclamation since them.

     The newer system (called Light Rail) is in the Northwest (New Territories) around Tuen Mun and Yuen Long and these are similar to Croydon’s trams. This opened 30 years ago, and was constructed at around the time that these new towns were being developed.

     (I am a former resident of Croydon, now living in Hong Kong)

154. @Chris
     It is, perhaps, relevant to the question of converting train tracks to light rail that when the Hongkong MTR Island Line, which parallels the tram route (only about 15m lower), was built it was intended that the tram should be closed as superseded. It seems that there is room for both. Horses for courses. Particularly since the Island line does not go to Happy Valley, while the tram does.

155. @Alan Griffiths: I don’t think so, it’s clearly marketed as an airport service. Season tickets aren’t valid, and even with PRESTO (Toronto’s Oyster card equivalent), Bloor – Union would be $11.40, and Weston – Union $15.20 – the equivalent GO fares are only $4.77, respectively $5.09.
     However, from what I’ve gathered, there are plans underway (cleverly dubbed RER – now where have I heard that acronym before?) to provide an all-day 15-minutes service on a number of lines and also to electrify the new core network – making this Canada’s only second (!) electrified railway line.

     As far as the tram network there is concerned, it’ll be interesting what’ll happen to the add-on order – because the new trams are longer and offer more capacity, it was thought that less vehicles would be needed in the future, however because of a growth in passenger numbers, something more like a 1:1 replacement might be more desirable after all. However because of the teething troubles of the new Bombardier vehicles, it seems to be unclear whether they want to exercise the option for 60 additional trams they already have, or do something else.

156. @Jan

     Excellent summary Jan. Indeed the RER name and concept, which in Toronto stands for Regional Express Rail, was taken from Paris’ Reseau Express Regional (apologies my keyboard lacks the French character set).

     But we have now hit the end of the Toronto streetcar discussion.

     San Francisco and Boston streetcars for the most part travel in separate lanes or rights of way, but still have mixed use sections. However as the latter are the minority, they tend not to bung up streetcar service too badly.

     LA’s Blue Line LRT is in mixed traffic at the Long Beach end of the line. However ridership, and therefore frequencies, of this line are now so high that I believe the LAMTA is now looking at segregating the LRVs and auto traffic to achieve higher frequencies and reliability. If they’ve not already done so, last I checked was a few years ago. I no longer travel there so’ve lost interest.

157. Jan 22 August 2015 at 16:42

     That’s interesting news. The airport line was being built when I was in Rouge Hills in September 2014. I was surprised by 2 things about GO trains: –
     1) lack of electrification; Ontario does benefit from Niagara hydro-electricity
     2) The size of those trains for a suburban service

158. @Alan Griffiths:
     1) But doesn’t Canada have plenty of oil with which to power those trains? Also, I’m unsure whether the service density/use was ever high enough when services were steam powered to benefit from early electrification before diesel became a viable option post-WW2.
     2) Probably double-decker to take advantage of the larger loading gauge? Does this allow them to run services with fewer carriages than would otherwise be required?

159. @Anonymously, Alan Griffiths

     1.a) Yes we have lots of oil, unfortunately much of it is now from fracking.
     1.b) Correct, density along the Lakeshore East & West CN commuter (later GO Train) lines was never that high, so electrification was not a viable option. However electrification of this busy corridor is now planned in the next 10 years. Good thing too as the new Tier 4 compliant (lowest polluting) locos are very loud.

     2) Initial GO train service started in 1967 with single level trains but ridership in 10 years had grown, in 10 car trains, to require double deckers. Gauge is north American standard. Bombardier built the double decker cars, and exported them to many US cities on the east coast, as well as LA’s commuter fleet as well I believe.

     We should end this conversation here as we are quite far off topic. Mike

160. Aside from Sutton – or possibly Bromley Town Centre – I doubt the Croydon scheme could be sensibly extended anywhere else. I would also want to point out that a certain large French city, comparable in size and population to London, has not only managed to build no less than EIGHT separate orbital tram routes in its suburbs, they all run with different rolling stock, different technologies, and – for the most part – on-street. And best of all – they are very successful both in terms of reliability and patronage.

     I would therefore advocate putting to rest the argument of whether it makes more sense to develop extensions to a system just because there is a tram built there or build tram routes where they make sense. Clearly there are routes away from the deepest reaches of South London that would benefit more from a tram than – say – Crystal Palace.

     I would also like to remind everyone, that trams work well in pretty much every urban environment. They can run alongside pedestrians in pedestrianised precincts, alongside cars on ‘regular’ streets, on former railway lines (regardless of whether they were underused or closed), and in tunnels. And they can do so in London as well as they can do so in Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Hong Kong, or any other large city. London is not special in any way with respect to this.

     I also think the argument between buses and trams has also been done to death – there clearly exists a cut-off point in terms of passengers per direction where a tram route becomes more economical and less disruptive than a bus route. And I think it is also very clear that there are plenty of corridors in London where passenger flows have crossed that magical boundary.

161. …having said that, I would suggest people give the West London Tram a break. One of the reasons why buses are so popular along the Uxbridge Road is that for years now the local train service along the Great Western Main Line has been inadequate in many aspects. In the peaks the trains are far too short – indeed, the Western has topped the ‘most overcrowded trains’ charts for a few years now. Off-peak, the service is not frequent enough to be attractive for intermediate journeys – Hanwell and West Ealing get two trains per hour, whereas Southall gets four, but pretty badly spaced.

     Solving both of these issues, Crossrail will make the rail service in that neck of the woods far more attractive and – I’m sure – will go some way to reduce the pressure on the Uxbridge Road.

162. straphan
     Solving both of these issues, Crossrail will make the rail service in that neck of the woods far more attractive
     Just to nail it down, I’m going to make a prediction.
     Given that (IMHO) far too many CR1 trains will turn around at Padders, the CR1 trains will be full within 2 years (as opposed to about 2 minutes on the Abbey wood & Shenfield services)
     And then what?
     How long before “they” realise that extra CR1 trains will have to be shoehorned in between the ex-GW “locals” from further out?

163. @ Straphan – now now spouting all that tram nonsense! Repeat after me “trams are evil, trams are evil, trams are evil”. “Cars are wonderful, cars are wonderful, cars are wonderful” “Pollution is good for you, pollution is good for you, pollution is good for you”. Just doing my best Adam Smith Institute / IEA / TPA / Bonkers loony bin (delete as applicable) impression.

     🙂 🙂 🙂

164. As a small related remark I see that the new tram routes in Nottingham open for passenger service on 25 August 2015. Barely 1 day’s advance notice of the opening although trial timetable runs and final snagging have been happening for a few weeks.

165. @Walthamstow Writer:

     I know you were being facetious, but…

     “Pollution is good for you…”

     Except public transport isn’t about reducing pollution. It’s about solving congestion. Cars alone cannot solve that problem, no matter what they’re powered by. Even self-driving cars will only be of limited benefit.

     Central London is already full of tunnels and stations. There’s a limit to how many more of those we can build under there, so trams may well be unavoidable once we hit “Peak Tube”.

     Beyond that… either we’ll have personal jetpacks and flying cars*, or I’m going to be demanding a refund. I was promised flying cars, damn it!

     * (It’s possible I may be overthinking “The Jetsons” a tad.)

166. Except that, it seems over recent years, it is TfL who is responsible for all trying to bring down the level of pollution for all vehicles. The responsibilities seem to extend as far as encouraging recharging points for electric cars.

     In any case public transport isn’t primarily about solving congestion. If it was then public transport would only exist in places where, without it, there would otherwise be congestion.

     Unfortunately it seems that currently Mayoral policy is not about reducing pollution caused by transport as such but reducing pollution to the level where we would not be in breach of EU limits i.e. not As Low As Reasonably Practical but As High As We Can Get Away With.

167. @ Anomnibus – I suspect I was a tad beyond facetious but anyway. PoP has given a nice explanation about the distinct slant of much of TfL’s recent investment which has been about getting emissions down. There is a great deal of political and lobbying pressure on the Mayor about air quality and health issues and transport is seen as a “villain” in terms of its effect on air quality.

     TfL has ended up gaining a pseudo environmental management role alongside an economic development role because of government cuts to quangos. Some of that effort has been directed to get City Hall out of the “we (the EU) are going to fine you hundreds of millions of pounds for poor air quality” territory as PoP says. The irony in all of this is that the Mayor’s policies coupled with economic growth means that congestion and traffic volumes are now rising so he’s managed to undo years of falling traffic levels from previous policy initiatives. I leave it as an exercise for the reader as to whether that’s a good or bad thing.

168. @WW – “TfL has ended up gaining a pseudo environmental management role alongside an economic development role because of government cuts to quangos. ” I suspect there’s also the element of having to nod to the fashionable thing of the moment- there was a period when every (I mean every, too) Cabinet paper had to include a statement of what it would do to reduce staff numbers, so a lot of brain power was consumed inventing “world’s lousiest links” to satisy the requirement.

169. In my opinion, there is no “solution” for road congestion in a city like London as there will always be considerably more demands on road space than there is space available.

     Really, the objective should be to provide mobility through selected transport options, accept as inevitable that the rest will be stuck in traffic and try to mitigate the negative impacts of this.

     Also some honesty telling people that congestion is a problem that can’t be solved in order to influence their travel choices. That won’t happen, of course 😉

170. @Greg Tingey: Extra Crossrail trains on the Western? What will you do with all the freight – not to mention the future WRAtH services?

     @WW: I fear another of TfL’s roles will be to become a blunt instrument used to force through housing density increases. As their budgets tighten, they will dangle the carrots such as Tramlink to Sutton or Bakerloo Line extension and tell the borough councils ‘We don’t have enough to build these, but you can help. How? Authorise a few high-rise posh apartment blocks along the route and give us a cut of the tax. What’s that now? You don’t ALL want to have your town centres look like Croydon? Tough – no high-rises no tram tracks.’

