Very logically, and very conveniently for us, TfL’s Finance and Policy panel has now published details of the proposed infrastructure upgrade to the Jubilee and Northern lines. So as a nice follow up to our look at the future train procurement for these lines, we are now able to report on what is proposed in terms of upgrades to support them.
The great unknown… until now
It has been a source of frustration for us over the years that despite knowing that there was an upgrade plan for the Jubilee and Northern lines – in contrast to the others – we really did not know the details. This was especially true for the Northern line although in part the reason for this was fairly clear – despite knowing the basics of what was required, TfL hadn’t decided the real details themselves. The options for the Northern line, in particular, have been re-evaluated many times it is only recently that a final decision appears to have been made.
Thoroughbred stock
At the heart of the matter lies a problem that London Underground have always tried very hard to avoid – running mixed stock on a single line. London Underground have long preferred to run similarly performing (and similarly looking) trains on a particular line because mixed stock operation has a whole host of implications – increased complexity of driver training, delayed boarding as people adjust their position on the platform due to variable door position, extra training for fitters and extra spares needing to be kept, just to name a few. There is also a small potential safety issue with the risk of drivers becoming confused by being in charge of different types of train although this risk should be less critical these days with Automatic Train Operation (ATO).
As well as day to day issues, operating mixed stock can be problematic if, in order to do so, you need to purchase new trains for the fleet. If this is the case then buying stock midway through its expected life is almost the worst of all options. In an ideal world it is much more preferable to buy it earlier, losing just a just a few years of use when the stock is starting to become less reliable anyway, or leave it another ten years and think of it as an advance delivery of the full new fleet.
Needs must
Of course if the Underground was operating with only slow growth one could simply put off the fateful day when more trains were introduced. The trouble is that passenger numbers are rising rapidly and all of the ways to deal with that here require new trains. Leaving it until replacement stock is due naturally is thus not really practical. Interestingly, at the Rail and Underground panel, replacement of the Northern line fleet was talked about “for the late 2030s” and the latest briefing for the Northern line upgrade states:
The current assumption is that the JNAT [Jubilee and Northern Additional Trains] trains would be withdrawn in 2040 at the same time as the existing Northern line 95 Tube Stock fleet and the business case would erode if the number of years of beneficial use were reduced.
So the plan already appears to be to expect the existing Northern (and presumably Jubilee) trains to last around 45 years in service. Such an assumption is not at all unreasonable based on the age of much of the stock recently withdrawn, and the generally better construction of modern trains. The 1972 stock is mostly regarded as being the last of the ‘old’ generation and the 1973 stock being the first of the new, but with the attendant problems of being first in an age when metro trains were undergoing a radical design change. As has been commented on before, it is looking more and more likely that by the time trains for the first four lines of New Tube for London are fully introduced it will almost be time to replace trains on all or part of the Northern line.
As soon as possible – but no sooner
It is clear that, once you have decided to buy the trains midway through the greater part of the fleet’s lifecycle, it makes sense to introduce the trains as soon as possible to get the maximum life possible out of them. The difficulty is that an awful lot of preparation work needs to be done before additional trains can be brought into service.
The case for the work on the Jubilee line
The case for the Jubilee line is relatively simple and, we are told in the Jubilee line briefing document, compelling. The line is very much at capacity now, with a wait for a second or third train in the peaks quite commonplace at various locations due to the inability of the passenger to board the first train that arrives. Part of the reason for this is undoubtedly the work at London Bridge main line station, but the trains will almost certainly fill up again to crush loading within weeks of this work being completed.
The argument then goes that, with the signalling upgrade complete, and demand still greatly outstripping supply, it makes sense to buy extra trains to add extra capacity to an infrastructure that is mostly already in place to take them. The trouble is that the bits that aren’t there yet on the Jubilee line are still expensive and would cost around £100 million to provide. The 10 additional trains are expected to cost around another £150 million for a life of approximately 20 years. Very approximately, the initial capital cost for a seven car train works out at around £100,000 per carriage per year – or £300 per carriage, per day of its expected life. At least with the capital infrastructure works you only have to do it once and it is done, more or less, forever.
Although the sums involved for extra stock may appear huge, one could quite reasonably expect that, even when other cost such as drivers and maintenance are taken into account, the trains would generate more revenue over this period than they would cost. While the report does not go quite as far as saying as much it does state:
No revenue abstraction from other TfL modes is assumed as the assessment identified that the additional capacity provided will be utilised by currently deterred demand, rather than diversion from other options.
Without detailed data it is impossible to be sure, but one suspects that the new trains may well pay their own way simply by increasing income due to increased fare revenue. If that were the situation then the case for purchase is almost compelling for that reason alone. The main concern, of course, would be a future mayoral policy on fares that would mean that revenue created would not be as high as expected.
The work involved on the Jubilee line
Very conveniently the work involved is listed as:
- power strengthening works at six substations by June 2018
- four cooling ventilation fan upgrades by June 2018
- conversion of a cleaning road at Stratford Market Depot into a general maintenance road by March 2017 and provision of two roads at Neasden depot for maintenance of Jubilee Line trains by August 2017
- conversion of Temporary Fit Out Shed at Stratford Market Depot into three stabling roads by July 2020
- renewal and upgrade of the crossover at West Hampstead by March 2017
- five signalling workstreams by October 2019
- necessary modifications to the existing fleet of 96TS for operational consistency
- all associated maintenance and operating changes
Getting the optimum number of trains
The report has a short, but sufficient, explanation of why they proposed a ten train upgrade. It seems that this number was necessary to get the desired 36tph through the central West Hampstead – North Greenwich section. More trains ordered would not lead to more frequent trains operated in the central area, but would improve the service out towards Stanmore. There would possibly be a case for this but it would involve an extra eight trains, which would presumably cost around £120m, and an additional stabling scheme at Stanmore, which would presumably have costed around £50m to bring the total extra to the quoted £170 million – a figure which it was felt could not be justified. As always, the critical thing is capacity and, whilst improving the service further out would bring customer benefits and time saving, it would not do anything for increasing capacity where it is needed.
The complexities of terminating Jubilee trains in the West
Diagram showing principal Jubilee line terminating locations
The Jubilee has a very discernible pattern at the eastern end of the line for terminating trains. This is that three trains in four terminate at Stratford and the fourth terminates at North Greenwich. At the other end there is no such regularity. Around 19 terminate at Stanmore in the peak hour, five at Wembley Park and six at Willesden Green. It is possible to terminate trains at West Hampstead but this is not currently favoured.
West Hampstead is the key
The plan for increasing the service on the Jubilee line to 36tph with so few additional trains relies on using that terminating facility at West Hampstead. A round trip from West Hampstead to Stratford would be slightly in excess of 80mins suggesting nine trains would be necessary to provide an additional 6tph. Allow one extra for maintenance and you have the ten train requirement. Of course, it is not quite as simple as that because the service pattern will change slightly for the existing trains and, as we have already remarked, not all trains at the eastern end of the line terminate at Stratford. The believed intention is for trains westbound to be in a Stanmore, Willesden Green, Stanmore, West Hampstead sequence. This would give Stanmore an almost identical service to that of today but further south of West Hampstead it would be better.
One stop closer to central London from West Hampstead is Finchley Road where there is considerable interchange from the Metropolitan line to the Jubilee line in the morning peak. Finchley Road is probably the first station southwards from Stanmore that really merits a 36tph service if possible.
Early gains
The plan is for authority to be given to proceed in the very near future so that works to upgrade West Hampstead crossover – presumably with faster turnout speed – can be done in order to take advantage of two planned closures early in 2017. This would then be available for reversing in May 2017 and it should be possible with the existing stock to introduce 32tph by April 2018 – just over two years away.
Any indication of what service can run from April 2018 is naturally speculative, but the smart money at LR Towers is on London Underground running the line to the future intended pattern as this would enable the revised service pattern to settle down. If there was any shortfall of trains this could be taken into account by terminating one or two Stanmore trains short at Wembley Park. Assuming terminating at Wembley Park was not necessary, this would mean that in the peak there would be 16tph to Stanmore, 24tph to Willesden Green and 32tph to West Hampstead. At the other end Stratford would have 24tph rather than 22½tph and 8tph rather than 7½tph would terminate at North Greenwich.
Full service by April 2020
If the experience on the Victoria line is anything to go by, London Underground will be cautious as it increases service from 32tph to 36tph. Quite how they will increment the service remains to be seen and will probably depend on when they decide that the working timetable must take into account time periods shorter than a quarter of a minute. Realistically, 34tph (a train every 105 seconds) is as frequently as one can go based on a working timetable with quarter minute increments.
It is worth noting that, on completion of this project, it is hard to see how one could improve the Jubilee line service for the next twenty years beyond. By then thoughts will turn to replacing at least the rolling stock, maybe the signalling and possibly the platform edge doors to take into account any different door spacing on future stock.
It is believed that the 2022 off-peak Jubilee line service will be 27tph between West Hampstead and North Greenwich – the same off-peak frequency as currently operates on the Victoria line.
Northern line changes not so advanced…
In contrast to the Jubilee line Upgrade 2, where the additional authority requested for the next phase is around £77 million, the Northern line briefing document requests only a modest £8m for Northern line Upgrade 2. The reason for the much lesser sum is because, unlike the Jubilee line, all that is being asked for is money to deliver concept designs prior to the work being carried out. This shows that work on the Northern line upgrade is not in as nearly advanced stage as the Jubilee line. This could explain why previous publicised proposals to bring the upgrade forward to 2020 were simply not going to happen – there was too much work still to do.
The true cost of upgrading the Northern line is likely to be much higher – an estimated £700m with the trains themselves seemingly only a third of that cost. This is a stark reminder that replacing trains like for like is relatively cheap. Additional capacity generally can cause considerable extra one-time costs as sidings, power upgrades, administration offices and extra depots to service the trains may be required. Often there will be the extra train that causes a new set of costs to be required (such as the train that is one more than there is space for in the depot, so that means a new depot) and the aim generally is to provide the overall package that provides best value for money.
…But more involved
It is clear that the work involved on the Northern line has considerably more scope than that on the Jubilee line despite both intending to increase the number of trains by 6tph. A lot of this is down to the Jubilee line being more modern and, perhaps, because it was originally planned to run 36tph on the Jubilee line – or at least signal it for 36tph, which isn’t quite the same thing. It does appear that there is a lot of work involved on the Northern line that simply would not be needed on the Jubilee line.
Again, conveniently, a list is supplied of the works required. It is much more extensive than that for the Jubilee line and part of this appears to be because of accommodation necessary at two station-based driver sign-on locations – Battersea Power Station and East Finchley. Whereas the one at Battersea Power Station obviously will be an entirely new location, the accommodation for the one at East Finchley will be a replacement for the existing facilities suggesting an expected increase in the number of drivers to be based there.
Fairly obviously, because there are many more kilometres of track, the upgrade to the power supply is more involved. This even includes installation of low loss conductor composite rail, which you would have thought would have already been done and could be justified on its own merits.
The list of specific upgrades necessary is described differently from the Jubilee line list and refers to “[t]he scope of the preferred 30tph option”. Read into that what you will.
The list is as follows:
- 17 additional trains (procured via the Jubilee and Northern Line Additional Trains Project (JNAT))
- additional stabling at Morden and Highgate
- provision of a new heavy maintenance depot at Highgate
- installation of a new scissors crossover for reversing at East Finchley
- provision of Train Crew Accommodation at East Finchley and fitting out at Battersea
- reconfiguration of Morden depot
- five signalling workstreams:
(i) out-stabling (to reduce the number of additional stabling berths required)
(ii) signalling pinchpoint improvements (to support throughput)
(iii) coasting (for energy efficiency)
(iv) depot signalling at Highgate and Morden
(v) modification to support new track layouts - power upgrades (22 substation upgrades, new feeder cable at 14 sites, increased regenerative braking)
- low loss composite conductor Rail, fan renewal and two cooling schemes
- upgrades to track including development of new track layouts for service pattern and stabling
- all associated maintenance and operating changes
It is clear that it is quite a challenge to find somewhere to stable the 17 trains.
One of the things that is surprising is the requirement to put a coasting function into the ATO software. This is to reduce the heat generated by the trains during the off-peak period, but it is slightly strange that this is specifically mentioned as required for the Northern line but not for the Jubilee. It is no insult to say that Thales are probably quite pleased that luck has presented them with an opportunity to create something for London Underground (and to bill for doing so) which will make their system more attractive for future sales.
The East Finchley scissors crossover mystery
Diagrammatic current track layout at East Finchley
Normally these briefing papers are fairly clear but one thing that is far from obvious is exactly how a scissors crossover at Each Finchley could assist with reversing. The layout at East Finchley is highly unusual for historical reasons and the inner two platforms (2 & 3) only serve Highgate sidings. The location of tunnel mouths means that it is not clear at all where a scissor crossover could be located that would enable trains to reverse.
Just to add to the mystery, one wonders why East Finchley would be considered at all given that Finchley Central, one stop further down the line, has a much more flexible arrangement that gives a number of reversing options. Possible reasons for choosing East Finchley are that to terminate at Finchley Central requires more rolling stock and a desire to terminate trains at a signing on location.
Diagrammatic current track layout at Finchley Central
It would be interesting to know the reason why the scissors crossover is required. The most likely explanation is that it is because High Barnet and Mill Hill East on their own cannot handle all of the planned 30tph peak period terminating trains. With Mill Hill East only about to handle just over 5tph and High Barnet currently handling 18-19tph one would imagine the plan to be something like terminating 5tph at East Finchley, leaving 20tph to High Barnet with a slightly awkward pattern between East Finchley and High Barnet.
An alternative explanation could just be that it is recognised that the off-peak service north of East Finchley is unduly frequent – it is currently 20tph – and that it could be reduced without a significant adverse impact on customers. An off-peak service of a train every 5 minutes (12tph) would not seem to be excessively frugal in zones 4 and 5. Of course the peak and off-peak reasoning need not be mutually exclusive and it could be a combination of the two requirements.
More or less?
Because the work on the Northern line Upgrade 2 is not so advanced there is not a total commitment to 30tph, but it is felt that if this figure could not be achieved and a lesser frequency committed to then the money spent on this lesser increase would be disproportionally high. This would largely be due to infrastructure works, which would be necessary regardless of the level of improved service provided.
In the paper to the Finance & Planning panel there is no suggestion that the work should not or may not go ahead – although it is not so emphatic as the Jubilee line recommendation that it should go ahead. It does say it should not be deferred because the costs remain the same but the benefit is reduced and it does add that:
If NLU2 were delayed, then it may be a better strategy to abort this project and consider other strategic options for delivering additional capacity.
So, in essence, do it now or don’t do it at all.
