Friday Reads – 28 December 2018

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47 comments

  1. The ThamesWater article is Baker Street, not Bakerloo.

    The CfL graphs are interesting, I guess that shows the difference between low hanging fruit and more difficult projects to increase train km.

    The Boston article isn’t clear what’s happening, two lines from opposite directions that go into the same terminal will both tunnel under the station to a new shared through platform?

    Chicago Tribune blocks EU readers.

  2. @Toby
    The article says it would be without a tunnel – looking at an MBTA map, it seems the idea is to build a spur to connect two of the lines converging on the North terminus from the west and the north east, to provide a through service (missing out the terminus).

    Imagine a north-to-east spur at Bethnal Green bypassing Liverpool Street, or a south-to-east one in the New Cross area, bypassing London Bridge: perhaps a better analogy is a direct east-west connection between the Gourock and Motherwell lines which both currently feed into Glasgow Central.

    In all these cases (and, I would imagine, in Boston too) the problem is that most passengers actually want to go to the terminus!

    https://www.mbtagifts.com/products/2011-mbta-commuter-rail-map-w-rapid-transit

  3. @timbeau, thanks for the explanation.

    I hesitated adding the urine guards link, as it might be seen as a piss take.

    I’ll get my parka…

  4. @TIMBEAU – It looks like a connecting chord avoiding North Station already exists for this service concept in Boston MA, but is part of a depot and yard area today so track and signalling would probably need some reconfiguration for routine passenger use. The junction and depot complex is only about a mile from the terminal buffer stops. Another idea might be to run the trains into the terminus, then after a short dwell reverse back out onto the other line. In the west to east direction all such trains would have to cross the entire throat however. Some extra grade separation might assist this but could be difficult due to the railway being surrounded and boxed in by freeways, their intersections and the Charles River.

  5. ‘Bakerloo disruption averted by Thames Water:’ A misleading title. The Kings Scholars Pond sewer runs directly above the original 1863 Metropolitan tunnels at Baker Street. The huge cast iron sewer can just be seen to the west of Baker Street’s platforms. Any ‘disruption averted’ is to the Circle and Hammersmith Lines the Bakerloo isn’t affected in any way.

  8. @timbeau
    There appears to be a link between the lines coming out of Boston North station, and the triangle which allows the north/east to west lines to avoid Boston North, and the Worcester line which currently comes out of Boston South. If this is what is intended, perhaps the better analogy is the West London line and the East Croydon to Watford Junction/Milton Keynes service.

  9. @quinlet, timbeau, Mark Townend

    On this Boston area track map http://www.vanshnookenraggen.com/_index/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Boston_MBTA_TrackMap_24.pdf, zoom in on North Station. Fitchburg (Fb) and the Newburyport/Rockport commuter lines (Nr) are purple and head north from this station, diverging before the rail yards of the MBTA Commuter Rail Maintenance Facility. As quinlet mentions, there are tracks just north of this facility that connect these two commuter lines together. Furthermore the single black line that heads south just west of this facility heads to the Worcester commuter line (W).

  10. @LBM etc

    Tying two suburban lines together looks like a good plan in general, but surely the majority of commuters on both lines want to go to the terminus (North Station), which is bypassed by this plan. How will they be catered for?

    Connecting Orpington and Sidcup lines by using the east spur at Hither Green would not be popular with users of either line.

  11. @timbeau

    I completely agree that a service bypassing North Station would not be of much use, but as Mark Townend suggests, a through service by running trains into the terminus, then reverse back out onto the other line might be viable.

  12. Boston ( MA, USA – not the real Boston of course ) …
    The better analogy might be the removal of Broad Street services & their diversion to Stratford ( atte-Bow ) ?

  13. Timbeau: just imagine an east to south-west spur in the Clapham area, bypassing Victoria…

    Services bypassing termini can clearly be of use!

    That’s a fascinating map that LBM has linked to.

  14. Some Boston suburbs, like Waltham, have a huge number of employers and could easily be a destination in their own right. This is a legacy of their car-centric recent history, making it attractive for employers to set up out of the city.

    Today people drive around the orbital freeway to get to work – better cross-city connections could create transit options instead.