171. On a more serious note, though: I really do think when looking at tram schemes people should consider tunneling through town centres. Despite what people say about accessibility, I think it has plenty of advantages:

     – Shopkeepers want car/delivery access to their shopfronts so they shall have it
     – Said cars/delivery vans will not obstruct the swept path
     – No direct conflicts between trams and residual bus services in the area
     – Through speed of tram route becomes much faster than road traffic that has to get through endless toucan crossings and mini-roundabouts
     – Underground tram stations could be gated – revenue protection improves
     – This is London. People are used to going down an escalator or two to reach something on rails. Indeed – marketing the tram as ‘almost a tube’ is not without its benefits.

172. straphan 25 August 2015 at 14:02

     ” when looking at tram schemes people should consider tunneling through town centres.”

     As seen in Antwerpen, and (stretching a definition) Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

173. @Straphan
     “On a more serious note, though: I really do think when looking at tram schemes people should consider tunneling through town centres”
     However, when I suggested to the Cross River Tram people at a roadshow in Camden many years ago, I was told they wouldn’t even contemplate using the Kingsway underpass because it would stop the trams being accessible. I did point out that closing the subway altogether (as the plans required) would make traffic congestion on the east/west route (The Strand) even worse than it already is: especially as they were trying to sell one advantage of the tram project as being the priority that would be given to it – presumably the flow between those insignificant traffic generators known as the City and Whitehall was considered too small to matter.

174. @timbeau: Tunnelling is pretty expensive, especially when you need to build stations underground. I don’t know how much the cost would have been of redesigning the station inside the Kingsway Subway to modern standards (lifts, etc.) – perhaps it may have indeed been prohibitively expensive.

     However, if we do go back to that dreaded West London Tram, sections of tunnel under Acton, Ealing and Southall town centres would have no doubt made the scheme far more palatable to local stakeholders, and would have no doubt sped the tram up compared to original plans. Though this would have been more expensive I think it would have made the scheme more attractive to all.

175. @Straphan
     The Kingsway Tunnel is fairly short – certainly shorter than the typical distance between tram stops. It would have been quite possible to have a tram stop on the surface at each end of the tunnel and no underground stops at all. (After all, the 521 doesn’t stop in the tunnel!)

176. @timbeau: Fair enough then. I won’t try to justify the Cross River Tram’s team’s views anymore…

177. What about cut and cover tunneling for tram lines? Very disruptive during the construction phase, but not as pricey as deep tunneling, and quicker to build. After all, part of the Picadilly extension to Heathrow (between Hounslow West and Hatton Cross) was built this way not all that long ago…..the photo below serves to illustrate what residents along the route had to put up with!

     http://www.ltmcollection.org/images/webmax/89/i0000j89.jpg

178. @Anonymously: I was generally thinking of cut and cover – I’d struggle to think of places in London where you would need to tunnel a tram line with a TBM…

179. There has been quite a lot talk about on street running, congestion all that sort of stuff.

     Well only political will can sort both out. I’ll leave out commenting on our current mayor, however this is one way to do it:

     Groningen.

     My parents weren’t best pleased when it was implemented, however going back 30 years later, I think it’s a great success… It’s now 40 years on and still loved…

180. straphan refers to trams tunnelling under city centres.

     This reminds me of pre-metros. Popular in Belgium and elsewhere, they are supposed to be an early stage towards the development of full metro lines, sending trams through the tunnels with the intention of later replacing them by a proper metro. But in Goeteborg (and maybe elsewhere) the full metro replacement has been postponed indefinitely, as people are rather fond of the resulting well-functioning tram network.

181. @Malcolm: Brussels started out that like that, but there has been very little change in the last 18 odd years, a few minor extensions but that’s all…

     In Charleroi, they have finished things to create a radial network of trams going into a central circle line. Antwerp is going to open a line built years ago, again as pre-metro….

     The key thing is that in all these schemes, stations and other tunnels were created before they were required. There are several levels under Opera station currently not in use..

182. Re. The “Pre-Metro” approach…

     I don’t have a problem with this in principle. The only issue is with its application to Tramlink’s loop through Croydon.

     The problem here is that the tram passes roughly east-west through Croydon itself. Any tunnelled option here would therefore have to be deep enough to get under both the Wellesley Road underpass, and both the Brighton Main Line (East Croydon) and the Dorking line (West Croydon).

     The resulting tunnels would be a long way down and the stations would be similar to the DLR’s “Cutty Sark” station in Greenwich. Just getting to and from the trams would be a hell of a faff for many passengers. This is a very poor user experience.

     User Experience (‘UX’) design is critical in situations like this: Why should road traffic that has no intention of even stopping in Croydon be at street level, while pedestrians, cyclists and public transport users are forced to jump through figurative hoops to get around?

     The ‘ideal’ UX is to remove all unnecessary traffic from the streets of central Croydon and divert it all below ground. Only public transport and delivery vehicles should be permitted on the roads at street level.

     Granted, this sort of work doesn’t come cheap, but I’d argue that it would offer much better value for money over the long term.

183. @Anomnibus
     As I mentioned up-thread, traffic underpasses have been tried before in Croydon, and they were not very popular with either drivers or the ‘liberated’ pedestrians.
     I agree that very deep-level tram stops are not ideal either. I think we probably have to live with the massive fudge that is being proposed!

184. Deep level tram stops are not a good idea, but is there any reason why a tram could not use an underpass between stops at street level?

185. Anomnibus,

     I think that the only reason the tunnels are a long way down at Cutty Sark is that there is a somewhat large river nearby that has to be tunnelled under. There is no equivalent in Croydon.

186. http://en-gb.topographic-map.com/places/Croydon-894788/ shows that East and West Croydon are at about the same height above sea level (10ft difference, by my reckoning). So a tunnel from (say) Waddon Marsh to Sandilands wouldn’t need to be very deep. Unless I’m missing something, it needn’t be too difficult to build a tram to train interchange below both East Croydon and West Croydon – with intermediate stops beneath the new Whitgift Centre and the Fairfield Halls car park.

187. Yes, but as things currently stand in Britain, each subsurface tram stop would need to be staffed by two members of staff during the time they are open due to “section 14” fire safety rules about minimum staffing levels for sub-surface stations (legally it would be considered a station). This would completely blow the economics of a tram service out of the water.

188. @PoP – not to mention the need for disabled access.

189. You would also lose all the intermediate stops between the two stations, unless you are going to dig dirty great holes all over Croydon town centre until it resembles a Swiss cheese (or turn it into one big hole – I’ll refrain from taking that line any further!)
     And any tram tunnel would still have to get below the Wellesley Road underpass.

     Manchester City centre is big enough that a second city crossing is still within the city centre, but any second crossing of Croydon (e.g using the flyover) would be towards the edge of the central area and thus would not attract enough custom to relieve the existing route.

     I don’t know how many through passengers there are – not many I imagine, and through ticketing is allowed anyway, but perhaps the Croydon loop could be adapted such that all trams, not just those from the east but also those from Wimbledon and any future extensions to north and south, could use it as a terminal loop. In order that East Croydon is on the loop, this would require modification of the proposed Dingwall Loop so that trams from Wimbledon use it (in the southbound direction) and then turn right, next to East Croydon station, to head back west.

     Grade separation of the two crossings of the A212 Wellesley Road would also seem to be helpful – the westbound limb is already partially grade separated as it is on top of the underpass – either by extending the underpass further north, or providing a tram diveunder at the Station Road/Bedford Park junction.

     Incidentally, someone question the reasons planners generally prefer to keep moto traffic on the surface and make pedestrians burrow under – firstly, the approaches to a pedestrian underpass can be more compact as they can use stairs, lifts or, if using wheelchairs, baby buggies etc, ramps with hairpin bends. Secondly, vehicle underpasses require ventilation.

190. “providing a tram diveunder at the Station Road/Bedford Park junction.”
     I should make clear – a short diveunder between stops – no need for staff supervision, disabled access etc etc.

191. @timbeau – how we all love those hairpin ramps (not to mention the urine-sodden,rat-infested, be-beggared, grafitti-decorated underpasses when we actually get there.)

192. @Graham H
     “how we all love those hairpin ramps……………….. ”

     Just because it’s easier to build doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do!

193. As with this pointless monstrosity
     https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.2277221,-0.5365886,3a,75y,4.76h,85.48t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s2oeTKnPUlyV2Isd9OHSNzw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1
     Simultaneously spoilt a classic view without being of any use whatsoever – it is shorter to walk to the nearest pedestrian crossing than use the hairpin ramps that are the only access to the top span.

     (A long way from Croydon, but illustrates the point)

194. @timbeau – yes, we love those overbridges even more. If I had to award a small prize for the nastiest pedestrian underpasses, it would be a toss up between the Piranesieque south bridgehead at Waterloo, or the Escheresque north bridgehead at BFRS. Euston Road at various places, highly commended…

195. @Graham H, 27 August 2015 at 13:09
     “yes, we love those overbridges even more.”

     Particularly as the vertical difference has to be sufficient to clear a maximum height road vehicle (or train or tram plus OHLE in the case of a rail bridge) rather than the tallest pedestrian or bike. I don’t think Timbeau’s Lincoln example would be compatible with latest DDA standards – the ramps for new-build today would probably be twice as long with many more landings!

196. @timbeau……But not as pointless as this beauty across a quiet residential back street near Orpington High Street!

     http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/streetview?size=640×640&pano=wxR4TamUjzU5ZBMke2daqw&heading=-163.06254237607328&fov=90&pitch=5&sensor=false

197. Apologies – I should have been clearer. What I’d intended to say was that some of the Wimbledon trams would continue to go around the loop as now. I wasn’t envisaging an underground loop.

     PoP’s point still stands, though. In staffing terms, the two staff at each of the two underground tramstops would be the equivalent of an additional revenue protection team, except that they wouldn’t be checking tickets/Oyster/contactless or issuing penalty fares. It would be a situation of having to pay people to do nothing except to be there in case something untoward were to happen. Hence the tram tunnel concept is very likely on the “too difficult” pile.