If the Northern line upgrade goes ahead then a decision on the main project needs to be made by June 2017, with the aim of providing 30tph by 2022. As with the Jubilee line, it is hard to see how, subsequent to that, services can be improved in any cost effective way until replacement of rolling stock around 2040. If the project does not go ahead then the Northern line would have been the only line to have an improvement plan rejected and one would wonder how long before it regains its old epithet of the Misery line. Either way one would be stretching a point to call the currently proposed Northern line improvement (30tph) “world class capacity” though the term would be deserved for the Jubilee line improvement (34-36tph). This would rightfully place the Jubilee alongside the Victoria in achieving a level of service that could legitimately be regarded as one of the best in the world.
Want to discuss this article in person? Then why not join us on March 10th in Soho for the LR Monthly Meetup.
Surely at East Finchley what’s needed are crossovers to allow terminating services from central London to use platform 2 and starting services to use platform 3? Though, subject to the embankments, it’s quite a distance from the tunnel mouths to the bridges over the A1000 south of the station- perhaps room for both the connections and a scissors between the depot roads, allowing terminating trains into 2 and 3 and departures from both as well?
As ever, with just summaries published and no actual maps, there’s just guess work and a trace of crayon to go on. It would though surely be a good thing operationally to be able to use platforms 2 & 3 for services from and to the city centre.
Another possibility, untidy but possibly workable, is a scissors that crosses the spur to the depot on the flat – the depot access does not, after all have a very frequent service. Alternatively, by the time the tracks enter the tunnel they are quite a lot lower than the depot access and a scissors might be put in there, but that would involve a lot of wrong line running as the scissors would be a long way from the platform end.
Not that I think either of those is necessarily better than Al _ S’s idea.
Whatever the plan, it can’t be very simple or they would have done it already necessarily may have
@Al_S: Evidently that is what would be useful. However, the snag might be your “subject to the embankments”. Memory tells me that the tunnel-entering tracks start to drop pretty close to the bridge: the tunnel mouths themselves are well below the level of the centre tracks. If a crossover can be fitted in at all, it will be a tight squeeze lengthwise, which may be why it has not been done yet. (I cannot persuade google earth to give me a good enough view to confirm or disconfirm this – as so often a site visit, or detailed ground plans, is/are really required).
Ah, I was dreading the day my beloved Northern Line trains will be replaced. One of my earliest memories is of me and my dad boarding a fresh from Washwood Heath Northern Line train at Stockwell in 1998 in utmost excitement.
One question I do have, if they did construct 96 stock clones, what traction packages will they have? Considering the original builder, GEC/Metro Cammell, has joined the great FTSE 100 in the sky. Along with the rest of British industry..
timbeau: the tunnel mouths are widely separated, so any crossover between the running lines would involve a long skew tunnel through the depot-track embankment: costly.
Re PoP and Al__S
There used to be crossovers south of the station but for the benefit of services leaving/entering the depot rather than turn back so there was space and looks like there still should be to have the crossovers in the other direction. The current track layout north of the station will possibly also need revising layout depending on where they want to turnaround in siding or in platform or if the centre A1000 bridge deck could take a set of scissors (concrete deck so there is a good chance).
Re PoP,
“This is to reduce heat loss during the off-peak period”
Surely heat gain in the tunnels during the off-peak period???
Re Tiger,
It was already GEC-Alstom before they were even ordered. The Alstom traction packages are still made in the same former English Electric (later GEC) and now Alstom factory in Preston.
The Jubilee line had the first of the Onix IGBT traction packages (updated versions available) and the Northern the last of the older GTO ones that had been developed for the 465/466s for NSE. So not a big issue (and it wouldn’t be an issue for any of the other bidders either as they have equivalent IGBT technology)
Interestingly Alstom are planning to open a new factory in Widnes on the Wirral…
ngh I think heat loss is implied as being from trains into surrounding environment (tunnels in particular) .
The article states that there will be a new ‘Signing On Point’ at East Finchley but, there is already one there.
I, along with almost 100 Train/ Instructor Operators and 13 other Managers work there. I know its quiet but, we are there!
Perhaps the issue with Finchley Central is that any train departing the turnback siding for Central London blocks the High Barnet branch in both directions as it crosses the junction, not only that but depending on how the Mill Hill branch operates, one platform is occupied by the shuttle.
If the Finchley Central platforms were moved towards London, you could have a 4 platform arrangement, one for trains into London, one turn back for trains from Central London terminating at Finchley Central, one for High Barnet and one for the Mill Hill East shuttle, trains from all platforms could reach High Barnet.
The ticket hall/commercial development could be built on a raft over the platforms to offset some of the cost, some of the car park would be lost.
ngh……it’s the other way round. Jubilee has a GTO three phase drive, and Northern is the IGBT Onix drive (it was Alstom’s first production one too, and not without its problems in the early days, now fixed!)
ngh and Blue Mountains,
Regarding references to heat loss, it is the age old problem of stating something that appears clear and obvious but is, in fact, ambiguous as it depends on from what perspective one is looking at it – the trains or the tunnels. I have reworded it.
This is always a problem. Even “clockwise” is in fact anti-clockwise if looked at from the perspective of the clock and I have never really understood the concept in football of being awarded a penalty – as if that were a good thing.
Jason,
I wasn’t sure if the signing on point was currently in the station or at the sidings. These things are surprisingly hard for an outsider to discover. I was trying to hedge my bets on the basis that stating it would be the case in the future did not necessarily mean it was not currently the case.
In the light of the definitive information given, I have modified and expanded the comment.
I can’t see any prospect of crossovers to the south of the station. Too much variation in levels between the depot and main line tracks.
However, what follows is pure speculation, but it looks like there is space to the north of the current pointwork to put in access to the centre siding from the NB line to Finchely Central and back to the SB line. This would involve extending the siding under the bridges carrying the A504 and Prospect Place. The distances are similar to those between the platforms and turn back siding to the wast of Acton Town. Now, if this was accompanied by unattended reversing??????
100andthirty 08:21,
It is indeed and I have sometimes wondered if, perversely, that is why they seem keener to replace the Northern line stock than the Jubilee line stock.
The logic is that one could gain more benefit by a mid-life replacement of the motors on the Jubilee line than on the Northern line and, if one did so, it would then make more sense to extend the life of the fleet.
Of course, this may not be a factor at all and it may be replacing platform edge doors or finally splitting the Northern line (now it appears unlikely to happen before 2040 at the earliest as there would be nothing to gain by so doing) that determines the order of replacement.
PoP.. it’s not the motors on the Jubilee stock, but the power electronics that control the motors. In principle, it is feasible go upgrade from GTO to IGBT which could, perhaps, be a sensible mid life systems refurbishment option. (For the avoidance of doubt, IGBT is the current mature technology, but there are other power semiconductors coming along that might challenge IGBTs in the future)
I suspect that the Northern line replacement is talked about and Jubilee line not, simply because there are far more unknowns about Jubilee than Northern. Also Northern stock replacement isn’t simply a TfL planning decision, Alstom and the 1995 tube stock’s owners will also have a view.
Northern stock replacement could follow the outline methodology for NTfL…….new train, signalling upgrade (if required), fit PEDs, convert to fully automatic operation so there is a template to follow and propose.
Jubilee is more of a problem as the current position of the PEDs dictates the door layout on the trains, and more or less implies continued use of the current 1996 tube stock configuration. This configuration is a) not suitable for the walk through layout and b) doesn’t eliminate some bogies to create underframe space for air conditioning – and believe me, both have been studied extensively. Equally, if NTfL is required, no one has yet worked out how to migrate the PEDs to the new layout whilst gradually changing from old trains to new ones. So, “better to remain silent for now”, would be my reading of the difference in the papers.
Re 130,
Oops I always get them confused so should have checked late at night.
Thats what I was thinking of north of East Finchley. It depends what the overall plan is and what is allowed operationally.
Re PoP,
The Jubilee motors should be fine just the tractor control electronics might be worth doing especially as Alstom are starting to do Silicon Carbide based power electronics which would help with increasing efficiency of regenerative braking and hence reduce the heat problems and the costs of doing other works instead.
This might align with:
“necessary modifications to the existing fleet of 96TS for operational consistency”
There is a high degree of transparency in TfL plans which is pleasing to see.
That said, the implication of the plans for extra stock for the Jubilee being used by deterred demand suggests strongly that the Elizabeth Line is not expected to meet that same demand. Given rates of growth, that in turn implies that by 2030 or sooner, there will again be insufficient east-west capacity but there seems to be no plan to deal with that.
So the hope of extra capacity over the next decade is clearly a good thing but it does highlight the lack of medium term plans.
——-
On the Northern Line plans why are funds still being sought for Battersea?
@ ngh
“Widnes on the Wirral”? You need a new map! 😛
THC
100andthirty,
I like your “better to remain silent for now” summary.
Looking at it another way, there are only 8 stations on the Jubilee line that currently have Platform Edge Doors and even these are not the Crossrail-preferred floor to ceiling variety. So I would hope future long term policy on the Jubilee line is not determined by 17 platforms with platform edge doors. I thought a lot of the problem was simply having platforms strong enough to take the considerable weight of them rather than the time taken to actually disassemble/assemble them.
I appreciate you recognise the real problem would probably be swapping over from one fleet to another in a short period of time but this is not impossible – merely very difficult and a logistical challenge.
Kate,
On the Northern Line plans why are funds still being sought for Battersea?
I suspect that final fitting out of ancillary areas is often, rightly or wrong, regarded as an LU operational cost. The shell is provided for LU to use as they think fit. The extension does not really depend on having a drivers signing on point there – it is just a convenience benefitting the whole line if they do. If there was an existing signing on point at Kennington (I don’t think there is) that needed to be moved to Battersea then I think that would be different.
There have been precedents and a lot of the work north of Baker Street for stage 1 of the Fleet line (as was) had to come out of London Transport’s own resources on the grounds that the costs would have been incurred anyway and it wasn’t the construction of the Fleet line that created these costs.
Am I right in thinking that the 1996 stock is actually younger (or an earlier design) than the 1995 stock?
PoP …..
PEDs…..I have thought extensively about changing over trains on lines with PEDs when the door layout is different on the two train types. It is a real issue unless “an all old trains out, PEDs altered, all new trains in” approach is adopted. This would make the logistical challenges of the Jubilee 7-car project look like a walk in the park!
Extra funds for NLE……. wasn’t there something about having to redo the design of Battersea station design because of changes to the development above? TfL would have to approve the cost of the change even though it would expect to reclaim the cost from the developer.
And for 1995 read 1996 and vice versa in the comment above. It’s confusing!
IanJ…….in a word, yes!
Couldn’t the PEDs just be removed completely for the period there would be mixed stock running? I mean it doesn’t seem to be an issue that there aren’t platform doors on all the other stations on the Jubilee…
My understanding was that the reason the underground Jubilee Line extension platforms were fitted with platform edge doors was that this was cheaper than fitting the extensive ventilation systems otherwise necessary to ensure the piston effect didn’t create gusts that could blow people off the platforms. Obviously this doesn’t apply to above ground stations hence they weren’t fitted there.
This would suggest that any solution based on removing the doors for a period would be a non-starter. The only alternatives would seem to be Japanese style moving doors, or a total line closure during the conversion period.
IanJ…… your comments and mine crossed. For the avoidance of doubt……
1996 Tube Stock: ordered ; fitted with GTO three phase drives, rubber suspension, Alstom bogies, etc. Owned and maintained by LU with Alstom support. First train entered service, 1997
1995 Tube Stock: ordered second; fitted with IGBT three phase drives, air suspension, BREL/ABB bogies, etc. Owned by banks, maintained by Alstom. First train entered service 1998.
Whilst Jubilee line PEDS were not originally justified on the basis of improving safety (they are there to avoid having to manage draughts in stations as stated above), there is no doubt that they do have a significant safety benefit. It would be challenging in the extreme, based on current UK Health and Safety principles, to justify removing them even temporarily; and temporarily could be approximately 2 years.
Post Crossrail opening you could temporarily split the Jubilee so the old / new stock was only on half the route giving a few options.
There would also need to be some temporary platform edge solutions if removing the non-moving parts of the PEDs till the new ones got installed.
Not easy to see how they would do it.
On Google Earth there appears to be a bridge of some kind carrying the Highgate tracks about 30m north west of where the tunnel mouths are
Seen in the distance here
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.584711,-0.1621098,3a,15y,36.94h,91.56t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1shPv43-Z4rOKShrVzTom4SA!2e0!5s20091001T000000!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1
and here with a tube train on the tunnel tracks in front of it here
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5847234,-0.1621308,3a,15y,44.34h,91.35t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sZ3gg9jNnKE1Vp-j6I2TEIw!2e0!5s20120501T000000!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1.
From the limited view it is difficult to make out how large the span is, or indeed what the purpose of the bridge was, but it might be possible to install a crossover under the Highgate tracks there. It would appear that a crossover under the Highgate tracks at any point closer to the station would not be possible as the height difference only becomes large enough where this old bridge is (as seen by the height of the Tube train in the second picture)
The A1000 bridge immediately at the London end of the station is three separate spans, which would make installing crossings on it rather difficult.
Regarding the NL stabling requirement at Highgate, could use be made of the platforms at Highgate High Level and the disused North tunnels? I presume the station is all TfL property and even if the tunnels were still owned by either NR or Haringey, they are not used for anything else.
Re Timbeau,
But the 3 A1000 bridges are concrete decked so you could have part of a scissors for the centre pair of tracks on it. There was a set of cross over points between the 2 centre tracks along time ago…
I looked at the bridge shown on the Google view sent by timbeau, but I do not think that the bridge is wide enough for a crossing. What is was for originally is anybody’s guess !
The tunnels at Highgate are used. They are used by bats. (Seriously).
Re Timbeau, ngh, Harjinder
I pass through East Finchley every day. I’m certainly no expert but I’d say that it *might* be possible to put a scissors crossover immediately to the south of the station, partially on the bridge over the A1000. There would not be space, either length- or height-wise, to put a crossover in next to the tunnel portals.
Surely a better idea would be to rip up the track layout north of the station where there is ample room for both a scissors crossover and a reversing siding? It would require trains to terminating trains to do so on the Northbound through platform, but this doesn’t seem to be a problem on the Jubilee line.
At East Finchley. There would be no point whatever having any sort of crossover (let alone a scissors) on the centre pair of tracks, to the southeast of platforms 2 and 3. Trains can already move between those platforms (by using the reversing siding), and trains to/from the depot (which are anyway only at unbusy times) can use either according to where they are going-to/coming-from next/previously. The point of any additional pointwork could only be to simplify peak-hour turnrounds from-to the tunnels – such turnrounds are already possible, but currently require the train to trundle through all four platforms, one at a time.
Re timbeau et al.
The mystery bridge to the depot just before the tunnels – Before the underground in LNER days when the route was via the current depot access tracks there used to a street under there and there is still a large sewer under there…
@Timbeau, @Luongo
The bridge you refer to is not even wide enough for two lanes of traffic. I believe it predates the tube and originally would have given access to Cherry Tree Wood from Great North Road. There is certainly no room to install a crossover north of the tunnel mouths.
However, there is plenty of room to put in a reversing siding north of East Finchley station. The formation is wide enough for three tracks and bridge arches would accommodate it.