  15. Orbital routes can indeed be useful as additions to the radial routes, but it would be unusual for an orbital route to replace two radials. (The Clapham Junction example cited by Betterbee is instructive – there is a good reason it does not continue beyond Clapham Junction towards, say, Putney). Likewise the orbital route to Stratford goes no further east.

    An in-and-out route (LBM/Mark Townend) might be possible, although that does not appear to be what is suggested. It would also take up capacity in the station throat as the trains would have to cross over everything else (even if there was a platform capable of serving both lines – compare Brighton, for example)

  16. The real problem with orbital routes is that for fairly obvious reasons, in most cases (and there will be exceptions for historical reasons*), you will usually get very much higher suburb to centre flows than suburb to suburb. The business and transport planning cases are correspondingly weak. Doubly so that an orbital trip between any two suburban centres involving anything much more than 120 degrees of a circle round the centre will almost in variably be quicker than a “direct” orbital trip because of the higher frequencies that can sustained. on the radials. Greater London has some especially awkward strategic issues because of the “pairing” of major traffic destinations – eg do you choose Ealing Broadway over West Ealing, Harrow over Wembley, Richmond over Kingston, and so on, given that attempting to serve both is likely to produce fairly tortuous routeings?

    Much the same point might be made about urban bus and tram network design outside London. Ring routes are fairly uncommon (Leeds and Manchester have them, but Glasgow, Bradford, Newcastle and Brum not really,)

    It’s noticeable that attempts to provide even “middle circles” as in London or the Petit Ceinture in Paris have tended to fall at the orbital versus radial frequency issue. (Paris has certainly acquired stretches of outer circle now, but the design and service offering implies that they are very much there for local movements).

    *There are some polycentric conurbations such as the Randstadt and the Ruhr where a grid rather than radials meets the need, and there are some like Joburg where, if one was planning a metro there (!), orbitals might well be the way to go because of the collapse of the classic city centre.

  17. Brum certainly does have long standing orbital buses. The 11A and C and the 8 A and C

  18. @Purley Dweller – thanks – my apologies – it is so difficult these days to be sure one’s collection of timetables is complete for any particular area.

  19. Yes I understand the issue, my contention is that Boston is a special case because of the concentration of businesses and commuter suburbs along the I-95.

    One reason to suggest it’s a special case is because many of these business are fundamentally more like the ones you’d find on the M4 corridor (software, biotech) rather than the ones you’d find on the M25 corridor (light industry). These kind of workers don’t need work vans or heavy tools. The towns and suburbs near I-95 are also fairly wealthy. It’s a densly populated corridor that can afford and would benefit from public transit that just happens to wrap around a city.

    Another is because the existing rail network in Boston is shockingly slow. Waltham to North Station is 12 miles and takes 20 minutes, despite only 1 intermediate stop. Radial lines aren’t faster when they are falling apart due to malicious underinvestment.

  20. @Bob – – many of us would regard a commercial service speed of 36 mph as very respectable for any sort of suburban railway or metro

  21. Not for a heavy rail line with stops 6 miles apart, surely?

    London Bridge to Severnoaks has a similar stopping pattern and achieves about 50mph including all stops.

  22. @ Graham H – Newcastle has had circular or orbital routes for many years. There were the old Cowgate and Walker circles (3/4 and 18/19) which survived until Metro integration. Other routes interworked across terminals (33/36 and 37/38) but didn’t have through fares. We then got the 6/7, 41 and 49 which were orbital routes around parts of East, North and West Newcastle. In the deregulation era these changed again with the 15/16 and 32/32A services serving similar areas but in different ways. The 6 and 7 still survive under Stagecoach but now stretch across the Tyne to the Metrocentre. The Newbiggin Hall express circulars (X87/88) also still survive. The old Kenton Bar circles (8/9) didn’t last into the deregulated area for very long.

    Both South Shields and Sunderland had long standing circular routes and a couple survive in South Shields. Sunderland was more complex as some of the “circles” existed by virtue of interworking across termini with passengers allowed to remain on board. Only one such working seems to remain in Sunderland but with interworking across one terminal. Back in the 1980s the PTE changed the “ride across terminals” rule resulting in a mocking feature on That’s Life on BBC1 which showed a passenger having to run between two stops in Grangetown in South Sunderland. Sadly the clip is no longer on Youtube.