198. @Andrew
     But with two routes across Croydon, one serving all the shops and other useful places and one missing most of them out, wouldn’t most people continue to use the former?

199. @timbeau
     Added to which, there is the inertia factor. People on a loop tram are likely to stay put rather than alight in order to wait for a through tram – especially in cold or wet weather. So, all things considered, a through tram tunnel looks (sadly) to be a non-starter.

200. I’m also not convinced that a tunnel is the right answer for Croydon specifically. However, places where the town centre is essentially along a single high street (e.g. Acton, Ealing, Streatham) could be sensibly served by a tram tunnel.

201. @straphan
     “where the town centre is essentially along a single high street could be sensibly served by a tram tunnel”
     Surely, if the tramline is along the axis of the High Street, this means having several underground tram stops which would put the capital and operating costs up. Better in such cases to have the High Street for trams and access only, with through traffic diverted round (or under) the High Street. This has been done with Oxford Street (although for buses, rather than trams), with all other traffic diverted along Wigmore Street, and for places like Sutton and Kingston (for pedestrians only – buses having to use the relief road with everything else)

202. Meant to add – Cross River Tram would have run across the main east west street (Strand) and could have used the existing tunnel as the 521 bus does, although it does mean the nearest stop on the surface is the length of the ramp away from the crossing street.

203. @timbeau:

     Were a tunnel to be built, I doubt – say – Ealing would require more than one stop to be located in tunnel. And as for diverting traffic elsewhere: I do wonder where you would like to relocate traffic off the Uxbridge Road in Ealing or Acton, or the A23 in Streatham?

     Also, bear in mind that diverting cars under the high street speeds them up, making car travel more attractive, whilst reducing the tram to a 10kph crawl on the surface. Wouldn’t it be better to reverse this?

204. Yes. well town centres such as Kingston were pedestrianised. But there were no handy nearby main roads.

     The inner gyratory had to be carved through the surrounding streets demolishing many buildings. It took several decades and 20 years later the edge of the ring road is still littered with vacant sites used as car parks.

205. did I say it was easy?

     As for where the traffic from the Uxbridge Road through Ealing and Acton should go, that is what, believe it or not, the Western Avenue was supposed to be for.

     Streatham was to have had the Ringway 2 http://www.cbrd.co.uk/articles/ringways/ringway2/south.shtml
     and M23 extension
     http://www.cbrd.co.uk/articles/ringways/southern/m23.shtml

     Even one underground tram stop pushes up the cost considerably – not just in building and operating costs: look at how the DLR had to replace its entire fleet when the Bank extension was built, as the original units were not “Tunnel-proof”.

     If you’re going to build a tunnel, it’s the through traffic that should go through it.

     Acton High Street is about half a mile long (and up a hill) – Streatham High Road well over a mile: that’s a long way between tram stops – more like a full-blown Metro.

206. @timbeau – on the basis of having lived in the area for a number of years,I can assure you that the Western Avenue is another planet as far as Ealingers are concerned and wholly irrelevant to removing the through traffic,much of which isn’t long or even medium-distance at all, but built up from numerous overlapping shorter trips. Unlike the Oxford Street example cited, there are really no parallel roads covering any substantial distance along the Uxbridge Road in Ealing; in particular, the area round West Ealing station is really quite short of east west routes – a detailed examination of the former 211 bus route would show the point. The same goes for the Uxbridge Road east of Ealing Broadway…

     The point surely is not whether it is “easy” but whether it is , in fact, possible at all without large scale demolition of property.

207. @ timbeau

     GH needs no endorsement from me, but I think you are wrong with your statement, “……that is what, believe it or not, the Western Avenue was supposed to be for.”

     It was built in what was once open country, to avoid “Uxbridge and everywhere else to the east of it”. It was built to avoid Greenford and to pass between Hillingdon and Ickenham, not to link to them. It was meant to be the fast road to Oxford and the A40 was re-numbered to become the A4020. As a general rule “Ealingers” do not use the Western Avenue.

208. I seem to remember reading somewhere that about 1900, the population of Perivale was just 90. In the 20th century, the Hoover factory was built along with the “Perivale Trading Estate”

     The danger with any traffic alleviation scheme, is that as with the “nature abhors a vacuum” principle, traffic will follow any such scheme to saturation point. People will then ask, “How did we live before it”? It applies everywhere, such as the Overground, DLR, Croydon Tramlink, M25 and MUST be borne in mind with any new traffic alleviation proposal (Crossrail etc), even the night tube. An extension to any full system is more likely to further saturate the core than alleviate traffic in the areas of any extension.

209. Having lived just off Acton High Street myself some years ago, I am quite aware of what traffic is like in Ealing and Acton – evidently the diversion of the A40, to run a mile or so to the north of its original route, simply created a vacuum that has been filled up in the subsequent century.
     And the Kingston solution is far from ideal.

     In installing a tram system, Croydon was fortunate in that it has more than its fair share of flyovers and underpasses (not to mention a moribund railway line) which allow the trams to be kept separate from much of the traffic. Moreover, the main axis of the Croydon tram route is orbital, whereas the proposals for Ealing, Acton, Streatham and Sutton are all for radial routes following, not crossing, the respective High Streets which have all generally developed along radial routes out of London. (It is interesting to note that Paris’s new tram routes are generally orbital)

210. @castlebar – I think we are in agreement actually – the Western Avenue* was built so that London-Oxford traffic didn’t have to go through, inter alia, Ealing Broadway, leaving that thoroughfare to what local traffic there was that had business in Ealing. But the amount of such local traffic has increased a lot since 1925, so the Broadway is far busier than it was when it was the main route to Oxford, Gloucester and (pre-Severn Bridge) South Wales

     *(and to a lesser extent the Great West Road to the south of Ealing, although that was primarily intended to relieve Brentford and Hounslow)

211. To be honest the A23 should have a full blown tube line along it’s length anyway, it’s not as if it would not be full from opening.

212. @timbeau – I shouldn’t get too hung up, if I were you, on the theory that the Uxbridge Road (and the A23 etc) are “radial” and therefore to be distinguished from the “orbital” nature of Tramlink. Their origins are just history now in terms of function – just like “Oxford Street” from a previous century. Few, if any people, these days set off from central London and drive along a radial route to, say, Uxbridge, Reigate or Croydon, let alone carry on to wherever; the former radial routes are much the same functionally, now, as the orbital routes – part of essentially a local web of trips.

     @Castlebar – perhaps you had in mind the Betjeman poem?

     “Parish of enormous hayfields
     Perivale stood all alone”.

213. @ Rational Plan

     A23 Tube. > How far south would you go “along its length”?

     (Somebody who no longer posts on here has already suggested extending the Northern Line to Brighton – [via Uckfield -Lewes I seem to remember])

214. @ GH No, not Betjeman but “A history of Greenford Parva”, and Sir Montague Sharp’s “Bygone Hanwell”

215. @castlebar
     “extending the Northern Line to Brighton – via Uckfield -Lewes I seem to remember”

     surely the answer to the squabbles over the Hayes branch between the BML2 lobby and the Hakerloo lobby is to extend the Bakerloo to Lewes? (keeping on topic, would there be room for both the trams and the Tube trains in the tunnels near Coombe Road?)

216. @ Castlebar 1546 – as far south as a comfortable stroll from PoP’s front door? 😉

     More seriously there is obviously scope for debate once you get south of Thornton Heath as to quite where you pitch the line – East, West or Central Croydon???? – and then where it heads after that given the differing s/b road corridors out of Croydon. I suspect Purley would be a natural terminating point but there is probably a genuine question to ask whether Purley warrants a tube line or if such a service should just stop in Croydon (there are positive and negative aspects to that).

     I would still contend, as I’m awkward like that, that a tram service could still be justified on the A23 corridor alongside a new tube line. The point in all of this is that there is enormous travel demands in that corridor and a tube line would cover a proportion of them but a tram would raise quality hugely for the remaining ones. A vast number of buses could be taken off the corridor and re-used to provide high quality feeder routes into both tram and tube corridors. And before people baulk at such extravagance then how on earth do we justify both a tube and rail link to Walthamstow or Tottenham or Ealing or, in future, three very frequent lines into Canary Wharf?

217. Surely, there is a cut-off point where travelling in either tram or tube sized stock, with many frequent stops, becomes unbearable and point-to-point journeys take too long. Surely a reason why extending the underground down the A23 will never be a rational solution.

218. Dr Richards Beeching says ” Surely a reason why extending the underground down the A23 will never be a rational solution.”

     Before we can decide whether such an extension could be “a rational solution”, might it be helpful to ask the age-old question “What problem is this ‘solution’ intended to solve?”

219. @Walthamstow Writer:

     Taking over one or more of the branch lines in that neck of the woods would make more sense than terminating in the centre of Croydon, and also means a depot site should be easier to find. (E.g. taking over the Tattenham Corner + Epsom Downs branches, thus releasing capacity through both West and East Croydon stations. Other options also exist.)

     For what it’s worth: the M23 starts at its junction with the M25. (It was originally planned to run much further into London, hence the odd junction layout that dumps traffic onto the A23 instead.)

220. Anomnibus,

     For what it’s worth: the M23 starts at its junction with the M25.
     For what it’s worth, the M23 does NOT start at its junction with the M25. A quick look at a map would have instantly shown that it doesn’t e.g. Ordance Survey 1:50000 here.

     The M23 starts at junction 7 in Hooley. The junction with the M25 is junction 8 (M23), junction 7 (M25). To get from the A23 from London onto the M25 you have to first get onto the M23 and then keep your wits about you and get in the correct lane to join the M25.

221. @Pedantic of Purley:

     Huh. Learn a new thing every day. I always thought of that bit as a slip road linking the M23 with the A23.

     (Though, technically, I’d say the M23 “starts” at the incomplete stub next to the disused Croydon, Merstham & Godstone Railway* cutting; the rest is slip roads.)