@Malcom
No problem, just install a Bat Signal.
Nameless says “the formation is wide enough for three tracks”
Indeed, I believe East Finchley to Finchley Central formation was made four-trackable as part of the Northern Heights works, logically enough as otherwise it could have been a bottleneck for the many services (including freight of course) which were envisaged at the time.
When the time comes for the Jubilee line to switch to NTfL, could the 17 platforms with PEDs be reconfigured during a long Christmas and New Year shutdown? When the new LU station design idiom was released recently, I recall there being a video showing rapid installation of PEDs from track-mounted machinery. As NTfL will be running on multiple lines by then, deliveries for the Jubilee line could be commissioned and stored all over the network pending switchover – obviously a few units would have to do gauge testing etc. on the Jubilee line well in advance.
Steve L, only if the entire rolling stock changeover took place during the same period, which would require double the usual storage space to accumulate new trains while deliveries took place, and leave limited opportunity for identifying and resolving problems with the new stock when they all went into service simultaneously.
Does anyone know why the 1995 stock, having been ordered after the 1996 stock, for delivery from 1997 onwards, was not named 1997 stock?
SteveL,
I think what 100andthirty was saying was that the problem is introducing the trains very rapidly and disposing of the old ones and being sure everything worked. Like you I suspect a relatively quick changeover of PEDs could be arranged. And I am sure one could survive for a while without Bermondsey and Southwark stations. And if the new trains are walk through, how many doors do you need to be functioning from day 1?
I don’t doubt this has been thoroughly researched and we are not likely to think of something that has been overlooked. I am just saying that I suspect it would be better to go through the pain and sort this out forever rather than the Paris solution of committing until eternity to the current door spacing even though it is known to be sub-optimal.
Steve L……
Assume for a moment that changing, testing and commissioning new PEDs at these stations is feasible, (I will return to this), there will be 73 old trains to get out of the network and another 73 new trains to get into the network, fully tested and with all the staff fully trained. There is no space in London to do this and the logistics of storing that number handily for London, as well as organising it would seriously test the resources of those who plan and execute such movements..
Returning to the PEDs, the video you will have seen covers fitting PEDs to a prepared platform. With the existing PEDs already in place, there will be little or no opportunity to prepare anything other than the wiring and controllers.
As a couple of asides……
Moving S stock around the country was painful, relying as it did on ancient motive power, but moving the Victoria Line trains by road was even more so!
Crossrail/Elizabeth line have frozen their configuration of trains with non-standard length cars in aspic by specifying PEDs!
100andthirty,
Crossrail/Elizabeth line have frozen their configuration of trains with non-standard length cars in aspic by specifying PEDs!
Or maybe they will be looking to the Jubilee line in future to see how this can be done!
It is a bit of a worry but I suspect they had no choice.
I was about to suggest that “frozen in aspic” was a weird metaphor, combining two incompatible means of preserving food. However, a google search reveals that 100andthirty is not the first person to dip into this mare’s nest of red herrings.
PoP ………”It is a bit of a worry but I suspect they had no choice.” I agree, but it is interesting to reflect that what emerged on Crossrail/Elizabeth Line is the result of competitive tendering of a performance e specification rather that a clear client inspired interface specification. This links to (and takes us back on topic!) to the Northern Line, where the original plan for the new trains was something like 7-car Central Line trains, with a short piece in the Invitation to Tender that allowed bidders to offer (shorthand) “or something similar, currently in manufacture or design”.
But the crossrail door spacing and width is probably far better to start with especially no single leaf doors at the end of cars! So less need for a potential change.
There is also enough space on the CR stock for all the equipment you could possibly want so no reason to go for articulation (in the proper meaning) to increase the space under the car.
@Malcolm
I’m afraid it was only built as a 2 track formation from north of Prospect Pace bridge to just south of Finchley Central station car park.
If you wanted a four platform southward relocated Finchley Central, the signal building would have to move as well as losing a large chunk of the car park.
On the matter of doing a “Big Bang” changeover to NTfL on the Jubilee line, look back at how the introduction of the additional trailers was done a few years ago. In the run-up to Christmas, as people finish work for the holidays, you reduce the service, so by the time that the closure starts you have already withdrawn a third of the outgoing trains. NTfL is a “go anywhere” train, so you can spread the storage of them out across several lines. Once you hit the New Year reopening, you can spend a week or so ramping back up to a full service. As for driver training, you can use a few units on the Jubilee itself out-of-hours for experience of using the new trains on that line, combined with visits to train on NTfL on the numerous other lines that will be operating them by then.
I’m not saying that it would be easy. But I think that with over 20 years to plan the operation that it might just be possible.
ngh at 16.50
For your second paragraph, you are absolutely right.
However, the line will always require nominal 22m long cars, so if a few extra trains are required in future means that TfL will have similar problems to those it experiences when it wants “just a few more” tube trains. They won’t be able to buy whatever is being made by the Derby factory (drawing analogy with the various Southern Electrostar incarnations!). The extras or successors MUST have the same length cars with the same door spacing.
Steve L. Jubilee 7th car involved 59 cars , not 73 trains. Even the 59 cars were stored off site and there was a web cam show of the work of accepting the cars and splicing them into the sets.
Even if you seek to store trains on LU, there is not the space for anywhere near this number. It was, for example, really challenging to find space for all the S stock trains given the increased length and number of trains.
However, as you say, there is time to come up with a cunning plan.
By the way, NTfL is not a “go anywhere” concept. The idea is that the same basic building blocks can be assembled into the train lengths needed for the various lines….113m, 132m, and for Jubilee, about 124m. It is the signalling systems specified for the various lines that will determine where the trains can easily go.
Malcolm @ 1434
There were four tracks up until the bridge under East End Road back in the 1890’s (see National Library of Scotland OS 25 inch). It now only extends about another 200 yards North East to the foot bridge by Stanley Road. Whilst understanding the thinking about extending this to Finchley Central I would have expected such a plan in connection with the 1935 works to have progressed before the extension to High Barnet in 1939/40. A useful source here is Wilmot’s The Railway in Finchley.
100andthirty 18:21
And worse than that, this was all because the spec required the train length “not to exceed 205 metres” so the sensible option of 9×23 = 207 metres was not permitted. And worse still, I think this is down to something like the length of platforms, or potential length, at Liverpool St High Level.
@Steve L
“so you can spread the storage of them out across several lines.”
Even so, most lines only have enough storage for their own rolling stock.
I am reminded of the photographs of the then recently-singled Ardingley branch, on which the second track was used to store most of the Kent Coast fleet ready for the big day when those lines went electric. Sadly, the lack of recently-closed branch lines, plus the difficulty of guarding what would effectively be a 9km-long billboard from the graffiti artists, would seem to preclude this option nowadays.
Has seat free stock ever been considered to increase capacity? I understand those with long commutes would not like the concept. But there must be lots of short connecting journeys made in the central section where passengers would not expect a seat during peak periods. Interested to know if there has been research into this in the past.
Simon: unfortunately I don’t think your idea will be considered any time soon. The “research” would be considered to have included the use in Nazi Germany of cattle trucks for carrying people. It would only take one mention of this precedent (however irrelevant it really might be) to put the proposer on the seriously wrong side of public opinion.
Also trains used in peak hours are also expected to have a role outside of the peaks these days.
However, trains with transverse seats only, such as are in widespread (and controversial) use already, are a significant step in the direction you mention.
@Malcolm – not to mention the fourth class on Prussian railways – open wagons with holes drilled in each corner to let the rain out. (or the famous French vans – hommes 40, chevaux 8)
Malcolm…..do you mean longitudinal seats? Transverse seats are hardly notable or controversial! Certainly longitudinal seats have been in widespread use on the underground for over a century. Indeed, on tube profile trains there is little choice but to use longitudinal seats over the bogies as the wheels come above floor level.
Re the PED’s, I worked on the JLEP (at CRW).
On the sub-surface lines, the PED’s are there for two reasons. Firstly they stop smoke from any fire in the tunnel from billowing onto the platforms (the smoke would be extracted by some very large fans over both tracks at each end of the station). Secondly they are there to prevent passengers falling (or jumping) onto the tracks.
The PED’s on the JLEP do not go up to the roof of the tunnel / soffit of the floor above and so the structure cantilevers from the platform. The possible passenger crush load is quite high and so the platform slab has to be specifically designed accordingly, as does the structure of the PED “wall”. I would suggest that as the platforms on the JLEP were designed for PED’s it would be possible to re-space the doors if required. Considerable works would however probably be required to beef-up the platform edge on “ordinary” stations. Imagine trying to do that on the Night Tube!
The power and control wiring runs along the top of the structure, for the full length of the platform, with as few joins as possible. It cannot be installed until a cable management structure has been erected at the top of the PED structure. Once the runs are complete it would then be possible to start commissioning the new system, e.g. making sure that the doors only open when there is a train there. Trying to take one working set out and replacing it immediately would be a nightmare!
I am not saying that it cannot be done, but please do not under-estimate the problems to be over-come and the time required to do the work.
@Simon, Seatless train cars have been used in Japan – see this thread on Skyscrapercity http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=683886 and have apparently been trialled in Chicago and NYC too.
The shape of tube-profile stock would limit the utility of a completely seatless interior, as the curved walls prevent most people from standing upright in the area where the seats are. If most of the below-seat equipment could be relocated elsewhere, a transverse 1+1 layout might provide the highest capacity, utilising the space too cramped to stand in for seating passengers and eliminating the legs protruding into the centre aisle which result from longitudinal seats.
Re PoP and 130,
Nothing to do with Liverpool Street which won’t be an issue after the lengthening as it could need to take 250m long term.
A 10 car networker (341) as the original stock from the 1990s proposal would have been 204.0m hence the less than 205m.
Although modern EMUs are thought of as either 20 or 23m they are often 20-21m and 23-24m some with longer end cars.
A 10 car Desiro (350/450) or Electrostar (357/377/379/387) would both also be 204.0m
All the main manufacturers* (Alstom, Bombardier, Hitachi, Siemens) can produce mainline stock any length between 20 and 26m given the current construction methods so this shouldn’t be an issue, the only one who couldn’t do this was Bombardier till the Aventra (Crossrail stock) due to the different structural design and assembly method (On the electro/turbostar the doors couldn’t be put in certain positions near the bogies hence the need for redesign if having more doors or wider doors which then allowed continuously variable body length in the range)
*not sure about CAF but the other 4 should provide enough potential competition.
PS…
The CR requirement was also extend-able to 250m so “23m” would also fail that as sub optimal.
The mathematical optimisation solution is simple:
205m = X centre cars of length A + 2 end cars of length B
250m = Y centre cars of length A + 2 end cars of length B
Throw in some assumptions:
20m< A (or B) =A due to new crash regulations and tapered cabs allowing the end cars to be longer
And you get 2 solutions:
The CR initial one:
204m 10 car or 245m 12 car assuming traditional “20m” cars (before new crash regs etc.) e.g. A=B
So 1m or 5m less than max length so close but not as close as…
And Bombardier’s alternative which maxes out length (and has a direct weight saving of at least 12 tonnes + more indirect weight saving with 1 fewer traction motor due to weight reduction (and further feed back loops with more indirect savings))
X=7
Y=9
A=22.5m
B=23.75m
Can you blame Bombardier for doing some maths?
@Simon: But there must be lots of short connecting journeys made in the central section where passengers would not expect a seat during peak periods. Interested to know if there has been research into this in the past.
The Yamanote Line in Japan (very much a short connecting journeys kind of line, and extremely busy) used to have certain carriages on the trains that entered service with tip-up seats that were locked in the up position. The seats then automatically unlocked at the end of the peak. I think that declining population means that this is no longer needed.
Wikipedia suggests that JR East also withdrew the carriages in question because they had more doors than standard and they intend to introduce platform edge doors on the line.
The layout of tube trains (the position of the bogies and the low ceiling at the edge of the carriage) would make it harder to make use of the space freed up by not having seats.
I am left wondering quite why the Northern Line upgrade specification has proved so difficult. I read papers about NLU2 well over 5 years ago and there was a fair amount of detail about service patterns, tph levels, extra rolling stock, siding and depot requirements back then. While I suppose you might argue that Battersea has proved to be something of a distraction it doesn’t really alter the fundamentals too much. That much more work has to be done to get to a point of being able to seek authority and even then there is the possibility of “don’t do it at all” what on earth has been going on for the last half a decade or so? It’s not as if demand has fallen or even faces the prospect of decline. We have the go ahead for the works at Bank and a plan in prospect for Camden Town so the serious station problems are no longer quite so urgent an issue. The lack of any viable alternative for N-S transport capacity expansion says to me that there is no prospect of anyone saying “don’t go ahead with further upgrading the Northern Line”. As it will be a political decision then the poor old Mayor will be “dead in the water” over a large part of London if they were to take that decision hence why it won’t happen.
I see others have nicely provided some details but I would just add that I do not see PED replacement on the JLE as being easy or achieveable over a short blockade period. I would also not be seduced by corporate videos showing a bit of PED structure being angled into place. There will be months of preparatory work on the platform structure and nosing stones before that could happen and almost certainly more months of wiring, commissioning and testing before any train will stop at them and be able to activate the door open / door closed cycle. There is a great deal of clever technology and checks around ensuring the safe operation of train and PED working. You don’t just flick it on over a weekend and hope for the best. I doubt the safety regulator would be satisfied with that nor would the unions. The added issues on JLE stations make the task even more involved there if we get to the point of new trains with different door spacings sometime in the next 30 years. I would not be shocked if by the time we get there that the structures on JLE platforms need attention before any new design of PED could be retrofitted and then you’re into even more fun and games.
@WW: I am left wondering quite why the Northern Line upgrade specification has proved so difficult. I read papers about NLU2 well over 5 years ago
I suppose in the intervening time there have been the Jubilee and Victoria resignallings, the multiple SSL (re)tenders and the development of the New Tube for London – maybe the Northern Line just kept getting pushed to the back of the queue? Is TfL pushing against the limit of the number of different projects it can do at once? And the Northern Line resignalling is the one that actually went to schedule, so maybe there had been some slack built into the planning to allow for potential delays there?
@WW “The lack of any viable alternative for N-S transport capacity expansion says to me that there is no prospect of anyone saying “don’t go ahead with further upgrading the Northern Line””
CR2? If CR2 was given the go ahead to be built by 2030-ish, wouldn’t that provide enough relief (at least on the West End side) for Tfl to kick Northern line down the road and focus its efforts on the Piccadilly etc?
@Toby Chopra – if anything, CR2 relieves the Picadilly more than it does the Northern.
As has been guessed, when I wrote “transverse seating” I was referring to what is normally described as longitudinal seating. My subconscious reasoning was “seating in which people face transversely to the direction of travel”. However logical this might be, language works best when conventions are followed, not (inadvertently) flouted. Sorry.