  23. WW

    Just had a look at the Newcastle network map for the first time in a while. The 32/32A is a shadow of its former self. I used to enjoy that one on my 25p student ticket as it stopped outside my house. Lots of other changes have happened of late too.

  24. Timbeau: re Boston, “all existing trips on each line would continue to terminate at North Station”, so the orbital would be in addition to the existing radials, not replacing them.

    GH: orbital routes certainly have their issues, but that doesn’t mean that converting radials to orbitals will never work (though, as noted above, that’s not what is being proposed in Boston). The North London, East London, South London and West London lines and the Goblin all used to have services to/from at least one main London terminus, and are busier than ever despite no longer doing so.

    In my country there are no orbital railways as such, but major centres have popular circular bus routes: two in Auckland, and one each in Hamilton and Christchurch (the latter being a great success, partly because it connects a ring of large suburban shopping malls); and in Wellington popular demand forced the powers that be to reinstate an orbital route that had been reduced to peak-only operation.

    As Bob notes, the Boston example may well have the potential to fill a niche.

  25. The “Night Train” article gives an example of something that used to happen in Britain too, the “through carriage”. In these days of unit trains, presumably these have all disappeared, but when did the last one run? I’m not thinking so much of trains that divide en route, rather the examples where a single carriage that would be forwarded on across multiple railway companies.

    My memory is not to be relied on for accuracy, but I seem to recall that fifty years or so ago there used to be a board outside Swanage station listing all sorts of far-flung destinations in the British Isles, bracketed by phrases something like “Trains to — without change of carriage”. Presumably it was already a museum piece by then.

  26. @TIMBEAU, 31 December 2018 at 10:14 –
    Re capacity at Boston North Station. On weekdays, the Rockport/Newburyport Line has a total of 34 train pairs a day and the Fitchburg line, 19. Adding the Haverhill (21) and Lowell (26) traffic totals, the terminal only has to deal with 100 arrivals and 100 departures over about an 18 hour operating day, in ten platforms with a four track throat. That’s little better than a departure every TWO HOURS from each platform on average, and just over eleven movements an hour through the throat. Hardly congested by European standards. Although the service clearly gets a little denser in peak periods, unlike a number of commuter rail operations in the US a reasonable service continues throughout the day on all lines. There’s potential for the Rockport/Newburyport trains to dive under the Lowell line to gain the west side of the station on approaching and leaving the terminus to avoid some conflicts if that was neccesary as part of a scheme to link the two lines with a reversal at Boston North and I suspect an increase in frequency on both lines could be accomodated comfortably as part of that. That would increase frequency to the centre as well as provide the new cross city links. Abelio is the local contracted operator of these services so perhaps they could apply some of their Dutch operating experience into sweating these assets a little more!
    Timetable info can be found here: https://www.mbta.com/schedules/commuter-rail

  27. Note in my traffic figures above I’ve only included revenue movements. Clearly there will also be a number of empty moves between the terminus and depot complex.

  28. @WW – I freely admit there are more circular orbital bus routes than I had deduced from an over view of the timetables, although some of the routes that people have mentioned seem to be “frying pans” out from the city centre and then an orbital loop through the suburbs. Full orbitals that never visit the city centre are less common. It would be interesting to know how many of the frying pan orbitals (!) had their origins in trolleybus routes where operational and electrical issues tended to generate loops across the ends of former tram routes.

    @Reggie – Damn you! If I could bill you for the time I shall now spend looking into the answer, I would… In practice, I’m not sure that it is still possible to do the research any longer as the relevant carriage circuit diagrams may not have survived, although I suspect that by the ’60s portion working was much simpler compared with pre-war days when sets of carriages/individual carriages would roam the system for a week or more before meeting up again. A simple approach might be to look at selected named cross-country trains such as the Pines*, although the usual “conveys coaches from..” footnotes don’t give much clue as to how the rake was assembled and dispersed.

    *I have a suspicion that workings over the S&D and MSWJ are likely to be amongst the last routes to see much portion working (other than emu splitting and joining on the Southern generally, of course)

  29. Graham H
    There was the “York Mail” that conveyed through carriages, originally I think from Newcastle, York, Leeds, Stalybridge, divide for (a) M/cr Exchange ( & originally Liverpool ) & (b) Stockport, Crewe & Shrewsbury … may have had through carriages for Aberystwyth in the v distant past.
    When I knew it, it was “only” York-Manchester & Crewe ….
    Meanwhile, if one has a 1922 Bradshaw, you can get lost in the “Through Carriages for” indications.