     [And that’s enough about the M23 in this thread thank you. Malcolm]

222. Well Croydon towards central London, would cover the highest passenger demand, though how many passengers would transfer from buses and how many from the local trains would be up. for debate.

     But considering the crush on both it would have a pretty good case.

     Though if it had tube like spacing of stops compared to Crossrail, would it get from Central London and past Streatham before it was rammed?

223. @ Dr R Beeching – not everyone wishes to travel at hypersonic speed on trains that stop only at your chosen origin and destination. If your basic premise was correct then the tube, DLR, Tramlink and Overground would be dire failures because they stop everywhere and have basic rolling stock of varying designs but all with the same basic aim of cramming people inside. Last time I looked all the services I quoted have had sustained growth for years and that’s not all attributable to it being a “distress purchase” for commuters who have no choice. Off peak travel is also bouyant and people have more choice about how to travel then.

     Looking at the A23 corridor – we have buses that are stuffed full of people and they mostly converge on Brixton to catch the tube. Some will catch trains at Streatham stations but not many. This is madness. Far better, even with all the traffic issues to solve and I know there are plenty, to have them given a brand new fully automatic tube line and to also have swish high capacity trams. Both schemes would revolutionise travel in that corridor with buses redeployed to feed into stations or else improve orbital links. Yes it would cost a lot of money but the alternative of the 50, 133, 333, 60, 59, 109, 159 and 250 bus routes all being jammed full and slogging up and down Brixton Hill and taking 5+ mins to board / alight at Brixton or Stockwell is not very attractive. And yes there is a tiny bit of artistic licence in the routes I’ve listed – no one needs to provide detailed corrections.

     I only grumble on about this stuff because we simply can’t carry on fiddling about with what we already have. We have a crisis about how to accommodate the people who want to live in London and we have a crisis about how they move about in a way that won’t kill people through pollution or growing traffic accidents. We also simply don’t have the land to sustain everyone having 1, 2 or 3 cars per household – there’s nowhere for those vehicles to park and still have access to local streets. If the politicians ever manage to improve the accommodation problem then we will simply have an even larger mobility issue. I would contend that a fixation with building Crossrails gets us nowhere very quickly. We must must must have schemes that add more capacity into available road space than we currently achieve. We must also get back into the habit of building new tube lines, not necessarily to tube dimensions, to supplement the existing rail network. London can’t control the increase in long distance commuting which means trains from East Croydon and Bromley are full before they even try to pick up London area commuters. Therefore we must do something different if the peak time rail network can’t squeeze more people on to the faster trains they’d all love to use, if only there was space. That argument repeats itself all the way round London on each of the main line arteries into Central London.

224. I have a lot of sympathy for WW’s arguments above. But we need to get real. Sure, there would be a big positive impact on London’s traffic problems if new tube lines and tram lines such as the A23 ones mentioned, and the many others on other major arteries, could all be built starting tomorrow (or Wednesday at the very latest).

     But that isn’t going to happen. The most we can really hope for is a modest increase in the current rate of capital expenditure per decade on new transport infrastructure. We could all draw lines on maps until we got blue in the face, but I think we would be more productively employed devising the most effective way of spending the limited sums which might plausibly be allocated to London transport infrastructure.

     To me, at the moment, that looks like more crossrails. It might be a little early to judge, but that seems to me to be the approach which gets the best traffic-relief (however you measure that) per pound spent. Yes, perhaps other things (metro lines, tram projects) could have a part to play, but I see their role as secondary, at least until we reach the sunlit uplands of more money than projects needing it, which surely won’t happen any time soon.

225. @ Malcolm – sigh! If the money is constrained why on earth would you tip all of it into just more Crossrails? That means you concentrate all your limited funds on one or two corridors either side of the central area and that’s it. Yes a Crossrail may be beneficial but it may also be the case you get more benefit over a far wider area by spending on a range of cheaper and easier to deliver schemes. Are we seriously suggesting that tracts of London get no or negligible improvement for up to 12-15 years because that’s how long it takes to get a Crossrail line built (assuming a fair wind behind and little objection to the scheme in question). Are we seriously suggesting that approach to things will be remotely acceptable to people and will not result in damage to London’s economy in the mean time? Mayor Livingstone was wise enough to go for a blend of schemes that delivered a range of benefits over a good spread of time and which allowed a projects pipeline to be run effectively. Once again I seem to be in a minority and that’s fine – I’ll shut up now.

226. @WW: I only said that it seems to me that crossrails provide the best value for money. Obviously this is pretty subjective, and there is plenty of room for alternative views. Perhaps I should have also said that, even if crossrails are chosen as the best way of spending limited funds, that there is no law of nature stipulating that only one be built at a time.

227. New crossrails will alleviate congestion in the centre and inner suburbs, but will do nothing for congestion on the existing suburban services – neither the Haykerloo nor XR3 will increase the capacity on the Hayes branch itself, and BML2 would actually make matters worse. Similarly, XR1 will have no effect on the capacity on the Shenfield line or the GWML.
     The cost per mile of tunnelling does not scale – a one mile tunnel costs a lot more than 10% of a ten mile one, and the major costs are actually stations. So the most cost-effective way of improving capacity on the suburban network might not be more Crossrails but more HS1s – tunnels from somewhere on the edge of the suburban area – Surbiton, Welwyn, the Quarry Line area, Orpington, Cheshunt etc, with few or any stations in the suburbs, to whisk passengers from out of London direct to one or two well-connected central London destinations (which may, or may not, be close to the current termini the respective main lines, and would ideally be connected across the centre. With the fast services out of the way, much more intensive suburban services could then be operated on the original main lines.

228. timbeau: More HS1s – now there’s a promising approach. Another way of looking at it is to observe that the infrastructure already in place in the form of suburban stations is mostly underused. (With the occasional exception). So if more trains can call (because the non-stop ones are diverted) we can make use of this “free” capacity.

229. @Malcolm
     I think that’s the idea I was trying to convey.

     In case people think this is going off-topic, it isn’t – because the issue is how best to improve radial services along the A23 corridor. Building a tram is one possibility, but few people will switch from local trains to parallel trams, which are slower, except for very local journeys where frequency is more important than speed in determining total journey time. It would be interesting to compare prices for a mile of HS1-type tunnel and a mile of tramway.
     If we can improve the existing local train services instead, then the limited capacity in central Croydon can be used for other, orbital, extensions to the trams.

230. @Walthamstow Writer:

     The Tube network still serves as a distribution system for the dozen or so terminus stations that sit in a big ring around London. The Tube therefore handles not only the job of getting people from a terminus to the point in central London where they actually want to go, but also people trying to get across London as, for many journeys, London is not the destination. (From south of the Thames, it’s fair to say that nearly all trains “lead to London”, even if that’s not where you want to go.)

     Crossrail-type projects allow people to make journeys right through London and out the other side. When Crossrail 1 opens, Gravesend to Heathrow or Reading is just one train-change at Abbey Wood, and a lot quicker than the usual faff of getting off at Charing Cross, taking the Bakerloo to Paddington, then catching the relevant train.

     Crossrail’s Abbey Wood branch gets us two improvements for the price of one: passengers who live to the west of Abbey Wood will find more space on their trains as many will likely change onto Crossrail rather than staying on into London Bridge, or using the Woolwich or Greenwich DLR branches.

231. Two further points concerning timbeau’s “more HS1s” notion. The selfsame principle has been promoted here by Mark Townend with regard to CR2 (and maybe elsewhere and/or by others and/or in other contexts).

     And the second point is that the prototype, HS1 itself, currently suffers from perceived high prices, particularly between Stratford and St Pancras. And the relief that it has provided to conventional lines, allowing some extra stops, is unappreciated by anyone (pre-existing users because their trains are consequently slower, new users because they are generally unaware of the reason for their slightly improved service).

232. @anomnibus
     “When Crossrail 1 opens, Gravesend to Heathrow or Reading is just one train-change at Abbey Wood,”
     Both journeys can already be done with one train change – at St Pancras or at Waterloo respectively. Given that Crossrail will operate only the stopping services on the GWML, I’m not convinced by the speed argument either.

233. @ Anomnibus – have I not read in on this very blog that the one example of cross London line that we have (Thameslink) has negligible cross centre traffic? Now you will no doubt argue that Thameslink isn’t typical but it’s not exactly an auspicious example. Crossrail may be different but we must wait and see the extent to which suburb to cbd, intra cbd and cross London traffic shares develop. I would not be astonished if Crossrail is largely suburb to cbd (work) traffic with a lot of daytime within Zone 1 and to Canary Wharf traffic. Heathrow may be a factor that generates cross London traffic but I remain to be convinced given Thameslink has Luton and Gatwick and doesn’t seem to generate a lot of cross London traffic to those destinations. I am obviously assuming here that previous comments on this blog are correct. I am happy to be corrected if firm evidence can be provided.

     Just because infrastructure may allow a journey does not mean that people will use it in the way expected. Planners often got caught out because actual behaviour diverges from that which was planned for. I doubt anyone planning the JLE had any expectation of a Westfield shopping centre, an Olympic Park or the massive “hub” effect that the station has generated. I suspect we may see some strange effects with Crossrail and Thamelink in and around Farringdon and Clerkenwell but we shall see. As I have said before there are fun times ahead as these transport services come on stream.

234. Malcolm 7 September 2015 at 17:52

     ” HS1 itself, currently suffers from perceived high prices, particularly between Stratford and St Pancras”

     That’s got worse since re-privatisation of the East Coast Main Line.
     I was quoted a fare from Stratford International to Edinburgh Waverley which was almost twice the fare from London Kings Cross to Edinburgh Waverley.
     We bought separate tickets.

235. Some strange references to people on high closing any discussion re.double length trams. Maybe we should have more detail on such strangulation of blue-sky thinking.
     Metrolink builds every station to accommodate double from the start.
     Reminds me of a similar situation over double deck trains. Always this was ridiculed
     in spite of wide continental practice.
     Yet now recent years seem to have allowed the idea some traction.
     The UK always had double-deck buses and trams when the continent did not. Have you ever tried walking the full platform length of a 12-car train – its gets pretty tedious.
     So, how about double deck trams for Croydon?