@ Malcolm 2200
The no seat concept even for long distance journeys is with us with the launch of Izy.
http://www.railwaygazette.com/news/high-speed/single-view/view/izy-budget-paris-brussels-train-service-to-offer-EUR10-standing-tickets.html
My understanding of the Yamanote Line in Tokyo is that it was the need for standardisation of the number of car doors to enable the introduction of PEDs that was the deciding factor in withdrawing the special cars. In themselves those with extra doors had been very successful in speeding up loading, certainly from my own experience and observation. Tokyu Railway are also withdrawing some cars to achieve the same end. Sadly Japan has a high suicide level and the disruption caused is becoming an increasing problem so that the urgent introduction of PEDs has become a major objective.
@Deep Thought/Toby Chopra
CR2 relieves the Piccadilly more than it does the Northern
And the Victoria – especially the hordes currently interchanging from SWT at Vauxhall – even more.
It is a matter for conjecture which way the net flow will be at the Balham/Tooting interchange, but it is possible CR2 would actually make the Northern Line worse.
The planned (and speculated) service frequencies for the Jubilee Line sound like they will be rather unpopular with passengers who use Wembley Park, Neasden and Dorris Hill. These stations currently receive 24tph in the peak, potentially reducing to 16tph in 2018, rising to 18tph in 2020. I don’t know these stations well but could this cause overcrowding or just longer waiting times?
In case the net flow is from cr2 to Northern wouldn’t it be prudent to improve the ability to reverse trains at Tooting Broadway so empty (or emptier, if the cr2 interchange is at Balham) are available to pick up cr2 passengers?
@Anonymous
walk-through trains would make it quite easy for a driver to change ends. A Vienna-style auto-reverse facility might speed things up even more, but possibly de trop.
Stewart… I love the notion of Dorris Hill. Dollis Hill as pronounced bh a native Japanese speaker?
@100andthirty Haha. I genuinely have no idea where that slip came from. Now you have pointed it out, what I have written looked ridiculous but it seemed reasonable to my mind at the time. I think it’s time for a coffee.
Stewart,
The planned (and speculated) service frequencies for the Jubilee Line sound like they will be rather unpopular with passengers who use Wembley Park, Neasden and Dorris Hill.
No doubt it would. We would be back to a c2c type situation but on a lesser scale. It does seem though that nowadays the inconvenience to a relatively small number of existing passengers is given far more prominence in decision making than I think it should. (I am not suggesting in the case of c2c only a relatively small number of passengers are affected.)
The issue you describe was obviously considered as a factor when investigating ordering more trains and terminating more of them further out.
I would suggest that Neasden and Dollis Hill are not particularly busy by tube standards and a 16tph service would be quite adequate. It just happens to be the difficulty of finding suitable intermediate reversing locations that means they get such a good service. Also bear in mind those 16tph would be at even intervals of less than 4 minutes apart as opposed to today’s offering of a more frequent service but with larger gaps. So you could argue that the users are actually better off.
I think Wembley Park is a bit of an irrelevance as, as well as the argument above, passengers would be able to catch a Metropolitan line train non-stop to Finchley Road and pick up a Jubilee line train from there – some of which will be nearly empty having started from West Hampstead.
I was wondering if LR are also planning an article on the New Tube for London Signalling procurement?
This subject was also on the agenda of the Rail and Underground Panel meeting that covered Jubilee and Northern train procurement discussed in this article.
Reynolds 953,
Yes, it is about half-written. It was intended to be published by now but stuff happens.
@ PoP 1107
“It does seem though that nowadays the inconvenience to a relatively small number of existing passengers is given far more prominence in decision making than I think it should.”
The idea of thinking about the “greater good” is not currently popular. If pressed people might agree about the theory “as long as it doesn’t affect me”. Looking forwards the need to take the concept on board is inevitable but I fear much wailing and nashing of teeth before it sinks in.
Anonymous 10:31
With regards to starting trains from the siding at Tooting Broadway or, equivalently, running them empty from Morden to Tooting Broadway you might be interested in paragraph 114 of the Clapham South accident report into a person dragged along the platform which has just been published
I travel from time to time into Marylebone in the morning peak, all of the platforms at Dollis Hill and the Western parts of the platforms at Neasden are visible, and while busier than the platforms on Chiltern stations they rarely appear particularly busy.
TfL data says both had 3-3.5m entries/exits in 2014. Dollis Hill is less than 3/4 mile walk from Willesden Green which has 6tph starters, rising to 8 if the changes outlined in the article are made; coupled with being cheaper by a zone, that’s a strong temptation to switch if you start being unable to get on the first train at Dollis Hill.
Re PoP,
Clapham – agreed it potentially just means other trains are more crowded so fewer can board at the Claphams on those services potentially making the problem worse.
Re Malcolm & James B,
Surely the NTfL variant on the W&C would be the place for far fewer or no seats or is pedestrian flow in the stations the limit before that stage?
@ngh
W&C trains have all-longitiudinal seating. Quite apart from the amount of equipment stored underneath them, given the shape of the carriages I doubt if many more people could be carried in practice if all the seats were to be removed – the number of people using the line who are under 4’6″ tall being negligible.
Arguably seats increase capacity because the layout creates two layers of people (legs taking up less space that torso) and best uses the areas of reduced height which aren’t tall enough for people to stand in.
Playing the devil’s small space advocate, passengers are mushed up against tube doors which are the widest point of the carriage. I don’t stand there, being 6′ tall, and the crook in my neck is very uncomfortable. My point is that some people do press up right next to doors, which have limited height.
Also, how many Drain passengers carry briefcases, backpacks, large bum bags, shopping, parkas? If a lot, surely these accoutrements would be the best way to fill the short 4’6″ space by the windows and leave more full(er) height space for paying customers.
[Modified to replace language innocuous in North America but not here with something a bit politer and more what was intended. PoP]
A few points which might illuminate others’ comments:
1) In the PPP, any space with less than 1.6m headroom didn’t count as a space for capacity calculations. These calculations relied on the floor being the widest point on the train. They didn’t envisage S stock, where floor width is noticeably narrower than shoulder or waist high.
2) There are always seats over bogies on tube cars as the tops of the wheels penetrate the floor
3) If anyone recalls the Central Line prototype trains, the blue one had 1 + 1 seating in the centre bay
@LBM
“how many Drain passengers carry briefcases, backpacks, large bum bags, shopping, parkas? ”
There is less luggage and shopping than on most lines – it is very much a commuter route. And people aren’t going to stow luggage for a four minute journey – if only because retrieving it will put you at the back of the scrum to get out at the other end.
These days there are more knapsacks than brollies-and-briefcases, and these are NEVER taken off! (there isn’t room to do the necessary wriggling for one thing)
http://rexyedventures.com/2015/07/30/waterloo-city-line-londons-dark-open-secret/
No Dorris Hill is obviously Doris Bonker’s sister …. ( Of Sid & Doris Bonkers, Neasden FC’s supporters club, as per “Private Eye”)
PoP
That Clapham S RAIB report is very interesting, isn’t it?
A classic “true accident” where no-one actually did anything wrong.
As you say stuff ( or something beginning with “s” ) happens
@ Ian J 0459 – I think what happened with the Northern Line signalling upgrade was that it was descoped to allow it to be done with minimal possessions and in a relatively short timescale. There was massive institutional pressure to show “new LU” could deliver better than nasty Infraco and to kill off vehement political hectoring. When I look at what is lined up for the future “might happen” NLU2 I can see several bits of scope that really should have been in NLU1 – things like coasting, power upgrades, low loss conductor rail. However they all take time and money and are “invisible” to the public. Where we seem to have ended up is a rather odd mix of work scope caused by expediency in the past but which makes the business case now much harder to justify. I assume some level of power works were done in NLU1 to allow for the more intensive service levels and to deal with the worst asset degredation (traction current and signalling power cable faults were a major problem on the Northern Line). This will make it harder to justify the next increment of work as you’ve already banked some level of benefit but may have to carry more overall cost. Always the risk with splitting work up and delivering it in sub optimal packages due to time or funding constraints. We’re undoubtedly seeing this on other LU lines.
I am not convinced that CR2 is a factor for the Northern Line in terms of allowing a delay to an upgrade. What hasn’t been mentioned is the push to the suburbs caused by stupid house prices / rents. What might not a big issue today for places like Morden, Barnet or Dollis Hill could well become one in future as people are priced out of places nearer Zone 1. As others have said CR2 may impact the Northern Line south section in unexpected ways. I also haven’t heard TfL cite relief of the Northern line as a key objective for CR2. If TfL do not upgrade the Northern then as PoP suggested we may be headed back to “misery line” days.
re W&C. the intention is to equip it with an NTfL train, the RS will probably be optimised for the Central/Bakerloo/Picc, the W&C numbers will not be significant enough to dictate much, if any, of the design. You wouldn’t design an F1 car like they are if all races were run on Monaco type street circuits, also space under seats have all sorts of equipment so you’d have to find a space for that. Some advocate, half seriously, installing a travelator on the W&C
LR staff – when’s the next issue of the magazine coming? I’ve subscribed for 6, but only received two. Had no explanation of the mega delay. Sorry for posting this here, but I don’t have other contact info for you….
[Anonymous, please see the Publisher’s update in the comments in the LR Issue Two Now Available article. LBM]
@timbeau
I apologize for bringing up this question(!), but I was indeed surprised to see how many passengers with knapsacks/backbacks were taking the Drain. Thank you.
As the Northern Line extension to Battersea is due to open in 4 years, presumably new trains will have to be ordered whether or not the upgrades take place…
The 1973 stock was a new generation when compared to the 1972, but the the 1992 stock was also a big change in terms of its body construction, while the 1996 and (especially) 1995 were a big step forward with their AC motors.
By the time the 1995 and 1996 stock need replacing in 2040, won’t the technology of the NTfL be out of date? Standardisation is good, but not if the available technology has significantly moved forward from that existing in the early 2020s?
Mikey C,
As the Northern Line extension to Battersea is due to open in 4 years, presumably new trains will have to be ordered whether or not the upgrades take place…
According to the briefing notes for the previous Rail & Underground Panel meeting:
There would be various options available without reducing frequency in the central section by increasing stock availability, utilising existing turnbacks (e.g. Colindale, Finchley Central) or creating new turnbacks (e.g. East Finchley) or a combination of these.
By the time the 1995 and 1996 stock need replacing in 2040, won’t the technology of the NTfL be out of date?
Maybe, but the general concept (door spacing, Platform Edge Doors, Unattended Train Operation etc) won’t be. So NTfL-like stock or NTfL-style operations would probably be a better description.
Alternatively, NTfL may become an evolutionary concept so that the stock that should eventually replace the Central line (last in the queue) may be very different from the stock that replaces the Piccadilly line (first in the queue) but will probably look extremely similar.
It’s surely not that surprising that people are increasingly having backpacks/etc with them when commuting, given how common it is for people to visit a gym before/after work (or at lunchtime), and also carry things like laptops.
Regarding the “no seats” option – I can’t imagine that being popular with the elderly/pregnant/etc.
Re PoP,
Indeed as soon as they have gone for the articulated bogies you automatically move away from single leaf end doors (for reasons 130 notes) to more evenly spaced all double leaf doors so NTfL could easily evolve technologically over time or even get manufactured by different companies after a while (e.g. Northern / Jubilee replacement time) but still look roughly the same.
To Mikey C and others who have raised “class”or “generation” issues regarding LU trains, may I add my two penny worth, having worked with all the current fleet during my career.
It is difficult to generalise on the generations. There are three main areas of technology: carbodies/bogies, propulsion, and other equipment.
1972, and 1973 stock are quite similar in body and bogie construction. Their propulsion is also similar (camshaft, 1972 uses two camshafts per equipment, 1973 uses one). 1973 tube stock’s innovations were to introduce the electrically controlled emergency brake and an early electronic system/fault monitoring system. Apart from their construction and technology, I have bracketed these together because of their main contractor and engineering inspiration – London Transport engineers (LTe). The main contractor and engineering inspiration for the others is quoted too.
1992 tube stock introduced welded aluminium construction, LU’s only DC chopper system, regenerative braking (that works properly for those who want to quote O and P stock), air suspension and full train control and monitoring with a form of remote download of data. This was truly the first “modern” train to break away from the 1938 stock heritage. BREL/ABB
1995/6 tube stocks introduced AC traction and electronic Passenger Information displays and in train CCTV. Alstom
2009 tube stock introduced electric door operation. Bombardier.
Of course each generation of kit was more capable than the last, so, for example, the information that can be obtained from a 2009 tube stock train whilst it’s in service is much more extensive that is available from the 1992 tube stock.
D stock is a surface, version of the 1973 tube stock but with all aluminium riveted body (LTe)
S stock is a surface version of the 2009 tube stock but with all axles motored, air conditioning and walk though gangways (Bombardier)
Re Moogal,
I was thinking of fewer rather than no seats on the W&C NTfL e.g. bigger vestibule areas given it is just one stop. There would still be enough seats off peak for everyone. Given the NTfL door spacing and width there may be fewer seats anyway.
@Moogal
I was surprised at the number of backpacks due to my assumption of the demographic of the W&C line of being City financial types in suits, having never ridden this line.
ngh,
If I recall correctly, technically they won’t be articulated bogies. You have a centre carriage with two bogies and all the others have one – at one end and away from the centre carriage. I don’t know what the correct term for that will be.
The issue of single leaf end doors on tube stock is nothing to do with bogies but was decided simply because it was established that they were inefficient – half the width and less than half the capacity of double doors and two single leaf doors have more to go wrong than one double leaf door. As the Clapham South incident shows, you want to minimise the number of places clothing and other stuff can get trapped in.
I suspect a lot of the reason we have single leaf doors at the end is historical and due to the fact that it was a convenient way of providing an area for the guard without taking away too much passenger space.
If 36tph can be run on the Jubilee it should be possible to run 40tph or higher on the Victoria since the need to open PED doors before carriage doors and to shut them after carriage doors uses a precious few seconds IE dwell time on the Jubilee is necessarily longer than on the Victoria.
Alternatively, if 36tph really is the maximum on the Victoria Line, then the maximum possible on the Jubilee is probably only 32tph.
@Deep Thought, Timbeau, WW. Thanks for comments on CR2. I suppose I was thinking of all those Euston rail arrivals and Surrey passengers who would have a new route to the West End, leaving the Northern Line for those who got on earlier. But then I remembered that one of the main points of CR2 is to provided capacity for increased longer distance traffic into Waterloo – so a whole new set of passengers for the Northern Line. So you’re right, if anything it increases the needed for the enhancements.
PoP……”If I recall correctly, technically they won’t be articulated bogies. You have a centre carriage with two bogies and all the others have one – at one end and away from the centre carriage. I don’t know what the correct term for that will be.”
What you described was the original plan for the NTfL. However, uneven weight distribution and uneven platform gaps and a whole host of other issues led to a decision to revert to articulation in its usual form ie intermediate bogies shared between car ends.
NTfL genesis was “how can we deliver a tube train as good a S stock within tube stock constraints. Forcexample, it is not practically possible to build a conventional tube carriage with three sets of double doors….the bogies get in the way.