  30. @Greg T/Reggie – the latest portion working – other than sleepers- that I can track down is the Yorkshire Pullman, which had a detachable Leeds – Bradford portion until 30 September 1967. I imagine that lasted so long because of the specialised stock used (although I have photos of earlier incarnations of the portion setting off for Leeds behind a tank loco accompanied by a very ordinary looking brake. By 1967, the S&D and MSWJ had gone and the rest of the East Coast workings had become standardised*, so the Pullman was likely to be amongst the last.

    *The East Coast seems to have taken portion working far beyond anyone else, including one train that was attacked at York from both ends by station pilots to provide up to six portions, and another where the sleeper from Edinburgh conveyed a day portion to Drem, where it became a local service. I will look further into the York Mail portions (but then again, having just noticed an interesting Brum-Harwich via Rugby and Peterborough portion working in the 1922 timetable, I may not … what on earth was it attached to?)

  31. @Graham H

    The Atlantic Coast Express from Waterloo to Devon and Cornwall gave a good spread of carriages throughout the two counties, but obviously the all started out together. In my Inter-Railing days (my first was the 1st year – £27 for 1 month) I took a number of trains that were very different in composition at the end of my journey than they were at the start, with a delightful mix of different railway administrations’ carriages coming and going, but I fear I digress.

  32. The West Highland Sleeper used to be attached to the main Inverness sleeper as far as Mossend, then worked into Glasgow Queen Street to be attached to the front of the early train to Mallaig, detached again at Fort William. And I can recall taking overnight trains on the ECML which detached and attached newspaper and mail vans at seemingly every station down the line, so that when I got off at Retford it was almost unrecognisable from the train that had left Kings Cross five (!) hours earlier.

  33. @timbeau – I’d excluded sleepers as they have always been susceptible to portion working (and still will be) and vans because they are virtually impossible to identify without access to the CCDs – the MLVs especially.

    @James Bunting – absolutely – and looking back to the prewar days when the services were far more prone to portion working, one wonders how on earth anyone ever managed to change a timetable, especially for the NE/SW services – very many of the key trains were completely dismantled on arrival and the components would then work their way back over the following week as a series of locals or attachments to less important trains. Change any carriage and impact on anything up to a dozen other trains. Fun for the timetable clerks!

  34. @Graham H – Oops! Thank you for the info, I’d no idea it was going to be such a large stone that I unwittingly turned over…

  35. Thanks to everyone else, too. I always found the idea of being able to get to so many different destinations without needing to change trains rather fascinating, even if it was very time-consuming. Rather sorry I never got to try the Brighton – Glasgow service that used to stop at East Croydon every morning, for the same reason.

  36. J Bunting & others …
    The first time I went to “Continetal Abroad” was 1965 – where upon arriving at “The Hook”, I was faced by a train with portions consisting, from the front, of: CCCP/Russian stock (presumably with changeable bogies); Polish stock (marginally better); two ancient, well-worn & servicable blue coaches (*note*); standard DB stock; NS stock. Yes, the Hook-Moscow express!
    [ *note* – labelled, in brass castings, of course – “Compagnie International des Wagons-Lits et des Grandes Expresse Europeeans” (If I’ve spelt that correctly!). I think, that, lovingly restored, they are still in service – I certainly hope so. ]

    Graham H
    Overnight “Newspapers” with passenger coaches – yes, well the Marylebone-Manchester ( & Liverpool ) which removed & added vans at the back at a variety of places, with multiple engine changes en route, as well. [ Woodford Halse, Nottingham Vic, Sheffield Vic, Guide Bridge (portion detach)]

  37. These days I think you can do Brighton to Glasgow with only one change, which isn’t too shabby.

  38. @GrahamH – Is emu splitting not just the modern incarnation of through carriages, traction is not significant to a seated passenger.
    The 309 Sunshine Coast Express out of Liverpool Street was a regular splitter.
    Grand Central want to split at Doncaster out of King’s Cross to serve Cleethorpes (subject to DfT regime change over track access charges and harm to franchisees).