236. @Walthamstow Writer:

     Thameslink … requires a change of train to get to anywhere useful.

     (If the East-West rail link happens, it’ll be interesting to see its effects on Thameslink usage.)

     Crossrail was planned from the outset to connect to major interchange hubs and junctions like Stratford in the east and Reading in the west, as well as to the ELL, Old Oak Common (assuming HS2 actually happens), and a bunch of Tube lines as well. While I don’t expect cross-London travelling to become a major pattern overnight, Crossrail also greatly improves (north) Kent’s rail access to the rest of the country, which should have knock-on effects on that county’s local and regional economies.

     You mention HS1: How many people in Medway or Canterbury do you think are going to continue paying a premium fare for a “high speed” service, that achieves a lower average speed than the Brighton Main Line, when they can change onto a faster, and more frequent service at Abbey Wood (and, eventually, Dartford**) that gets them right into the useful bits of central London and beyond?

     And who’s going to faff about changing onto Thameslink at St. Pancras for Gatwick when they can get to Heathrow and Stansted more quickly? Yes, Crossrail may be a stopping service, but those stops are some distance apart compared to conventional Tube lines, so it’s still a ‘fast’ route compared to taking a train into Cannon Street via Greenwich, let alone changing onto the Northern Line at St. Pancras.

     Some of the same arguments will apply to Essex, East Anglia, Suffolk and Norfolk travellers too: the “All trains lead to London” tenet has meant London is as much a barrier as a destination as changing onto the ageing Tube is a lottery when it comes to accessibility, and basic human comfort. Crossrail changes that by making London much more permeable.

     ** and possibly beyond, but I doubt it, for much the same reason the Bakerloo might never be extended beyond Lewisham.

     [Oft-repeated topics snipped. LBM]

237. @David C S Bartlett:

     We have tried double-decker trains in the past. It did not end well. The trains took longer for passengers to board and leave.

     The double-deck trains on the continent are designed for their lower platforms and larger loading gauge*. They literally wouldn’t fit any of our stations, and our older railway lines have tunnels and bridges that are too low to allow such trains to work. (Continental European rail networks have, in recent years, worked on raising platform levels to reduce the dwell times at stations, but their platforms are still lower than the UK’s for the most part, and they don’t have those overhanging coping stones we use due to their different loading gauges which precludes such a design.)

     Re. Double-decker trams:

     These have been used on the continent. They aren’t used any more because those stairs because articulation is usually better value for money. (It also means you can avoid expensive surgery to roads and bridges to allow for taller vehicles.) We couldn’t really do articulation reliably back then, so double-decking was the only option if you needed more capacity. The only other option was coupling trams together, as shown in that link.

     * also known as “kinematics envelope” if you prefer industry jargon. The term refers to the volume of space you need to allow for the usual horizontal sway and vertical movement of the train. The UK’s railways were built for smaller trains.

238. @Anomnibus – “Crossrail was planned from the outset to connect to major interchange hubs and junctions like Stratford in the east and Reading in the west, as well as to the ELL, Old Oak Common” No it wasn’t…

239. Anomnibus: There are no direct trains from Canterbury to Abbey Wood. The most recent time any airport was reachable by “the Northern Line [from] St. Pancras” was 1968. And if your plane is flying from Gatwick, being able to get to “Heathrow and Stansted more quickly” is of little interest.

240. @anomnibus – BTW thank you for the link to Italian d/d trams (of which I was unaware); they look far more British than the Parisian or Wiener ‘deckers.

241. @Malcolm
     “The most recent time any airport was reachable by “the Northern Line [from] St. Pancras” was 1968.”
     I don’t understand this statement, did the northern line connect to an airport once?

242. @Kingstoncommuter: Hendon Aerodrome, which closed in 1968.

243. @Malcolm
     RAF Hendon closed in 1987 and although Mr Wiki quotes the last movement as the Beverley landing in 1968 this is questionable – I was stationed there in 1975/76 and I have a vague memory of a light aircraft from Elstree landing with engine trouble. In any case, occasional military or other use hardly justifies classification as an ‘airport’. I suppose Hendon Aerodrome actually closed when it was taken over by the Air Ministry in 1938 or 1939?

244. @Graham H…..Even it it wasn’t the original purpose, you can’t deny that this is going to be one of the main additional benefits.

     Having made the trip between Orpington and Cambridge by train on numerous occasions, I can completely empathise with Anomnibus’ point about cross-London travel. If I’m still living in Cambridge by the time the Thameslink Programme is (finally!) in full operation, it is likely to prove far more attractive for me to travel via a one-stop interchange at London Bridge instead of my current subterranean journey on the Northern line, even though the train to Cambridge will take longer due to the extra stops.

245. @Graham H:

     I’m not referring to the earlier plans for the line. Given that it has existed in various forms since at least the 1980s, it would be pointless to do so. I’m referring to the current project. (While it was originally implied that Maidenhead would be the western terminus, it was clear from very early on that this was a cheap political trick and Reading was the intended target.)

     @Malcolm:

     I don’t recall asserting that the Northern Line went anywhere near an airport. It’s Thameslink that links both Luton and Gatwick airports. I may have made a typo, but I can’t tell as there seems to have been a bit of editing by the mods.

246. Anomnibus,

     I suspect Graham H was primarily querying
     as well as to the ELL, Old Oak Common (assuming HS2 actually happens),

     I think the first (the East London Line) is highly unlikely given the low usage at the time.

     They might just have wanted to serve Whitechapel (which happens to be on the East London Line). However I think that was a late afterthought and done more to get political support in the East End where there would have be a lot of disruption (especially with the Hanbury Street shaft – that ultimately didn’t happen) than for any strategic reason.

     As for Old Oak Common, this surely was not part of the original plan. Why would it be with HS2 not even being thought about? Given that even now, as it is being built, there will not be a station at Old Oak Common it is highly unlikely, almost inconceivable, that one was originally intended.

247. I am sure that advertising posters of around 100 years ago for the “Hendon Air Show” (or pageant), recommended Hendon station as being the best way to get there – – or was it Colindale??

248. @Anomnibus – no,Reading wasn’t in the Mk1 Crossrail, and the Mk2 2 version started without it either, nor OOC which had only been invented many years after the planning for Mk2 was complete. I doubt if you are right that “Reading” was always the promised land. From both an operational and a traffic point of view , it remains unattractive and whenever my firm did any work for the CrossRail Mk2 team (which was frequently), their view certainly was that Maidenhead was far enough; indeed all the first few rounds of timetables that my team wrote for them assumed nothing else.

     @Anonymously – there will always be someone who makes the Bedminster to Berney Arms (or whatever) trip; the question is how many will do so. Unless travel habits have changed radically in the last 15 years or so, all the evidence points to relatively few people making the region to region journey, and the modelling undertaken by, for example, the TLK sponsors seems to reflect that , in that the service pattern links outer termini on the basis of frequency and train length as much as likely through journeys. (Let’s hear it again for Cambridge to Tattenham Corner….) I accept that CR1 may change that in the particular case as the Wharf and Heathrow are such powerful attractors that people will travel right across London to get to these places. north-south trips, however, lack such powerful alternatives to the CAZ.

249. Graham H, Anomnibus

     Oh dear, we are way off-topic.

     Without wishing to keep it that way too much could I just add that I cannot agree that Reading is not an attractive proposition now which is what I think Graham H is saying.

     The reason Crossrail will go to Reading is almost entirely to avoid otherwise unnecessary 2 train paths an hour between Maidenhead and Slough which is what would have happened if Crossrail hadn’t have gone to Reading – and the GWML cannot afford to trivially have unnecessary paths used. It also saved infrastructure build at Slough to terminate the intended Reading-Slough shuttles. Remember there is a lot of local travel to Reading in the morning.

     The question that really needs to be asked is: “if the Crossrail Mk2 team had the situation where Maidenhead – Reading was electrified at no cost to Crossrail would they have come to the same conclusion?” I very strongly suspect not.

     I will give you both (Graham H and Anomnibus) right of one further comment about Crossrail on this thread but any after that will be deleted. There is a far more appropriate thread for this namely Crossrail: Reading the Future.

250. Anomnibus 8 September 2015 at 19:29

     “Maidenhead would be the western terminus, it was clear from very early on that this was a cheap political trick and Reading was the intended target”

     Crossrail didn’t want to get tangled up with the redevelopment of Reading station; happily completed early and under-budget.

     [Comment allowed as I presume it was written before the ultimation was given. PoP]

251. @Anomnibus
     “Thameslink … requires a change of train to get to anywhere useful. ”

     Strange, then, that there is a strong lobby for a duplicate Brighton Line. Not to mention Luton Airport.

     One of the main flows on any cross-London route will be to the main line terminus at the other end – so Thameslink allows passengers from all over the south of England to get to Kings Cross and St Pancras without changing (and thus can do Brighton to Edinburgh, for example, with one change instead of two). Crossrail 2 would do the same for SW London. Crossrail will similarly allow much of East London to have direct access to Paddington.

252. @PoP – you are right to rebuke us and I will still my pen/finger.

253. Could I just point out that rather dubious generalisations such as the ones given Anomnibus are not helpful as they inevitably lead to them being challenged which in turn creates a load of off-topic comments. There may well be a clampdown (at least by me) of sweeping generalisations that are not entirely accurate and are likely to provoke further comments as people have a natural desire to challenge them rather than have them blindly accepted.

254. @WW “Thameslink has negligible cross centre traffic”
     — I can’t speak for the longer-distance Brighton-Bedford trains, but on the Wimbledon/Sutton and Catford locals there is plenty of traffic between Elephant (and points south) and St Pancras, in fact at St Pancras northbound one often seems to see as many people getting off as getting on. But it all depends what we mean by cross-centre traffic. Perhaps you meant going from south of the core to somewhere beyond St Pancras, in which case you may have a point.