Kate…..I suspect the Victoria line and Jubilee lines are not strictly comparable both as regards to layout and systems fitted. The major constraint on the Victoria Line is the two platform termini. The signalling system, whilst not moving block, has been very carefully optimised for the Victoria line infrastructure and train performance, and 36 tph will be a very creditable performance.
The Jubilee has the benefit of moving block signalling, but is hostage to it being quite old at its core. Moreover, the terminals, with limited over-runs, don’t allow the same high speed run ins as on the Victoria line. Being in the open doesn’t help, and the increased distance occupied by the junctions for the three platform station at Stratford means that it is probably not as capacious as Brixton or Walthamstow in the current state of the system.
There is no doubt that PEDs slow down the time from wheel stop to doors fully open, and also doors about to close warning to wheel start time. However this time is quite small (in the order of a couple of seconds) and what matters is whether this extra time affects the overall dwell time. It is impossible to be absolutely certain, because there has been no control experiment (ie no way of comparing, say, Canary Wharf, with and without PEDs), but the general view is that PEDs help the customers organise themselves so that the overall dwell with PEDs is no worse than without.
Kate,
In addition to what 100andthirty says …
For the Victoria maybe not 40tph but perhaps a 38tph – or more accurately a train every 95 seconds (instead of every 100 seconds which equates to 36tph).
However, the problem is getting the trains and finding somewhere to put them.
With considerable foresight a fleet was bought that was sufficient for a 36tph service at a time when there was considerable doubt that would be possible. To buy the two or three additional trains to be able to try to go to 95 second intervals would probably be wholly uneconomic.
The Victoria line has only one depot which has virtually no spare space for either longer trains or more trains. Trains are already stabled overnight at Walthamstow Central and Brixton. When the time comes to replace the Victoria line fleet it will be a considerable challenge to introduce the new stock without depleting the existing stock in advance to provide some space.
Does the provision of PEDs allow for a higher entry speed to platforms and later braking as trains stop where services run under ATO or not?
@WW
” I also haven’t heard TfL cite relief of the Northern line as a key objective for CR2.”
I thought that was the justification for the Balham Bulge – although many people think it will have the opposite effect.
@poP
“The issue of single leaf end doors on tube stock ”
If you have end doors at all, they have to be single leaf as there would be nowhere for the other leaf to go.
@ngh
“NTfL could easily evolve technologically over time or even get manufactured by different companies after a while ”
As happened with the standard stock – which differed markedly from the earliest to the latest – indeed early examples did not have end doors
@Pedantic of Purley – 9 March 2016 at 19:13
I suspect a lot of the reason we have single leaf doors at the end is historical and due to the fact that it was a convenient way of providing an area for the guard without taking away too much passenger space.
Presumably the end doors are the direct descendants of the open platforms of the pre-first world war gate stock?
The current layout at East Finchley is pretty useless for anything other than starting trains from the depot going north in the morning, presumably to reverse towards London again at either Finchley Central or Mill Hill East and the opposite procedure in the late evening. I wondered if there really was room for additional connections at the south end of the platforms as suggested up thread to allow trains to start towards London or terminate from London during the day and reverse. I stumbled across this map on National Library of Scotland’s excellent map site:
http://maps.nls.uk/view/103657907#zoom=4&lat=5659&lon=14672&layers=BT
This shows the current station with the two islands in place but track present only along the outermost faces and the junctions between the depot/northern heights lines and the tunnel ramps situated to the south of the station. This suggests that some junctions between the parallel roads might be possible.
In light of this I suggest the following layout with new crossovers arranged between each outer running lines and its adjacent centre platform.
http://www.townend.me/files/eastfinchley.pdf
These would allow a terminating northbound train to access platform 2, empty at leisure without delaying following traffic then proceed into the reversing siding and return to platform 3 for southbound departure. With the depot access lines both equipped for bi-directional running trains being stabled or going into service could also be dealt with in their appropriate platform. All north and southbound trains would thus be accommodated on their appropriate island, easy for passengers waiting for the next train going south or interchanging from a terminating northbound for the next service going further north.
@James Bunting: The idea of thinking about the “greater good” is not currently popular
I’m not sure it ever has been:
And let it be noted that there is no more delicate matter to take in hand, nor more dangerous to conduct, nor more doubtful in its success, than to set up as the leader in the introduction of changes. For he who innovates will have for his enemies all those who are well off under the existing order of things, and only lukewarm supporters in those who might be better off under the new.
– Niccolo Macchiavelli, 1513
@PoP: That accident report does add to the long term case for platform edge doors.
On the NTfL articulation, the 2014 NTfL feasibility study (p. 17) shows more conventional articulation with the bogie between each pair of carriages – and also states that:
The repositioning of the bogies allows all train doors to be double doors. Double doors allow for rapid access and egress, which reduces dwell times. Controlling dwell times becomes a dominant factor for achieving high frequency service levels, due to reduced intervals between trains.
If you wanted a term for the articulation strategy of having one bogie under the end of each carriage, Alstom called this ‘bogie offset articulation’ in their design for Thameslink (which got rejected because it failed Network Rail’s track wear modelling).
On the W&C: There is an interesting note in the feasbility report where it says it is due to get the NTfL in 2032 “Subject to the role of W&C in the NTfL trialling and testing plan” – implying TfL are/were thinking of using the line as a prototype/testbed.
It would make sense because if you were going to order a handful of prototypes, then make changes in the light of experience, you will end up with some non-standard trains – which would be less of an issue if they form the fleet for the whole line. Also you get a whole day a week of possession and no Night Tube.
@Mark Townend….As others have alluded to earlier, would there be enough space and strength on the bridge to build the crossovers in the location you suggest? My memory of the line is that the through tracks either side begin their steep descent as soon as they’ve cleared the road, which doesn’t leave an awful lot of room.
If so, then it appears to be the most attractive option, but the cost might prove prohibitive if it involves a partial rebuild of the road bridge and/or shifting the station platforms further north by around 5-10 metres to accommodate the crossovers. Another complicating factor is that the entire station AFAIK is Grade II listed!
The fact that this strange arrangement (a legacy of the pre-war Northern Heights plan to run tube trains from Highgate High Level to Bushey Heath and High Barnet via the middle platforms, which of course was the original through line) has survived for as long as it has, even after the line south of Highgate sidings was removed in c.1970, suggests to me that TfL and its predecessors saw no value in altering this. I suspect instead they will use the middle platform at Finchley Central to reverse trains, and/or terminate more through trains from London at Mill Hill East by doubling the branch (for which there is enough space along the line, even on the viaduct!), thereby removing the need for a shuttle service.
Re Mark,
That was roughly what I had in mind. If the platforms moved a few meters north west then you could squeeze a Walthamstow sized scissors in on the bridge and go straight into P3 making turn back much quicker and it being far easier to get train into /out of service in both directions…
Re PoP,
As you effectively have a raised floor (or the equivalent of a small wheel arch) under the seats above each bogie if you don’t have articulation you are stuck with the single – double – double – single leaf door pattern as the bogies have to be between the single and double leaf doors under longitudinal seats (hence why the ’67 stock only had transverse seating between the double leaf doors and not between the single and double leaf doors).
The mystery bridge carrying the Northern Line near the Bishops Avenue/A1 junction is only long enough to carry the railway over a sewer running at right angles to the railway, and there is no way any crossovers could be fitted through it. You can see its shadow in Google aerial view. It had never occurred to me before that this bridge only carries the depot tracks, and that the Northern Line tracks are on the ground.. I had thought that it was not possible to lay a railway directly on this sewer, which is why I thought the bridge was there. The sewer carries fresh water and is clearly visible on aerial photos as a nearly straight line of undeveloped land from Woodside Avenue/Muswell Hill Road to Hanworth. It is also visible on ordnance survey maps as various property boundaries lining up across London, and wherever it cross a road it has distinctive railings.
It’s very visible at Corringham Road
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5746265,-0.1906145,21z/data=!3m1!1e3?force=lite
It goes beneath the pumping station at Golders Green visible here
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5724468,-0.1956187,3a,66.8y,229.99h,86.33t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1szsU4T2tj5pzA1U8ZW9HqcQ!2e0?force=lite
It’s clearly visible at Temple Road
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5582522,-0.2248472,19z/data=!3m1!1e3?force=lite
and by Mulgrave Road
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5560626,-0.2446017,19z/data=!3m1!1e3?force=lite
It runs under Conduit Way (hence the name) and is the reason the old Honeywell Bull HQ was built as two towers instead of one
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5440482,-0.2716732,18z/data=!3m1!1e3?force=lite
It’s very clear near Carlyon Road
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5375379,-0.2906485,19z/data=!3m1!1e3?force=lite
and May Gardens
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5329765,-0.308504,18z/data=!3m1!1e3?force=lite
It’s the reason the Hoovers Building is set back from the A40.
It then swings southward, and is visible by Tentelow Lane
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5003789,-0.3615849,19z/data=!3m1!1e3?force=lite
and where it crosses Great West Road
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4789825,-0.3703275,19z/data=!3m1!1e3?force=lite
A1000 bridge: Google Maps satellite view shows three bridges over the road. The ‘Townend turnouts’ would appear to fit on the SE side of the bridge but there might be consequences for the gradient of the depot access lines. These lines appear to become single track briefly and I suggest that making them bi-directional might need further thought.
Edmonton ‘Eadcase 10 March 2016 at 02:23
“The sewer carries fresh water”
?
Mark Townend
My thoughts precisely, as regards “link” crossovers just off the London end of the platforms – entirely do-able.
In addition, it’s very obvious from aerial photos, that the formation is wide enough to extend the centre reversing siding, or even to go to the “old” LT arrangement of two, with a scissors at the “platform” end of said sidings.
Here is an historic example – also notable for the stock variety.
@Edmonton/Alan Griffiths
The term “sewer” is usually reserved for a conduit for waste water, although it may be a storm drain or for industrial waste rather than for actual sewage. Generally, and for obvious reasons, water is extracted from the Thames upstream of central London, and waste water is disposed of downstream.
This pipe is a water main carrying fresh water from the works at Kempton Park to the northern suburbs – hence the need for pumping stations.
Difficult to see from Google Earth, but I suspect the tunnel tracks at East Finchley may have their own bridges over it, at a lower level than the tracks leading to Highgate depot.
Jubilee – I wouldn’t want to be the project manager for the eventual replacement of rolling stock and platform edge doors! Sounds like a really big elephant in the tube!
At East Finchley – could crossovers be added between the running tracks and the depot tracks by replacing the 3 bridge decks with one? Maybe too cost prohibitive? Otherwise I would assume that if East Finchley was used to routinely turn-back services then 2 scissors crossovers would be required north of station connecting the running tracks and depot tracks, of which the latter would merge into the siding?
@Pedantic of Purley 9 March
Thanks. While I can understand how turning back trains might enable Battersea to be served…
1) REDUCING the service at the northern extremities of the Northern Line is hardly likely to go down well. I can imagine local MPs getting involved if their areas end up getting a worse service, for an extension that doesn’t benefit them, especially as the extension is due to open in 2020, which happens to be a General Election year! Proposed TfL changes to the bus service in my area (for example) were an election issue last year, and got thrown out after the MP put pressure on Boris/TfL…
2) As the 1995 stock gets older, using the stock more intensively would surely be a risky policy?
Re PoP 9th March 22.00 hours.
Of the 39 trains in service on the Victoria line in peak periods, 6 have been out-stabled overnight (at Walthamstow Central (2), Brixton (3) and Victoria siding (1)). Taking into account the need for engineering access, litter picking and changing of adverts on the walls opposite the platforms, it is difficult to see how the number of trains out-stabling can be increased.
@GT et al
Updated it a little to incorporate an option with Timbeau’s long crossover, crossing the platfrom #2 road direct to #3, but with a slip connection to #2 incorporated as well. I think that should fit without having to rebuild the bridge or platfroms or move signalling stopping positions etc and would bring the stock utilisation advantages of a quicker turnround in normal operation together with the flexibility of also being able to put a northbound into 2 to go to the depot or to accomodate two closely following trains that both needed to turn back at East Finchley without blocking the Northbound.
http://www.townend.me/files/eastfinchley.pdf
Mikey C,
1) Agreed but something would have to give. You can’t in all honesty say that Edgware and Burnt Oak really need 24tph in the peak. It is just operational convenience that gives them this. I agree that it might not go down too well on the High Barnet branch as they “only” have about 19tph. The competing pressure to have some trains on a newly opened extension would surely carry more weight though.
2) Well possibly but it is getting on for 20 years old now. The question is whether this involves a higher reliability as such or rescheduling more maintenance to take place at unsocial hours and weekends with the cost implications of that.
Guano,
Thanks for the exact details which make my point even more forcibly so. Of course, the three at Brixton, it could be argued, are needed regardless of space at the depot in order to have a few early starting trains from Brixton. To a lesser extent you could argue the same about the Victoria starter and the two Walthamstow starters.
The TfL briefing paper on “Northern Line Upgrade 2” refers to a feasibility study. Is this study in the public domain (in whole or in part)? Could it be requested by FoI?
Paragraph 3.5 of the briefing paper seems to suggest that the 30 tph option was chosen because it fitted within existing expenditure constrains, even though a higher tph option might be needed or give a better BCR. There are also later suggestions that (paragraph 4.8) that the options might be reviewed in just over a year from now. Wouldn’t it be useful to know more about these other options and their pros and cons?
The reference to signalling changes to allow for out-stabling: does this men that signalling changes are required so as to allow some platforms to be occupied by trains at night while still allowing engineering access?
Guano,
presumably but I find there is more to read that is already available than I have time for so personally I don’t bother with FOIs which cost us all money to provide. But someone else can go ahead.
The briefing paper was written for the purpose of getting expenditure authorised for further investigation and preparation. So really I suspect the options can’t be presented until they have been investigated – which is why the money is being asked for in order to firm up the existing proposals and establish that they are or aren’t the best option.
I suspect not but we don’t know. It could mean allowing two trains to stable in one long siding or introducing/reinstating any existing track that could be used as a siding or simply that some existing sidings were not included in the resignalling but now need to be.
Full size trains running every two minutes or so out to every tube line extremity is a nonsense. A waste of manpower, expensive rolling stock and energy, especially for the most far flung termini as on Jubilee and Northern. Would a cut from say three minute to five minute frequency actually result in any reduction in demand at these locations? I doubt it very much as the turn up and go threshold is generally understood to be more like 10 or 15 minutes as demonstrated by LO growth. Also for these longer trips the travelling time itself dominates the journey much more than it does for short central London hops, where turn up and go immediately is so much more important to justify the time consuming entry and access down to the platforms and to meet the enormous total demand. It could be argued that if journey time from High Barnet to Central London for example could be cut by three minutes due to better performance of new trains, then sometimes having to wait an extra two minutes in worst case for a train is actually still an overall improvement to service. Cutting back some frequency at the extremities also offers the intriguing possibility of developing some new branching service patterns such as converting the Uxbridge line to a Jubilee branch, thus solving the compromise platform height problem on the section shared with the Piccadilly.