    The inverse for seating decisions would be short platforms – this carriage does not serve x as doors will not open, please move.

  39. @Graham H
    Trains continued to split at Carstairs into portions for Glasgow and Edinburgh until at least summer 1989. This included the Sussex Scot, the 0845 Brighton-Glasgow/Edinburgh, with a through journey time of around 9 hours.

    It had ceased by 1993 (the next timetable book I have to refer to), probably as a result of electrification of Carstairs-Edinburgh in, I think, 1991.

  41. @Man of Kent – so it did – I’d quite forgotten. I suspect the sectorisation did for it in the end, even though the lure of Brighton beckoned for just a little longer,

    @Reggie – there is probably a quite serious point behind all this and that is the change in operating strategies over time to reflect changes in the market. In days of yore (say up until about 1980), a long distance train journey was a major undertaking and required setting aside much of a specific day (as with air travel now); the operational side was designed to match – not very frequent trains but with plenty of portion/slip working. Nor were connecting services very frequent either. This led to the raft of exotic through coaches to such places as Stalybridge or Halifax. Faster more frequent trains, both long and short distance, have meant that the punters can accomplish in a working day what used to take two, knowing that there will be a selection of trains to return by. (Anywhere to Lincoln a dishonourable exception, of course). Combine this with the cost and delay of pulling trains apart at places like York and Donnie (and the implications for reliability) and it’s easy to see why portion working has vanished. Downside – direct trains to fewer destinations.

    SBB takes this a step further by designing a fixed interval timetable with planned connexions. And it’s arguable that the tube takes it even further by offering such frequent services that planned connexions become irrelevant}.

  42. GrahamH…..and it’s not just SBB with the fixed interval timetable but all the other public transport operators that interface with SBB; A hugely impressive undertaking

  43. Re 130 and Graham H,

    And even more impressively a national smart/mobile ticketing system that ties in the 19 local public transport area schemes and has even started to include car hire in 2 areas as well.

    The UK could really learn from the Swiss on this!

  44. @NGH – Yes we could, although every time this comes up before the UK politicians (most recently at a Labour party seminar on railway policy last winter), the issue gets obscured by a diversion about the Taktfahrplan. The problem with the Swiss timetable structure is that it’s ideal for a country with a basic polycentric, grid like demographic distribution, and so you can, albeit with some tweaking, lay out a pattern of nodes where all trains meet and exchange passengers every hour or halfhour. In the UK, the system is much more centred on a single node (London), and subsidiary nodes (eg Leeds, Bristol) are not well placed on through routes to non-London destinations. The other issue is that between the hourly interchange time, too often, large chunks of station capacity lie idle – or put another way, you build extra capacity just for 10 minutes each hour.

    The good things, of which a single approach to ticketing, and the management of competition in a typically Swiss collaborative way, get overlooked.

    @Reggie/John Bunting – and all this with some portion working, albeit sadly much reduced, on the Rhaetische Bahn- the days when you could ride around the layout in Samedan whilst your coach was detached from the Pontresina train and added to the Chur train, are long gone alas.

  45. Re Graham H,

    “learn from this” I meant Smart ticketing rather than Taktfahrplan which is a non starter for most of the the UK!

  47. @ Graham H – I have a childhood traumatic memory of being on a train from Bournemouth to Newcastle and having to make a paniced change on the train to get into the right portion for the through run to Newcastle. No idea where the train may have split but it gave me “nightmares” about being in the right part of long distance trains for a fair few years. Inter-railing soon fixed that – you have to get confident to make long journeys and also spotting the “comfortable” coaches in a long consist. Also using Dutch railways in the 80s and 90s often meant trains splitting and joining at key locations.

    You may well be right about some of the “frying pan” routes in terms of their history given the routes have survived many decades of bus industry change. They run over very long established corridors of demand that go back 50+ years and longer. Newcastle and Gateshead have certainly lost a fair number of orbital routes although some new ones have emerged off the back of developments like the Metrocentre, Cobalt and Tyneview Park (the new DHSS office location in Benton). There used to be a fantastic “cross country” route, Northern’s 638 from Sunderland to Ryton which linked all sorts of places didn’t touch central Newcastle or Gateshead. Despite buses often being full it didn’t survive the trauma of deregulation and trying to establish operable and commercially viable services.

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