255. @ PZT – not shocked to see people travelling as far as St Pancras given the growing developments in that area plus the traditional scale of interchange to other services. The original context of the discussion was right across zone 1 and arguably further than that. I suspect there is some cross London traffic to / from the airports but not mass flows from say Croydon to St Albans or Three Bridges to Luton.

256. @Castlebar

     Colindale – maybe 200 yards up the hill from the guardroom. In the early days of the RAF Museum there were a lot of people arriving with sore feet having walked from Hendon station (or sore wallets having taken a taxi).

257. Hendon Aerodrome never ran scheduled commercial flights, other than some mail runs, and became an RAF base in WW1. Even before WW1 it was attracting large crowds for races, and the RAF pageants which started in 1920.
     Hendon or Mill Hill Broadway (Midland Rly) were the nearest stations until Colindale opened in 1924.
     http://www.ltmcollection.org/photos/photo/photo.html?_IXMAXHITS_=1&_IXSR_=lVmfleVTu2n&IXsummary=location/location&IXlocation=Barnet&_IXFIRST_=235&IXenlarge=i0000fba

258. Trying to bring this back on thread, Croydon Aerodrome, now a thriving industrial and commercial estate, was never served by any public transport other than buses – the nearest station being Waddon, and Croydon Borough Council/London Transport trams coming no nearer than Wallington and Purley.
     Has any thought been given to extending Tramlink in that direction?

259. @timbeau – The South Metropolitan Electric Tramways ran right alongside Croydon Aerodrome/Airport, along Stafford Road, as did their trolleybus successors.

260. @timbeau
     I have often thought the same thing. It feels like a natural place for a tramlink extension with wide roads and some large central reservations at some points. It could probably serve as an ultimate destination in its own right. The main problem is where, on the current system, would trams be extended from?

261. @Graham F
     the tram route (which I missed because the tram map I was looking at was post-conversion to trolleybus!) did not pass the main entrance to the aerodrome though.

262. Does anyone know the turning circle of the articulated two car trams in Croydon as I feel if we in the London borough of Sutton Surrey do not plane ahead we will have expensive rejigging of the town centre to take the turning circle of these trams into consideration if we do not incorporate these tram turning circles in our plans we have for the regeneration of Sutton town centre. Bearing in mind there is talk that even longer trams will be more cost effective as it will carry more passengers per trip.

     Note the Bombardier Tram ( Light railway ) is 34.7 meters long (114 feet each half is 62 feet long)

263. @Mike sansom – in Basel,modern articulated trams use 12m radius curves, although that is thought to be exceptional. 15m should be doable with most types. Tram length is irrelevant insofar as modern trams are articulated and so, the longer the tram, the more the articulations.

264. Tram or train length is irrelevant to what radius curve can be taken. The length of the vehicle (assuming on bogies) only affects the width of the swept area. More accurately, the distance between the bogies only affects the width of the swept area – clearly you can keep adding carriages without it affecting the ability to take tight corners.

     The tightness of the radius is dependent only on the bogie. You can design the bogie to take tight curves but then it performs less well on straight fast track. The DLR is a classic case of trains that perform well on tight curves but are hopeless on a straight fast piece of track. Given the straight track between Ladywell and New Beckenham it is yet another reason why extending the DLR to the Hayes Line is not a good idea.

265. @Mike S
     Although, as pointed out above, the overall length is not the limiting factor, it would be prudent to have forward planning take account of swept areas (which are dependent on the turning circle, the length of each individual body of an articulated unit, and the positions of the pivot points). However, it wouldn’t do to be too rigid (pun not intended!) as it is most unlikely that the existing trams would be used on any Sutton extension – even if the CR4000s (which are already fifteen years old) are still in service when trams make their victorious return to Sutton, they are fully occupied on the existing routes so new trams would be needed, which could of course be designed around the constraints of the new line.

     Where are you getting the 34.7 m figure from? Tramlinks’s Variobahn trams are 32.37m long, on six axles (five sections, not all the same length), whilst the older CR4000s are slightly shorter at 30.1m also on six axles (three sections, the middle one being very short)
     Both types have been built in other lengths – longer and shorter – for other operators

266. timbeau , 09/09/2015 @9.17.

     Stafford Road, which I believe was the northern edge of the aerodrome, had trams and trolleybuses. Wikipedia shows an old OS map that tends to confirm this.

267. The 654 trolleybus ran from Crystal Palace to Sutton via West Croydon & Wallington. Is this the route you are referring to??

268. @castlebar
     Indeed – I had somehow assumed the trams/trolleybuses would follow the existing route of the A232 and bus routes 407, 410, and X26, instead of the present day 154 – despite the heavy hint afforded by that route’s number!

     The main entrance however was on Purley Way, on the other side of the airport. (You would not claim Mobberley or South Gyle stations as handy for the nearby airports, despite their proximity to the respective perimeter fences!

269. @timbeau, et al.: In the days of Croydon airport only the rich flew, so they would have most likely have arrived in their chauffeur driven limmo….

270. @Southern Height – the staff wouldn’t have arrived by limo though!

     Anyway, this is besides the point – could/should Tramlink be extended there now?

271. @timbeau: True but they probably didn’t care much about the staff. Also remember that Heathrow was only connected to the tube in something 1978…

     Trams should run everywhere! But I’m not biassed… 😉

272. Not sure what the point of a tram to Croydon airport would be. It’s not on a high frequency bus route and it would be a convoluted route from Croydon to Purley (granted it’s the signposted road route at least towards Croydon). I’m not saying it isn’t physically possible although undesirable traffic wise.

273. @Purley Dweller
     “convoluted route from Croydon to Purley ”
     I had in mind a second western branch, from Reeves Corner via Waddon and Purley Way.

274. @Mike Sansom: the ‘standard’ (if there is such a thing) for modern standard-gauge trams is a curve radius of 20-21m in regular service, and 18m in depots. I believe the CR4000 trams currently in service in Croydon are built to these standards.

275. @Purley Dweller:

     The Croydon Airport area has seen some regeneration over the last 20 years, so it’s not exactly a wasteland. While there might not have been a historic demand for frequent services by the previous generation of trams and trolleybuses, I don’t think that holds true today and a more frequent service – be it bus or tram – through the area ought to do well.

     However, there’s a limit to how many more buses you can run through Croydon’s core before they end up getting in each others’ way; limited road capacity is not just a problem for trams.

276. @ Anomnibus – I confess I don’t know that bit of Croydon at all well so take the following remarks in that light. A look at my bus patronage spreadsheet shows the 289, the main bus on Purley Way, having had reasonable sustained growth (net increase of 600,000 pass jnys pa) over the last 6-7 years. It’s never going to have startling numbers but that’s not bad for a suburban route in outer London. Anecdotal remarks on other forums say buses on the route are badly overloaded at certain times of day. The 119 has performed more modestly and it’s not easy to say where its growth has happened as TfL don’t provide that level of detail. All the patronage data comes from TfL but I’ve just compiled it into a master sheet with extra detail with a look up function. Whether the patronage is enough to warrant a tram service I can’t say. Part of the issue is whether a tram would trigger much more usage / transfer from car travel.

277. I know the area well. It really doesn’t justify trams. The 289 serves the whole purley way rather than going into croydon and the 119 goes through Waddon to South Croydon, neither route would be the tram. There are few houses and no significant development. The businesses there are those that tend to be either light industrial or generally car served. There is a playing field and a common beyond the airport and a couple of restaurants at it. Housing is low density. It’s perfect for buses. The 289 and 407 being double decked would be more helpful.

278. As of Saturday the Mon-Sat daytime frequency of route 407 will be increased to every 12 minutes. No double decking though.

279. I note with interest that a recent Mayor’s Answer about TfL Funding priorities and the Spending Review includes the following about what the Chancellor has asked about. Note the inclusion of Tramlink to Sutton alongside more obvious candidates.

     I welcome the Chancellor’s support for London’s transport infrastructure announced in our Long Term Economic Plan for London ; and TfL has prepared five additional business cases at the Chancellor’s request. These are for Crossrail 2 , new river crossings east of Silvertown, the Bakerloo Line Extension into south east London, the proposed Tramlink extension to Sutton and new road tunnelling schemes.

280. Not sure if this is the correct Tramlink article to post this but it appears to be the most recent. I noticed yesterday on Twitter that the new platform at Wimbledon opened on time. Some links to pics. (Not mine)

     https://mobile.twitter.com/GtrLondonPhotos/status/661213075350102016

     https://m.flickr.com/#/photos/tflpress/sets/72157658376836454/

     If this is in the wrong place or already been covered then mods please move or delete accordingly.

281. Ooh fantastic. Obviously the new platform won’t count until it’s added to Carto Metro.

282. With the service frequency increase expected in spring.

283. Re I am a Hedgehog,

     “Ooh fantastic. Obviously the new platform won’t count until it’s added to Carto Metro”

     Don’t count on it being there that long though…

284. Kate, (from another thread)

     A couple of extra sets of points and trams could run from Addiscombe to Lloyd Park and vv in such circumstances – not ideal but better than nothing.

     The problem is that the track needs to be severely canted (angled) for the trams to get around these sharp bends and onto the steep rise to reach Sandilands tram stop. An absolute non-starter. You can have either, or – but not both.

285. @PoP: I find your comment unclear, both of what? Do you mean that the third side of the “triangle” cannot be filled in at all, or do you mean it could only be filled in with a single line?

286. Lack of resilience was of course one of the reasons for Britain’s first batch of tram replacements (1930-1960). Let’s hope we’re not seeing the lead-up to the second…

287. Walthamstow Writer,

     The plan for an extra platform at Elmers End is nothing new but hasn’t been publicised much. The staff at the consultations for the Dingwall Road loop were very happy to talk about it though.