@mark townend
“converting the Uxbridge line to a Jubilee branch, thus solving the compromise platform height problem on the section shared with the Piccadilly”
As would running the District to Uxbridge again, which would allow all Piccadilly trains to serve Heathrow. Obviously these two proposals are mutually exclusive if the objective is to eliminate compromise platform heights!
(And to answer the obvious question, an Ealing Broadway-Acton Town shuttle).
Can we please not go through the Uxbridge possibilities yet again?
Mark Townend…….. I believe your proposal for a single slip south of East Finchley would be improved if it were to be a double slip. That said, both would be new territory for the modern Underground (can’t speak about historic track layouts), and I know that the track engineers would work hard to avoid such one off designs. The issue remains, whether the levels are such ascto permit crossovers at all, however elegant a solution it might be. I guess that issue this will remain ‘at large’ until one of us wanders up there or a knowledgeable correspondant comes along.
“Full size trains running every two minutes or so out to every tube line extremity is a nonsense.”
Yes but: the decision was taken a few years ago to cease using stations such as Colindale, Golders’ Green, Tooting Broadway, Marble Arch. Liverpool Street, Barons’ Court and Wood Green as termination points. The time taken to get passengers off the train, and make a low-speed move into a siding, was too long and held up the rest of the service. Staff were required on the platform to ensure passengers had alighted.
That decision may need to be revisited, if the reversing facilities at the end of the line become saturated and running frequent services to the end of the line requires very large numbers of trains. It would, though, require investment in reversing sidings and in platforms, and may require more platform staff at the new terminating stations.
PoP at 11.16: “So really I suspect the options can’t be presented until they have been investigated … ”
Yes, probably. But it does lead back to the question of why the various options were not researched earlier.
Guano,
I think it is a case that you can only decide on a plausible set of options and go through some initial analysis based on various assumptions. One may well emerge as a most likely front runner but at that point you have to start spending serious money to check this out. In the course of this some reasons may emerge why your original assumptions may be wide of the mark and hence other options (including doing nothing) may present themselves as a better way forward. What you don’t want to do is death by analysis where you spend serious sums of money investigating alternative options that would never present a better case than the front runner.
Already the National Infrastructure Commission report has a diagram showing (rather implausibly) 31 tph on the Northern line – maybe that is a train every 115 seconds instead of 2 minutes. So that could be something that needs further research.
Re PoP,
And 33tph on CR2 (18 New Southgate + 15 Tottenham Hale) despite the core being 30tph elsewhere, written in hurry???
[Scrap New Southgate and go for C2C Rainham relief didn’t see that one coming or is it a suggestion that some councils need to be bit more realistic?]
The Northern 31tph was predicated on NTfL etc. due to (dwell time?) issues with existing stock.
@Guano
Golders Green is still used as a termination point. Unlike the other examples you mentioned, it has a middle track with two platform faces so is a perfect place to reverse trains without impeding through services
@ Pedantic
The frequency of trains has already been increased since the new signalling was installed on the Northern Line, without any extra trains. I wonder if any slack is left in the Northern Line fleet?
@guano – “Yes but: the decision was taken a few years ago to cease using stations such as … Marble Arch, Liverpool Street and … as termination points. The time taken to get passengers off the train, and make a low-speed move into a siding, was too long and held up the rest of the service.”
I well remember those short workings and by and large the train ‘detraining’ procedures were swift and efficient. To start with, e.g. “Marble Arch” was on every platform indicator, so that folk who wanted a station farther on simply stayed on the platform to await the train just behind and so it wasn’t a full train to emptied out, the train saloon lights were turned off at Marble Arch so that hesitant or inattentive passengers would realise that the train was going no further but obviously could see that the platform lighting was OK, plus the fact that the platform staff were sufficiently voluble to clear the train in no time, whilst they shut the doors to each car as they swiftly worked along the platform. The train then set off almost as sharply as a service train going beyond but of course slowed when almost ‘out of sight’ for the siding, by which time the front of the following train was entering the platform. The same thing happened at Liverpool Street and elsewhere.
Since the platform staff are invariably required anyway, that detraining exercise when turning trains short shouldn’t be too burdensome to reintroduce if thought useful. After all, The Victoria Line did this far more frequently at Victoria.
timbeau,
As luck would have it I wound up at East Finchley yesterday morning so I popped into the car company and asked if I could go in their yard to look at the bridge. The Northern line from London is laid directly on the ground and does not have a bridge of its own, distinct from the roof of the water main. I presume the track to London is similar because it’s at the same height, although I couldn’t see it properly.
Remember that because the Northern Line splits, and from High Barnet you want either the City or the Charing Cross Branch, the interval between the trains you want is at best every 6 minutes already. (The gap is longer if the Mill Hill starter replaces the one you want.) Going to Camden Town and changing doesn’t help as by the time you change platforms you’ve missed the train from Edgware so you end up back waiting for the one you could have caught from High Barnet. So reducing the frequency at Edgware or High Barnet doesn’t reduce the gaps from every 3 minutes to every 5; it reduces it from every 6 minutes to every 10. Also, loadings from Woodside Park and West Finchley are higher than from most other 3rd and 4th from the end lines (and generally, loadings on the High Barnet branch are higher than on the Edgware branch).
Of course, if an increase in short turns was balanced by an increase in overall frequency, so there was no drop in frequency at High Barnet, that would be easier to sell. Depending on whether the short turns could be arranged so that you don’t end up with several City or several Charing Cross trains in a row from High Barnet.
It might also be easier to justify if there was a complete split of the Northern Line, as at least then every train is the one you want – even if half the passengers have to change at Camden (at least you wouldn’t always miss the train when you change platforms at Camden.)
[Declaration of interest – High Barnet is my local station.]
@Edmonton ‘Eadcase, 11 March 2016 at 05:11
“I presume the track to London is similar because it’s at the same height, although I couldn’t see it properly”
This video:
https://youtu.be/JJ1pA-1ZfEY?t=13m24s
Confirms that is correct.
As to slip connections, note at the beginning of the video there is a single slip leaving High Barnet. I accept they’re a non-preferred feature of new layouts, but if , as at Finchley East, using one could offer the prospect of a shorter layout in a very tight location, avoiding significant expenditure on rebuilding a bridge or station, then one might be considered.
Note also from the video that the vertical curve leading to the tunnel ramp starts almost immediately after passing over the A100 bridge. Junctions need to be on the plane, not neccessarily level but at a constant grade. That suggests that the north and southbound tunnel lines need to remain vertically parallel with the depot lines for the length of the new junctions, then take a slightly steeper regraded trajectory down to the portals. How close to the absolute maximum gradient the current profile is will determine whether this is possible, but the current trains are presumably more powerful than their antecedents from the original Northern line extension along this route.
ML,
Fair point which I, for one, had overlooked. But would a consistent 7½ minute gap to each central London section really be that much worse than a slightly erratic six-minutes-at-best service? A 7½ minute service that takes you to the heart of central London may seem unsatisfactory to you but most commuters in South London can only dream of such a service.
It also highlights something that I had overlooked for any planned 30tph on the High Barnet branch – namely that it is not that important to run all the trains at evenly spaced intervals. So a logical sequence for 30tph from High Barnet (assuming the terminus can handle it) would be: via Charing Cross, via Bank, (gap) which would be repeated at 6 minute cycles. From High Barnet both central sections would get 10tph which is marginally better than now and each of them would be at clockface even intervals unlike today. So the gap on the service to each central London section would become a consistent 6 minute gap rather than the six-minutes-at-best gap of today.
The remaining 10tph would be split evenly between Mill Hill East and East Finchley starters.
@PoP
via Charing Cross, via Bank, (gap)
choosing the gap to be after the train to the more popular central London branch (whichever that is) would be important, as there will be twice as many short-distance passengers (to stations as far as Euston) on the trains after the longer gap as on those before that gap.
PoP: “A 7½ minute service that takes you to the heart of central London may seem unsatisfactory to you but most commuters in South London can only dream of such a service.”
The problem is that once you have established a frequency of service, you find that development, commute patterns, passenger numbers and behavior all adjust to suit it. South London passenger numbers and commute patterns have developed in ways that are/were constrained by the transport infrastructure and services south of the river. The flip side of this is that reducing a service to an area that has grown largely as a result of the capacity provided by the tube causes a disproportionate level of disruption and disgruntlement.
TfL will also be fully aware that those living in the areas towards the leafy end of the Northern Line are likely to be very adept at getting their plight into the public eye!
Graham Feakins: “Since the platform staff are invariably required anyway, that detraining exercise when turning trains short shouldn’t be too burdensome to reintroduce if thought useful. After all, The Victoria Line did this far more frequently at Victoria.”
You may be right, but official thinking for some time has been that it was simpler to run trains through to a limited number of termination points, usually at the end of the line. There are not invariably platform staff available now. As the frequency of service increases, the need for additional turning points increases but the time available to detrain passengers on the running line decreases. While it can be done, and probably needs to be done, there are presumably staffing and investment implications to minimise the performance risks.
@Marckee
“South London passenger numbers and commute patterns have developed in ways that are/were constrained by the transport infrastructure and services south of the river. ”
Indeed, commute patterns are different, but it should be noted that the Tube is constrained too. A ten-car 376 “Big” train every twenty minutes, or a six-car 1995 Tube train every five?
There is another factor. High Barnet, Stanmore etc do indeed have a much higher frequency than their passenger footfall alone would justify, but the trains fill up further in. South of the river, the trains are full much further out – by Stratford, Wimbledon, Lewisham, etc – and they whizz through the inner suburbs without stopping much or at all. Zone 2 in particular is much better served by the Tube than by NR radial routes (West Anglia being a notable exception). Thus there is a trade off – by ignoring the inner suburbs, they can be faster, but they do not need the same frequency as they are not catering for all the areas they pass through.
@ Graham F – I think you are suffering from a case of “rose tinted spectacles” about central area detraining of tube trains. Yes *some* trains were dealt with quickly but many were not meaning you had queues of trains – Victoria s/b was particularly bad. You also ended up with crowding on the platform that stopped an effective *quick* check by staff as they had to fight their way through the flood of people. I’ve seen it many times. Now while it was nice to be blessed with an empty n/b starter at Victoria (more chance of a seat) the crawl into the platform did nothing for the headway with trains queued back beyond Pimlico. All this was in the days of lower frequencies than we have now and I just don’t see it as being feasible on lines with very high service levels – the risk of too many trains stuck in tunnels would be too great. Remember the nightmare problems that can arise if there were to be a breakdown and need for evacuation. We also have far far more people squashed on to platforms these days meaning there is less space to dump people in to for the purposes of regular detrainment. The off peak on the tube now in Zone 1 is like the peak of 10-12 years ago. This must force different operational principles to be adopted.
Clearly MTR Crossrail will have this challenge at Paddington westbound although they have slightly lower headways to work with than on the tube. However I still think they are going to have a real job on their hands to get such long trains properly detrained and dispatched to the sidings in about 75 seconds or so. This is a guess on my part as to the dwell time element in the overall wheelstop to wheelstart time for Class 345s at that location.
Thinking ahead, I suspect all the factors that are driving Crossrail 2 with the xx000 houses and so on will increasingly also drive running tube services nearer to the outer ends of the line. I agree completely with WW about the in town reversing points. Unless the line is already disrupted, the Victoria , Marble Arch and Liverpool Street reversing causes more trouble than it’s worth. I can also foresee the day when reversing part of the service into a headshunt will not be acceptable, only reversing at a platform will do.
As for Crossrail at Paddington, it still seems incredible to me that only 4TPH goes to Heathrow and then not to T5, but that lives in another topic.
@100andthirty
The seemingly poor Heathrow service is due to:
1) HEx existing (integrating that into Crossrail ups it to 8tph).
2) Heathrow Airport’s refusal to play ball with Crossrail (high track access charges, low contributions, etc).
3) Much heavier demand from Slough, etc than Heathrow at peak times (and so really the Heathrow services are about Southall, Ealing and Acton, rather than the airport, in the AM peak).
Re 130,
Agreed I think we’ll end up moving to in platform turnback sooner rather than later (or computer controlled turnback siding via ATO systems while the “driver” walks through).
I think the plan is to move CR1 turnback from Paddington to Old Oak Common (with turn back in platforms???) when HS2 opens in 2026. I suspect there might be fewer services turning back by then though!
@Mark Townend 1033
Can the required plane for the turnouts be created by regrading the depot tracks to dip down to meet the running lines? They appear to be on a more or less level trajectory, and the only constraint is presumably the bridge crossing the water main.
Personally, I think HEX will die. There will be some sort of deal re Heathrow (thrid runway or not) but thay the Paddington platforms will be required to accomodate long distance growth (rather like Waterloo). I have absolutely no basis for this assertion other than the fact that existing plan (integrated HEX and Crossrail. I am assuming that the 4 TPH to Heathrow originate from Abbey Wood, and I can’t see the city gents putting up wigh either 4 TPH or with changing to a premium fare HEX when all the time saved by the hight speed non stop service is lost by a longish change at Paddington.
I accept two things though.
1) Crossrail is currently successful because they have decided what to do and done it without chopping and changing. So probably none of this will be sorted until after it opens
2) I have wandered way off topic
[We generally avoid allowing opinions, preferring as much as possible to keep the focus on facts. However 130 has provided his rationale, despite claiming otherwise, which is based on facts. LBM]
@Man of Kent, 11 March 2016 at 20:43
“regrading the depot tracks to dip down to meet the running lines? . . . the only constraint is presumably the bridge crossing the water main.”
An interesting idea. It might be necessary to replace the water main bridge to allow the ‘dip’ from the depot to begin as far back as possible, but there’s no headroom beneath to maintain clearly. Might be less earthworks and disruption overall even if with other options the steeper main running line gradient required was acceptable. I think this was what Old Buccaneer was alluding to up-thread.
With Man of Kent’s idea, there might be slightly more digging than you might think, because although pointwork can be (I think) on any gradient, it quite probably cannot be on a “vertical curve”, and such a thing accounts (presumably) for a few tens of metres on the running lines immediately south of the bridge.
The video Mark Townend posted shows there is likely to be space for useful crossovers South of East Finchley. Some minor re-profiling of the gradients might be required, but it looks like a ballasting adjustment. https://youtu.be/JJ1pA-1ZfEY?t=13m35s (pause immediately when you open the link).
The problem with that cab video is that you get no real idea of the vertical drop which occurs on the main running lines as soon as the bridge is cleared. Thus I think the work required might be more than a simple ballasting adjustment! A video taken from the side car window on the right-hand side either on ascent up to or descent from East Finchley would show this much better…..is there anyone on LR willing to do some camera work out in the ‘field’? ?
Re East Finchley and the vertical drop, are there gradient profiles for LU lines in the public domain?