     It really has been needed for a long time as effectively the Tramlink timetable is written around the occupation of the single terminating platform at Elmers End. Note that, with the construction (if not use) of the new platform at Wimbledon, Elmers End is the now only Tramlink terminus with a single platform.

     Apparently £10 million has been budgeted for it. That seems a lot so I am wondering if they need to buy land and move a substation. It was suggested to me it may be because of buried cables – always an expense to move.

     The reason I think this has come up now is because the development of the new shopping centre is years behind its original timetable hence s106 payments won’t be available any time soon, hence no point in building the very expensive Dingwall Road loop without the money on offer. So I suspect the idea is to do this now instead rather than leave it until after the Dingwall Road loop is completed.

     At the very least the extra platform and double tracking at Elmers End will provide resilience but, hopefully, it will enable a better timetable to be implemented to Elmers End – maybe the proposed 6tph to Wimbledon at even intervals and 2tph to Croydon Town centre.

     The 2016/7 TfL Budget also talks about trying to increase the number of trams per hour to Addington to 10tph. As there is no mention of the Dingwall Road loop this really would mean that they would be running about the realistic limit of trams they can run around Croydon Town Centre (6tph to Beckenham Junction, 8tph to Elmers End, 10tph to New Addington making 24tph in total).

     To go beyond this level of service really does need the Dingwall Road loop but this is unpopular as it is seen as taking trams away from the town centre. If I interpret this plan correctly, the idea is to get to the practical limit of trams in the town centre before building the Dingwall Road loop. This should help quell some of the (slightly irrational) opposition to it.

     It will be interesting where they store the extra trams for a 10tph to New Addington. It will only need a couple of trams but Therapia Lane depot is very full. Maybe overnight at Wimbledon Station? Or maybe they commit to a new depot which would help in relieving pressure at Therapia Lane as well as give opportunities for the inevitable growth?

288. Malcolm,

     It cannot be filled at all because the place where you need to put the set of points is graded/angled/canted. You can only put points in at a flat location.

     A good photo would make this obvious. The best I can find is this one but I suspect it is not obvious enough for any doubters. It really needs to be taken at track level.

     On reflection it may be possible you could do it for one track but it is a thoroughly bad idea because unless it were to be used enough to make it worthwhile. It would give you serious maintenance problems to both tram and track. The trams would either have to take the curve much slower and then face an uphill climb from a very low start speed or the effect on tram and track would be punishing as you would be dealing with the unmitigated consequences of Newton’s Laws of Motion.

289. Graham Feakins sent me this picture which is a still from a video and is of poor quality but it does illustrate the issue at Sandilands Junction better. You can see that the gradient is already rising before the junction is reached. It might also be clear to you that the left hand rail is higher than the right hand rail to assist in tilting the tram as it goes around the steep curve to reduce forces on track/make travel more pleasant/ enable curve to be taken at higher speed.

290. It would be possible, but very awkward, to convert that to a triangular junction without affecting the existing canting. Single tracking all three sides of the triangle would be one way, but would put obvious constraints on capacity. Having a branch turning off the current Croydon-bound one notwithstanding the existing canting would require very slow speed on the turnout (geometrically straight ahead). In the days when I travelled that way regularly, I experienced this “adverse camber” at Trent Junction, where Nottingham-Derby services had to negotiate a triangular junction laid out primarily for services from both cities towards London.

291. Additional sets of points at Sandilands are easy by accepting that the link would be single track with points placed before the curves and rise. For occasional use that would be sufficient on a network which already has single track sections.

     I am pleased to hear the worse-than-useless Dingwall loop is not presently favoured. I have always maintained that the junctions on Addiscombe Road are the more significant bottlenecks.

292. @kate
     “points placed before the curves and rise”
     The rise starts before the curve. And, as Graham’s photo shows, there is a high retaining wall on the left, which would mean a lot of excavation to get the extra width needed to start that far back, possibly starting from under the Sandilands Road bridge and extending at least as far as the tunnel mouth.
     And for what? How many people want to go from Elmers End to Addington?
     If the line towards Croydon is blocked, reversal at Sandilands is possible anyway.

293. Kate,

     I am pleased to hear the worse-than-useless Dingwall loop is not presently favoured. I have always maintained that the junctions on Addiscombe Road are the more significant bottlenecks.

     I am not disputing that it may well be the case that junctions on the Addiscombe Road are, in some sense, more significant bottlenecks but I think you have entirely missed the point. In any case, as I suspect you don’t have access to the considerable modelling done (it was included as part of the planning application for the new shopping centre), I am presuming this is just your personal opinion and not backed up by the considerable amount of data available on the subject.

     The junctions on Addiscombe Road generally cause delay but this is restricted to the junction in question. The tailbacks are not so long as to affect other junctions. So, although they may be worse, and more trams will make them slightly worse still, it is a judgement call as to whether the benefit of extra trams justifies the extra delay to other traffic – including buses.

     By way of contrast, traffic in the town centre can have some hideous knock-on effects where blockage at one junction can lead to blockage at another junction and affect all traffic including trams. If you are not careful the entire town centre will seize up.

     So, to try and go above 24tph in the town centre potentially leads to catastrophic failure whereas going above 24tph along the Addiscombe Road merely leads to increased, but manageable, service degradation. That is why, above 24tph, the Dingwall Road loop is vital and sorting out issues along Addiscombe Road is desirable but not vital.

294. PoP
     Presumably if the TfL/RAIB/HMRI/ORR (delete as applicable) restrictions on more than one tram crossing a single set of lights at one go were lifted, quite a bit of congestion relief could be obtained?

295. Greg,

     Some of us have been trying to get to the bottom of this. I now get the impression that there is no, or at least no longer, a mandatory requirement to restrict a crossing to a single tram but that doesn’t mean the traffic lights are phased to be able to take two trams at a time. Remember the traffic lights are actually aware of the presence of a tram. Unlike cars (which are short), trams can’t really “sneak through”.

     We are back to the point though that this wouldn’t really help much in the town centre as all stops are busy so dwell times at stop probably prevents this being used to advantage. I suspect the high usage of Sandilands stop has the same effect too.

296. @ Kate 18 March 2016 at 17:09 “I am pleased to hear the worse-than-useless Dingwall loop is not presently favoured.”

     The LU&LR Our Plan 2016-17 has: Delivering this year
     • Submitting our Transport & Works Act Order for the London Trams Dingwall Road Loop

297. TfL has announced Tramlink live information (including tram stop departure and arrival countdown) is now available. (It was promised by summer 2014 in a Twitter Q&A with the trams team in March that year.)

     Does anyone know if Tramlink has appeared in the TfL ‘family’ grid of service information on BBC London’s breakfast programme? It was always the odd one out because the live information wasn’t available, and planned disruption would appear on the National Rail disruptions screen instead. I must admit I haven’t watched for a while so I’m not even sure if the TfL ‘family’ grid still appears.

     https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/media/press-releases/2016/april/new-live-tram-information-to-make-travelling-around-south-london-easier

298. Anon5,

     I would be more impressed if we could have an up to date tram diagram at https://tfl.gov.uk/maps/track/tram

     A list of all the stops served by route 4 at https://tfl.gov.uk/tram/timetable/tram-4/ would be nice as well.

     I pointed these errors out to TfL at the beginning of the month and got a short reply from First Group on the 8th April stating that “Timetables and maps will be updated in due course”.

     How hard is it for a transport company to have an accurate current diagram of its very simple tram network on its website? And is it asking too much for the stops served by line 4 to be up to date?

299. @ PoP – as is so often the case it seems Mr Munster of Londonbusroutes.net can provide the timetable. 😉

     http://www.londonbusroutes.net/details.htm#tram
     http://www.londonbusroutes.net/trams/160403T1T4.pdf

     I take your point though.

300. PoP
     Err … cough – alterations in CAPS:
     How hard is it for a transport company to have an accurate current diagram of its very simple TRAIN network on its website? And is it asking too much for the stops served by the DARTFORD LINES to be up to date?
     As per the last L-R Christmas quiz.

301. @PoP, Greg T:

     TfL’s Tramlink network is operated by First Group, not directly by TfL. Ditto for Overground and the DLR. The Tube network is the only part of their map that’s actually operated in-house, so it’s hardly surprising that they have fewer problems extracting accurate data from it.

     As for Southeastern, their website was last overhauled by Imaginet. (They’re also responsible for some other industry websites, including Thameslink’s.)

     Diagrammatic / route maps are usually dealt with by graphic designers. I suspect Southeastern would have to pay Imaginet, or a freelancer, to update these. (The graphical similarities between this, and Imaginet’s other railway company sites, suggest Imaginet have contracted to handle all the graphics as well. For a fee, naturally.)

     Given all the work going on around London Bridge and Bermondsey, I can understand why Southeastern might prefer to wait until the next tranche of work starts, rather than paying money from their PR / marketing budget on a new route map that might need to be changed once again in just a few months.

302. Anomnibus,

     Yes I know Tramlink is operated by First Group. That’s why the staff are in First Group uniforms. However, I gather the problem with the website is not at First Group’s end. And if TfL can get their Journey Planner up to date why can’t they get the other bits done? And it was TfL that commissioned this work in the first place. Nothing to do with First Group there.

     In the case of trams, it doesn’t take a graphic design company to update an existing diagram on the website. The updated diagrams are present on the trams and the stops and started to appear weeks ago.

     Incidentally, I understand that the current DLR contract has brought stuff like publicity in-house because it was reckoned that companies like Serco may be quite good at operating a railway but they tend to be less good at things like publicity. However, the DLR webpage on TfL’s site isn’t exactly a mine of information and the best they can do for future plans is a link to a press release relating to improvements that took place last August.

303. @ PoP – the move to “integrate” DLR into the main TfL empire and website has done nothing for the level of detailed info provided. The old DLR website used to provide a decent spread of info about projects, local info and maps for every station, future engineering works etc. Now, as you say, it’s not exactly wonderful. Things like departure info for each station has also been dumbed down although frequencies are now typically higher than in the past.