Si & 100+30
We’ve discussed this before, but: Heathrow’s “stranglehold” on services there will end in (?) 2023 (?) but until then they have to be dealt with, in spite of the fact that they seen to have fallen into a nice heffalump-trap (see also other posts) regarding access-charges on “other people’s trains”.
However, between CR1 opening to Heathrow & 2023 we are stuck with a right old mess, & lots of moolah for m’learned friends – plus the also oft-mentioned silliness (as I regard it) of probably far too many CR1 services reversing at Padders/Old Oak.
Um.
Regarding separate reversing platforms vs reversing siding arrangements, I think appropriateness depends very much on the character of the stations involved. Clearly for a terminating train all the passenger on board need to alight in the time available. and at a major city centre destination or interchange, like Victoria on the Victoria Line or Paddington on the Elizabeth Line, there will be a very large number of passengers, and that will come to dominate the total time for getting an empty clear of the running line and increase the likelihood of affecting following non-terminating movements. At an otherwise unremarkable suburban short turnback by contrast, the numbers alighting will be very much smaller. My gut feeling is that in the former case a separate terminating platform is most appropriate whilst in the latter a centre reversing siding could suffice in many cases. I hope that on the Lizzie the large number of trains terminating at Paddington will only be a temporary phenomenon. Even if some of these trains don’t go over a new connection to the WCML any time soon at Old Oak Common, the plan for four relief side platforms there will make dealing with reversals at that station much more practical.
Greg Tingey
All I can offer re Heathrow, is that in regulated industries, it be a bad idea to piss off the regulator. I don’t know how close ORR and CAA are in organisational terms (they are physically next door to each other), and therefore what pressure could be jointly exercised.
Memo to self….triple check before posting. My typing is getting worse and I wasn’t trying to suggest a Somerset connection in the post at 11.34
The Paddington terminators will run through to sidings at Westborne Park to reverse, where there are to be four tracks and two island platforms. I have read that these will be passenger rated, so there’s no safety reason to ensure that everyone has got off at Paddington. Presumably overcarried passengers will be able to exit and walk along the Great Western Road to the H&CR station or allowed to take the next train back to Paddington.
I have wondered if they could make this a semi-official stop and allow a few knowing locals to exit (with an card reader to complete a PAYG journey), but then they might need to install lifts.
I understand that once the train has left Paddington, the driver can leave the front cab and start walking through the train to the rear. I imagine that this would be unpopular with drivers late at night?
@Edgepedia – Although no doubt the signalling can be made fully passenger compliant for the reversing movement, the whole shebang can be automated, and there’s no danger of panicking people being caught between the communicating doors of old style tube stock on tight reverse curves, I doubt the passenger doors will be released in the sidings except for an emergency evacuation, so an over-carried passenger will likely have to remain on board until the train returns to Paddington. Very safe overall but not entirely without risk, not least from a PR perspective . . . “Elderly woman stuck on train going into sidings treated by paramedics following anxiety attack – “The doors slammed shut in my face!” she said”.
@ Edgepedia – I am very sceptical that safety regulators will allow passengers to be overcarried and then allowed to somehow magically exit at Westbourne Park. I am also deeply sceptical that the unions will be content with such a proposal. Ditto trains on the mainline running alongside non ATO lines with no driver in the front cab of a 200+m train! I know the technology allows it but I can see all sorts of issues. I am assuming here that ATO on Crossrail applies to the tunnel sections which all have PEDs to reduce the risk of incursion on to the tracks. I am also assuming drivers drive the trains on open sections including Custom House to Abbey Wood (yes I know there are some shorter tunnels on this bit before anyone goes into hyper correction mode!).
The rule that trains have to be emptied before going into a siding was introduced after a passenger on a Central Line train fell asleep and woke up as the train was going into Liverpool Street siding. He then decided to walk through the train, presumably to get to the driver, and the extreme s-bend at the entrance to the siding led to him falling between carriages and being killed. I believe that the new rule was internally imposed by LU rather than being forced by any external body. It occurs to me that with walk-through trains the rule doesn’t serve any purpose and could be abolished, allowing various rarely used sidings to be brought back into frequent use as soon as walk-through trains are introduced. I wonder if anyone in LU has realised this?
@Ed Ed: The wise response to a fatal accident is not just to seek to prevent the exact same accident from recurring, but also to look at whether there are related, but slightly different dangers. A passenger who wakes up in a siding may well act somewhat irrationally, so even if there is no danger from inter-carriage gaps, there are other risks, for instance using an emergency exit while the train is moving (etc.).
I am not saying that such risks would definitely be evaluated as serious enough to prevent the procedure. But they might be.
The ‘auto reverse’ between Paddington and Westbourne Park was described in a recent Rail Engineer magazine article:
Auto-reverse
A new facility called ‘auto reverse’ is being provided at Westbourne Park (no station) for turning the 14 trains per hour in the reversing sidings. The driver selects ‘auto reverse’ on leaving Paddington station and walks back through the train, obviating the need for drivers to ‘step-up’. By the time the train gets back to Paddington (about a mile) the driver should be in the other cab ready to form the next eastbound departure.
The facility has the capability to turn round a full 30 tph service. There is just time for the driver to walk back through the train whilst in the reversing siding but doing so on departure at Paddington gives that extra time that will also help recover from perturbation.
Auto reverse (AR) is not provided on Network Rail infrastructure. There will also be the possibility to use AR into and out of the stabling sidings at Abbey Wood so the driver will be at the correct end of the train to finish a shift or, when coming on duty, to start a new run westwards. Service trains will, however, normally reverse in the station. AR may also be used at Custom House and anywhere using crossovers in the central section.
http://www.railengineer.uk/2016/01/08/signalling-crossrail/
Seems a bit extreme to provide it if no-one is going to allow it to be used…
Paul says “Seems a bit extreme to provide it if no-one is going to allow it to be used…”
It’s not as open and shut a situation as that. Obviously there will be discussions, negotiations etc, and there is a clear hope that it will be used. WW’s guess, based I assume on observations of similar situations in the past, is that these negotiations will founder on one of the difficulties he mentions.
The technical problem has to be solved first – that’s the easy bit, and to judge by the article, it has been basically done. There would have been no point in even beginning discussions about the people issues unless that could be achieved. Now at least the negotiations can be done about a specific, concrete proposal, rather than vague aspirations.
Edmonton ‘Eadcase
It occurs to me that with walk-through trains the rule doesn’t serve any purpose and could be abolished, allowing various rarely used sidings to be brought back into frequent use as soon as walk-through trains are introduced. I wonder if anyone in LU has realised this?
They are not stupid. They are very well aware of this. It would probably have been pointed out as part of the safety case to the regulator to get approval to carry passengers, if necessary, beyond Paddington to Westbourne Park.
I think people are misunderstanding the bit about overcarrying. To quote Howard Smith, |Crossrail director of operations. “We will do everything in our power to get them off at Paddington”. Clearly late at night, with a reduced frequency there is more time to achieve this.
I strongly suspect the exemption is partly for dealing with person ill on train or incident requiring the police whereby LU, ambulance or BTP staff can board the train and the incident dealt with on the move and in the sidings. It would probably be much easier to get an ambulance crew to Westbourne Park sidings. Similarly, if arresting someone, it would be much easier to get the police van that transports prisoners to Westbourne Park and transfer the offender there – not least because without an audience prisoners tend to be a lot more compliant . The incident will still be fully recorded by CCTV/body-worn cameras so there would still be safeguards in place to prevent improper behaviour or allegations of improper behaviour by the police.
@ PoP – yes safeguards that still allow people, albeit being rather shouty, to be thwacked by a BTP officer with a baton in full public view at St Pancras Thameslink. Colour me not convinced.
I am afraid that I am still dubious about the willingness of drivers to walk through a moving train which they are not in control of as it heads out of a tunnel and into a wide overall track formation and then into sidings. I remain sceptical also that drivers would be willing to walk through a train which may well have passengers left in it because there wasn’t time / enough people to evict people from the train at Paddington. I also simply can’t see violent or ill people being bundled in an empty train to be “dealt with” at Westbourne Park. Are the sidings being built with ramps / lifts and wide enough for a NHS stretcher to be moved along them? I doubt it very much. Regardless of what I am sure will be strenuous attempts to create a new company culture in MTR Crossrail there are well known, long standing concerns from staff side representatives about passenger, driver and track staff safety.
I am happy to be corrected but surely the regulatory approval risk sits with MTR Crossrail? It is certainly nothing to do with LU. The “concept” of the ATO use west of Paddington may have been discussed between TfL Rail (not the TOC, the bit of TfL that manages the concession contracts) and ORR but I doubt it will have been approved yet. I doubt the operational rules have even been written yet so there’s nothing to be approved. I have a tiny (so as not to overstate things) bit of experience here having written and reviewed parts of Safety Cases / Safety Certificates and also had to demonstrate departmental / directorate compliance with parts of the same. We have a long way to go to get an operational railway that manages all the risks appropriately, is signed off with regulators, is technically “safe” and reliable and where there is full agreement with staff representatives. As I keep saying this is the “hard bit” of creating a new railway not digging the tunnels, impressive though that is.
Walthamstow Writer,
I also simply can’t see violent or ill people being bundled in an empty train to be “dealt with” at Westbourne Park.
I am speculating here but if what I imagine is the case is correct there is no way they would be left unaccompanied on an empty train. They would certainly be accompanied – if necessary by LAS or BTP. And no driver would be expected to walk past someone who presents a risk. If there is a risk then the obvious thing to do is to park the train in one of the sidings. The important thing from an operational point of view is that you don’t want a train stuck at Paddington station which would bring the entire service to a halt. It doesn’t matter too much if it has to miss out its return journey.
For years, decades even, at talks the question or reversing at Paddington has come up at talk. This dates back to the days when I believe Crossrail was perceived as a joint BR/LU project. So it was something to do with LU then. More recently it has been repeatedly stated that has been granted for passengers to be carried if necessary to Westbourne Park and this was way before MTR came on the scene. I cannot be sure the speakers involved are correct but I have to take them at face value.
PoP /WW
Possibly the “authorities” will insist on having a “spare caretaker”, so to speak, who will hop on to any train with an “extra” on-board, so as to watch out, whilst the driver does hos necessary control/movement/transfer functions?
That just might work ??
IMHO ( & from what I’ve seen other’s opinions, too ) the whole business of reversing fourteen trains an hour at Padders is itself the very weak point of the whole thing.
Surely there has to be a better way of operating than this model?
WW and PoP are debating how the auto reversing may be used in conditions that will not occur every day, but often enough to be considered and managed. The principle of auto reversing at Paddington is no different from the daily task carried out today at Bank on DLR. In fact, it is somewhat safer as there will be Platform Edge Doors at Paddington. There is no doubt in my mind that there will need to be staff on the platform at Paddington just as there is at Bamk. DLR trains are about 41% of the length of a Crossrail train, and have about 44% of the Crossrail train’s doorways, and thus Paddington will need more platform staff. In my former management role, I have reviewed with operators the suggestion that the saloon CCTV be used with a car by car door close system so the driver could manage the detrainment, but even on an S stock the process would take too long. So that’s a non starter before anyone else suggests it. However the day might come when image recognition/infrared heat detection might assist.
This issue is really a combination of three sub-issues:
1) how to make reasonably sure everyone has got off before departing for the siding
2) how to operate the train during the reversal
3) how to make sure the risk to the train driver changing ends is managed (recognising that people are quite frequently overcarried today, and they are generally ordinary human beings and not a real risk to the train driver).
The debate above seemed to be mainly about issue 3). Managing this risk is really the same irrespective of whether the train is driven, run in ATO or in auto reverse. If the driver changes ends through the train, then s/he might encounter someone who has been missed during the detrainment operation. This applies in all the cases I can think of except:
a) the train auto reverses unattended, or
b) a second driver boards the back of the train at Paddington WB to take it over once it has arrived at Westbourne Park sidings and the WB driver gets off at Paddington EB, or
c) the driver changes ends via the platforms at Westborne Park (wastes any benefit of auto reversing) or
d) stepping back takes place at Westborne Park.
Any decent Safety Case will break the issue down like this so that risks can be enumerated, and options developed/evaluated. I have lost count of the number such cases I have reviewed over the years including those related to operations following the Liverpool St incident. I don’t know what the solution will be, but there are enough examples of ‘good industry practice’ around that Crossrail Operations and MTR will come up with something acceptable to both parties, their H and S reps and which will go into their Safety Management System which will be endorsed by ORR
In a Q&A published in 2003 and on the London Travel Watch website
On leaving Paddington, terminating trains will be cleared by SATS. If passengers
remain on-board they can be detrained at Westbourne Park (where a reversing
facility will be provided) or remain until Paddington is reached again. This has been
agreed with the HMRI. Westbourne Park will be designed such that movements will
not conflict with the main running lines. The facility is also essential for emergencies
and phased opening.
In the evidence presented with the crossrail bill to Parliament, Chapter 2: Route Window C1: Royal Oak portal, paragraph 2.9 says
Her Majesty’s Railway Inspectorate requires that all trains are emptied of passengers before they run out of service. Crossrail must provide means whereby trains terminating at Paddington can be checked. To ensure that following services are not significantly delayed, it must be possible for a train that is being checked to be overtaken, or for two trains to be checked simultaneously. This would not be possible at Paddington without constructing more platforms than are proposed, which would add significantly to the cost of the station. A reversing facility will therefore be constructed at Westbourne Park, west of the Royal Oak portal. It will consist of four tracks and two island platforms 210 m long, and will have emergency access to and from the street via footbridges.
In that case why not make it an actual station. It almost is one already.
To summarise, the plan is that the section between Paddington and Westbourne Park will be legally part of the passenger-cleared line, but trains on it will not normally carry passengers. (Legally, just like, say, the Cannonbury curve). Exceptionally there may be passengers in the trains, and the details of when such exceptions might occur, and ways of managing them, are probably not yet finalised. Some of the comments above are plausible speculations on the matter.
The question of whether or not the auto-reverse feature will be used on this section is a separate matter, also not decided or planned in great detail. There will be some linkage between the two questions, but they are in principle broadly independent.
It would obviously cost more to make the Westbourne Park terminating platforms into a station. Maybe not all that much, in the overall scheme of things, but one reason that Crossrail has so far been on time and on budget is strict avoidance of project creep.
Paddington termination has anyway been described as “temporary”, being replaced before long by more trains to Heathrow and beyond and/or Tring. So money is not going to be spent on a station which might have to be closed (amid protests perhaps) in a few years.
How is the Paddington autoreverse situation different from DLR at Bank station?