     Coming back to Tramlink I thought I’d check the new real time departure info. There’s no obvious link from the TfL Trams page to this so I opted for the “Stops and Stations” page. This does get you to the tram stops eventually but it presents you with “Line 1”, “Line 2” etc as choices. There’s no explanation at the decision point as to what line number goes where which strikes me as a tiny bit odd. I guess if you are familiar with the line numbers then it’s no issue but if you’re a new or occasional user that seems an unnecessary complication when 3 or 4 words beside the line number would make things clear. Alternatively just take people directly to a list of stops – hardly matters what the line number is because the real time info just shows final destination and minutes to departure. Even more strangely East Croydon tram stop is shown on the stop map as being in Cherry Orchard Rd rather than in front of the station. 😉 Someone at TfL hasn’t properly tested their new datastream with some ordinary people from outside of their organisation.

304. Another little oddity of the current Tramlink route structure is the numbering of the Elmers End – Therapia Lane workings. They can be numbered either 1 or 4, which makes operational sense if the working is seen as a diversion of an EE loop service or a short working of an EE – Wimbledon service respectively, but from a passenger perspective it makes no sense at all – they’re identical. Much more sensible to number them all 4, then passengers would know that all 1s went round the loop, all 4s didn’t, rather than the current mixture.

305. WW
     Someone at TfL hasn’t properly tested their new datastream with some ordinary people from outside of their organisation. … again.
     Not the first time this has happened.

306. @Pedantic of Purley:

     “However, I gather the problem with the website is not at First Group’s end. And if TfL can get their Journey Planner up to date why can’t they get the other bits done?”

     Because any request for changes must therefore go through First Group’s Tramlink team, who will assign a cost centre and add on their fees, before they then pass it along to their website contractor, who then comes back with a quote for the actual work, which then has to be approved by the relevant accountants, whose likely response to the usurious charges for this one-off graphical change is going to be along the lines of “HOW MUCH?!” To this, they must then add any applicable “change fees” enumerated in their contract with TfL, as all this tedious administration costs them money too. They then send the resulting eye-watering quote back to TfL.

     At which point, it all comes screeching to a halt; this service terminates here, all change please.

     This is very likely the main reason why TfL are undoubtedly trying to bring so much of this stuff in-house. Not only does it greatly reduce the number of contractual interfaces involved, it also substantially reduces the costs as well. I’ve seen quotes for £500-1000 per day for even basic content changes and programming*, and that’s from website companies who don’t even work in the transport field.

     I wholeheartedly support such in-sourcing initiatives, but in the meantime, I’m willing to cut TfL a little slack as it’ll take time to achieve this. The looming budget cuts aren’t going to help either.

     —
     * (If it’s a clickable map that users can interact with, that interaction is usually provided through some form of programming. At this point, it may cease to be a simple graphic design job and require a full-blown project workflow with explicit testing and approval stages.)

307. Anomnibus,

     I suspect you are talking 100% load of rubbish.

     TfL has a contract for a company to run the tram operations. That is done by First Group. It is already TfL’s job to provide travel information on their (TfL’s) website so that passengers (or customers) can use their services. TfL collect the revenue and so, you would think, have an incentive to provide an up-to-date list of stops served by route 4 and to provide an up-to-date tram diagram.

     First Group have absolutely no incentive, other than to keep within their contracted requirements, to provide information. First Group appear to have done what they are required to do with revised maps on trams and revised timetables at stops. TfL seems to have not got their website, under their control, up to date. As I understand it, First Group are badgering TfL to sort this out because to the average uninformed person it may look like First Group haven’t done their job.

308. PoP…… Anomnibus might well have been right in the old days of Tramlink. What he describes will be horribly familiar to anyone who has worked with PFI/PPP deals. On those it is change that makes the money, and if change doesn’t come fast enough they can go horribly wrong. Those who specify these deals try their best to make them resistant to change if they were really good at it they would make far more money as fortune tellers!

309. 100andthirty,

     Not disputing that but clearly that point of view is not relevant today.

310. PoP. I agree. before I retired I spent a day with First operators on Croydon Trams and met people from all from tram drivers to the MD. I was very impressed

311. @ PoP – AIUI you are completely right. TfL brought an awful lot of Tramlink’s activities “in house” in order to get out of the worst aspects of the original contract. I think all First Group do is provide the drivers and manage the day to day service. I don’t even think they look after the maintenance any more (certainly not the tracks or control system). You are also correct about the information and website – entirely down to TfL. It’s not the first time, nor will it be the last, that the TfL website is not as finely honed as it needs to be to reflect the reality on the ground. Ditto maps, line diagrams and timetables. There are big gaps in updates to Bus Spider Maps – recent route changes have not been reflected on maps, in some cases for months. This is a real drop in standards for TfL as the maps were usually updated and made available *in advance* of a change. You won’t find any maps showing that route 70 was extended to Chiswick Business Park or that the EL2 now runs to Becontree Heath rather than Ilford and apparently the 359 bus doesn’t reach Purley if you look at the Purley Spider Map.

312. Walthamstow Writer,

     It is my understanding too that the maintenance of trams is now down to TfL. At a Rail and Underground Committee meeting a few months ago Mike Brown described how easy it was to improve staff morale on taking it over. Simple things like giving them the tools for the job and making sure the loos were clean, stocked with the necessary items and looked after. TfL were flabbergasted to discover that there was no maintenance shift rostered on a Sunday – the one day when there are a decent number of trams in the depot to do some maintenance on.

     I am very disappointed to learn that the spider maps can be out of date and cannot be relied on. I believe at one stage (website redesign?) TfL were trying to get rid of them. The trouble is that modifying them is labour intensive and needs someone with the appropriate skill (thought I would mention that before Anomnibus insists on telling us this again). This is different from the tram map which already exists – they just need to upload the thing.

313. @PoP:

     I was unaware TfL only farmed out the operation of the service; I assumed they were using the same model as for the Overground.

     In which case, TfL’s in-house web team isn’t doing a great job.

314. Anomnibus,

     The exact nature of the contract isn’t really that significant. TfL specifies the service like the route and what stops or stations are served and the operator runs it. If TfL hadn’t got the timetable from the operator then that would be different. Operators (LOROL, Serco, First Group, MTR etc) only do what TfL tell them to do and run the services TfL mandate. It is up to TfL to put them on their website.

     In the case of trams TfL have all the times necessary. They even show the correct times and service in journey planner.

315. Monies have been released to progress enhancements to the Elmers End branch.

     http://content.tfl.gov.uk/fpc-160727-item08-project-monitoring-project-approvals.pdf

     There are a load of approvals in that document covering a number of TfL modes. I won’t replicate the link across multiple articles so it’s worth taking a look to see what money is being spent on the Overground, LU, DLR, trams and roads.

316. As an example of the deteriorating quality of these reports I see the Actions List from the previous meeting has two cases of Matters Arsing in the appendix. One was to do with Taxi fares and Tariffs so maybe it is apposite.

317. @PoP – many a true word is spoken as a typo…

318. There was a tram last week parked by Sandilands sporting Crystal Palace on the front display as it’s destination. Obviously it wasn’t going to Crystal Palace but interesting that Crystal Palace was considered a sufficiently likely extension that signage including Crystal Palace was included.

     (I do have a photo but it is very poor as there’s a pillar in the way and I didn’t have time to cross the road.)

319. @ Kate – programmed in to support Boris’s repeated “I’ll extend tramlink” pledges that came to a great big fat nought during his 8 years.

     Oh look – http://www.yourlocalguardian.co.uk/news/11069860.Boris_Johnson__Crystal_Palace_tram_extension__absolutely_guaranteed__by_2020/ 🙁

     http://www.croydonadvertiser.co.uk/crystal-palace-tramlink-extension-backed-boris/story-17523965-detail/story.html 🙁

     http://www.croydonadvertiser.co.uk/affably-misled-wrong-track-string-pledges/story-28897666-detail/story.html 🙁

320. The timescale for the Sutton – Morden extension was included in Sutton’s Local Plan proposals (issued Feb 2016). Three options were offered, based on the Mayor’s current housing target, using three rates of growth

     Low growth – Tramlink likely to be delivered in the long term

     Medium growth – Tramlink likely to be delivered in the medium term

     High growth – Tramlink likely to be delivered in the short to medium term

     In other words, something akin to blackmail – ‘cram more houses into your borough and you can have your tramlink quicker’ .

     The full proposals are here:
     https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5l397zoXtVQR1J1THVUNTJxZTg/view?pref=2&pli=1
     p.22 – 24 are relevant

321. @RayL – but no actual cash, of course…

322. @ Ray L – IIRC local politicians in Sutton were complaining about “pressure” from City Hall over the scale of housing development being proposed. I wonder if the new regime at City Hall will take a different view?

     @ Graham H – you’re not being very fair there. Here’s a quote from the current TfL Business Plan.

     “£100m for a potential extension of the tram network to Sutton. Work continues
     into feasibility and funding with the relevant boroughs – Sutton and Merton – which have identified around £50m of local funding. However, there remains a shortfall to be addressed by looking at the scheme’s scope, value engineering and increasing the local contribution from development.”

     There clearly is money from three sources. However it isn’t enough to deliver the scheme as it stands and, as you know, today’s “mantra” is that we must have private money before anything sensible can be built.

323. @WW -fair comment -it was that last member of the Funding Quartet that I thought was necessaryfor the performance to begin.

324. Discovery Channel show loads of documentaries that interview civil engineers, mechanical engineers, structural engineers, etc. Why do they never interview any value engineers? We keep hearing about them, but never get to see them in action on TV.

325. Anomnibus…….Value engineering is a technique. Those that claim to be practitioners are usually facilitators of others who actually know what to do. The most valuable part is usually to create the space and time for people to think about how to produce a better design that still meets the requirement. One of the best examples I recall was the design included in the winning bid for the 3rd and 4th bores of the Dartford tunnel which today stand majestically above the Thames.

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