@ 100 and thirty – surely the Bank and Paddington situations are rather different. At Bank the trains proceed slowly over a short distance into a single track turnback. There are no other tracks other than the e/b track heading out of the turnback. At Paddington we are talking about twin tunnels that then emerge into daylight alongside a wide and complex track formation. I do not expect the empty Crossrail trains to be crawling on their way from Paddington to Westbourne Park. It is perfectly conceivable that track workers may be in the vicinity of the Crossrail tracks. It is also not beyond the realms of possibility that unauthorised persons could reach the tracks or deposit objects on the track. These are all additional risks that are extremely unlikely / non existent at Bank. I am not saying it is impossible to deal with these issues but I can see the risks of potential collision involving an ATO controlled train with no driver in the cab being a genuine concern for the unions (for the drivers and for track workers). That is something that is relatively rare in the UK – the nearest parallel I can think of is DLR on the approach to Stratford and just before reaching Bow Church where tracks are adjacent plus Tower Gateway. I still believe that speed and train length for Crossrail will give a different risk profile.
@ PoP – you’ve clearly heard statements that I haven’t. That’s fine. I also note other comments about “agreements” stretching back over a decade. All I’ll say is that regulators are not averse to changing their minds if circumstances dictate so I would not be placing undue reliance on the past. That’s simply a starting point for a further discussion and perhaps a review and update of past analysis to make sure the risks, intervening experience and any legislative issues are fully considered. I’d expect all that to be being done.
@WW – re. your comment above in response to mine, maybe I do have rose tinted spectacles concerning short workings but this short video of the scene in 1989 has reached me, illustrating my original comment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWpuEfCMEB8
Note the comment at 0:35 in (just don’t look at the shabby station tunnel environs). I reiterate that regulars who wanted to travel beyond would wait for the train that did just that so that there wasn’t a full train to clear at the reversing point, especially as most of the remaining passengers would be expected to alight there anyway. Little different from today, I suggest, where one waits for a through train rather than one terminating e.g. at Queen’s Park. It’s only the group of passengers who somehow think that the train behind will somehow overtake the one they’re on that they’ll get the first one through to the short working turn.
Far more disruptive to my mind was nothing to do with queuing up behind a short working but trains being held ‘to even out the service interval’ at locations like Green Park on the Piccadilly and Liverpool Street on the Central.
Woah…..those station tunnels are truly grim! ? Let’s just hope that we’re not about to see history repeat itself…..
@Malcolm….In the context of transport projects (especially road ones), the word ‘temporary’ often ends up meaning ‘permanent’ ?.
Is the weighing facility in modern carriages which enables them to know the loading of trains accurate enough to know that a single passenger has remained on a train?
Yes, Anonymously – somewhat grim and I admit there was a period when the ‘dampness problems’ as visually perceived by those using the stations worsened but somehow it didn’t seem to many tube commuters that they were bad enough to complain about because many of their main line stations and the stations serving them were even shabbier, even without the tube. The London newspapers of course always found a story in such things.*
One will note that the short working train of course entered service empty. This seemed at the time a very useful tactic to provide rapid and efficient relief to the central core section of the tube. I have used the Central Line as the prime example. Empty Westbound trains entered service at Liverpool Street and rapidly picked up patronage by Bank and probably reached maximum loading by Holborn or Tottenham Court Road, in terms of tourist trade but, by the same criteria, had started to empty out by Marble Arch. Having said that, White City was a more convenient short working but Marble Arch remained as a short working.
Those trains, just as LT used to put on many extra rush hour buses between London Bridge station, over the bridge and just as far as Liverpool Street station, provided what was then the essential criterion of pushing an empty train/bus into service to relieve and make space for the intermediate, core traffic on top of the invariable crush loadings from beyond. Off peak, of course, the core route was almost as busy as the rush hours but beyond e.g. Liverpool street wasn’t.
* Having said that, the London newspapers tended then to hark more on the Paris Metro and it’s then all-pervading smells of garlic, Gauloises and urine. I was never sure whether Fleet Street was recommending Paris or not.
WW. My comment re Bank/Paddington being analagous was unclear. I was intending to refer to the risk of a driver/PSA encountering a customer being overcarried in making that comparison. On reflection, with DLR’s current configuration, I accept that it is difficult to be unobserved in a DLR car but not if one wanted to do it deliberately. Morover, given DLR’s desire for single consist, open gangway trains, their risk profile will change.
As I intimated later, justifying the mode of operation for reversing is a different set of risks, some of which you have eloquently described.
Regarding regulators changing their minds (perhaps as the ORR is not influenced by HSE any longer), I believe that the issue is more that good safety practice moves on with a greater body of lessons learned and changes in safety tolerance (risk acceptable to the man on the Clapham omnibus; that perverse “typical” person who demands absolute rail safety but still cycles in London).
@130
“risk of a driver/PSA encountering a customer being overcarried in making that comparison. On reflection, with DLR’s current configuration, I accept that it is difficult to be unobserved in a DLR car”
As most of the trains are three-car (and non-ganwayed!) the PSA can only reach one third of the train. Even if they always ride in the middle car, they would have difficulty seeing both ends of the train at once, despite the large windows.
How does the shunt operate if the train has to be driven manually for any reason?
Timbeau
The DLR PSA can only really see in the vehicle in which he or she is located. That is OK because, if someone is being over-carried in another vehicle, that person (who for the puposes of this discussion is a violent drunk) can’t get to the PSA.
If the PSA needs to get to one end or the other (and I believe that they normally position themselves at the front – EB direction), there are doors the PSA can use. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect they normally position themselves in that vehicle before the train goes into the headshunt.
Graham Feakins,
I reiterate that regulars who wanted to travel beyond would wait for the train that did just that so that there wasn’t a full train to clear at the reversing point, especially as most of the remaining passengers would be expected to alight there anyway. Little different from today
Surely, unwittingly, you have highlighted another disadvantage of trains turning short namely that central London stations will get more crowded as people (where they have a choice) decide not to take the first train but wait for the one that takes them all the way to their final station.
In fact I suspect, on the Jubilee line at least, your argument has been overtaken by current day realities. At many stations on the Jubilee line going out of London (London Bridge a notable example) it is a case of once you are at the front of the “queue” by the platform edge doors you get the next train you can get on rather than either lose your place in the queue or get in everyone’s way or indeed be more or less swept along by those behind you as they get on. On this line, at any rate, the halcyon days of choosing which train you get on are over!
I am sure LU would rather terminate their Jubilee line trains further out. So, as a minimum, Wembley Park and Willesden Green rather than Willesden Green and West Hampstead. It seems from the report it is the cost of preparing extra stabling for the additional trains required rather than the trains themselves that makes this option unattractive at the moment.
100andthirty, timbeau, Walthamstow Writer
The DLR trains are indeed currently two or three separate cars with no means of accessing on from another other than via the platform. That will eventually change (but not before Crossrail opens) and it will be interesting to see how the DLR approaches this.
As far as I know, the Train Captain, or whatever he is called, has no authority to allow passengers to travel but, even if he did end up with one or more in the train, there would be no necessity for him to walk pass them – unlike Crossrail. Furthermore, I suspect the time spent in the turnback tunnel is very short – again unlike Crossrail.
Could I be bold as to suggest this is a lesser practical problem as people will be tending to head out of London at the worst time for problems (evening and night). So it the issue probably does not arise much at Bank whereas it probably will at Paddington.
At Paddington the problem of people not knowing may not be as bad as some suggest simply because for the first year everyone will expect to get off at Paddington and so the habit will be ingrained for regular travellers.
@ PoP – fair comment in your final paragraph and clearly it will give train and platform staff time to perfect their routine. However once through services begin old habits and behaviours will change and the operational situation will become more complex for staff and passengers alike. It will be intriguing to see how many GWML commuters use Crossrail from Paddington during the year when there are no through services. Passenger flow patterns through the main line station could radically change during that period.
@130
“if someone is being over-carried in another vehicle, that person can’t get to the PSA.”
Just as on the Central Line, there are emergency doors between cars on the DLR.
@timbeau…..But I thought those were only for evacuation purposes from either train end. When units are coupled together, is it possible to use those doors to move between units in motion without, er, falling through?
@anonymously
DLr/Tube, the purpose of the car-end doors is the same. What those end doors are intended for and what a drunk/panicked/angry/confused passenger might try to do are not necessarily the same thing – as was demonstrated in the Liverpool Street tragedy.
Timbeau……..dredging memory hard………..I think the doors between DLR cars are normally locked which a quick Google seems to confirm.
Has converting East Finchley to a White City layout ever been considered?
@130
So, unlike on the Underground, that means you can’t use them if the PSA is incapacitated in any way? Surely there is some way of opening them, even if it requires a “break glass” action to do so.
Timbeau…….I don’t recall either a “break glass” or a handle on the inside.
@ Timbeau – from what I can recall of the DLR Stock 100andthirty is spot on. The connecting and doors are locked and there is no emergency release. I believe the train captain’s “triangle” key (as used in the door release switch and to open interior panels) also releases those doors. In tunnels the passenger escape move is to a side walkway and not out the front / back of a train and I expect open air evacuation would be to an adjacent train (where feasible). I shall have to check next time I have a ride on the DLR.
There’s not much shelter at West Hampstead. When trains terminate there, it often means waiting in the rain for the next train. I guess though that with frequent terminations there in the future, and in the absence of a plan to build more shelter, regular travellers to destinations further along the Jubilee line would learn to switch earlier in their journey. e.g. at Finchley Road.
EE 04.33: Passenger load weighing was very much passenger counting v1.0. Current technology is optical or infrared passenger counting devices mounted above door passageways. Specified reliability is in the high 90s per cent but probably not enough for this purpose.
(I have to say that I am slightly surprised that, given the technological expertise clearly shown among LR commentors, there still seems to be a general impression that PLW is the state of the art.)
Re Caspar,
For the time being weighing is still the most used technology in London and the South East as very little of the newer little optical or infra-red equipment has been retrofitted to older stock (SWT 455 being a rare exception). New stock and up coming round of refurbs will change this.
Surely a DLR PSA is already exposed to whatever risk a driver in the presence of a passenger suffers, when reversing but also during normal operation? They don’t have a cab to lock themselves in. If it’s acceptable for them why not for a train driver?
Imm, just because the DLR doesn’t protect its staff is no reason for the railway not to.
@Caspar Lucas – may I sound a heretical note on the question of counting by weighing? It is/was a fashionable engineering-led solution to the wrong problem. The actual metric for overcrowding is the number of bodies,not the weight of flesh. To turn flesh into bodies, as it were, one needs to know a lot more about the nature of the flesh and bodies involved. Did, for example, the weighed train have a disproportionate number of children, or people with luggage? These things will vary from train to train and to interpret them requires additional research (counting!) that mere weighing won’t tell you. Even when one has pulled together the observations (manual) to interpret the results, you will have only a snapshot of what is going on. That is fine for making small scale interventions in service planning, but over time,the results from weighing will need further interpretation from other analyses. For example, people have become noticeably heavier over the last few decades; weighing will tell you -wrongly -that there are more people on board. I fear that when the engineers approached me with this whizzy idea for the SWT back in the early ’90s, I asked them not to proceed – I didn’t fancy doing battle with the treasury on how fat people had become.
As you say,modern technology which actually counts people is greatly superior, although even that has a hit rate of only 90%. (We studied this for the banks who were financing the new Brussels airport link and for which a fee was paid to them for each user – the most accurate method was to use o/h detectors that “saw” each person as a column of heat. Using systems which relied on passengers breaking an infrared beam or similar were less reliable either because they failed to detect children (and dwarves) or they did detect them but also perceived luggage as additional passengers.)
Graham H
Very well explained, and also avoids me having to do a lot of typing.
@Bob_G -happy to oblige. Interestingly,lift manufacturers have precisely the reverse problem – the metric is weight – and so,over time, the reckoning for weight into people becomes wrong and therefore a safety issue. [This was borne in on me when I used the lifts in Tallinn town hall which had been fitted in c1935 – allegedly,they accommodated 8,but 5 of our typical visiting team in 2000 filled the car just comfortably; had we squeezed 8 in, no doubt, the mechanism would have broken].
@Graham H – Counting ‘hot heads’ from above as they cross each door threshold sounds to me an excellent method of passenger counting and might also be able to assist in detecting each doorway is clear of (live) obstructions before closing as well. Modern sensors and latest processing techniques should be able to make this more accurate and affordable for widespread use today.
Graham says “The actual metric for overcrowding is the number of bodies, not the weight of flesh”.
For some purposes (like estimating fare-dodgers, or allocating fare revenue), it is important to know the number of bodies (though even here, you probably want the number-of-bodies-over-a-certain-age).
But for real overcrowding, you need to know how crowded the train is. Six five-year-olds will be much less crowded in a given space than four large American tourists. Neither the number of bodies nor the total weight of flesh is a totally reliable measure for this purpose, but I suspect that the weight comes closer.
To backtrack slightly: where the number of bodies might be relevant is in determining whether a train is “overcrowded by formula” (i.e. bodies per square metre exceeding a particular figure). But this is only important because the overcrowding has already been defined in this rather strange way. A better definition might have been areal density (kg of passengers + luggage per square metre).
Surely crowding does depend on weight, or at least size. You can get more schoolchildren on a train than adults. And if those adults are carrying luggage, there is less room for others.
In really confined spaces like lifts with an overall weight limit designers should probably work on the basis of total volume of flesh. Thus the fatter people get the fewer will actually fit. I was in a very small hotel lift a couple of weeks ago and the limit was posted as two people or one with luggage. As it happened it was so small that the two of us wouldn’t fit with our luggage anyway.
@Malcolm and timbeau – so long as the metric of overcrowding is headcount, then counting heads is what you should do. Anything else is irrelevant and misleading. Whether weight is a better metric, I would hesitate to agree, passenger weight is not usually a safety issue for railways, and only indirectly linked to the cost of providing the service – occupied floor space is probably the best, but if you start to include luggage,then logically you would pay for it as you do for a ticket.
Graham: you are right about “legal overcrowding” – for which the metric is indeed headcount. But “perceived overcrowding” is something different. So whether you should weigh or count (or neither, or something else) depends crucially on the use you plan to make of the answer. (Collecting data in case it might come in handy is rarely a good idea. You should have a purpose in mind, if not, then leave the thing unmeasured, I say).
The other use touched upon recently is directing waiting passengers to a place on the platform where there may be more chance of them getting on an approaching train. For this purpose, if you really want to do it, weight might serve well.
@Malcolm -just to press you a little further, weight is only a proxy measure (just like headcount) for something that is -probably -in the last resort girth. I look forward to charging people with a handy tape measure… “A 36″ waist? That will be another £20 please.”
It was in the ’70’ that LU started to weigh the mass on each bogie so as to adjust the brake force and tractive effort according to the load. This enabled roughly constant train performance irrespective of load, and, rather more importantly, the right braking effort to stop in the correct distances without locking the wheels or unnecessarily provoking the wheel slide protection system. The signals derived from this system have been used for a crude load assessment system. Quite how precise a more sophisticated system needs to be is a moot point. Graham H has advocated more accuracy much more eloquently than I can rebut his points (in the spirit of debate). Yes, average weights have increased and people carry more with them these days. This is a matter for the ‘statistical mass of the average customer” which might rise over time. Comment is made that the infrared detection of hot heads can deliver 90% accuracy. I reckon a good load weigh system is just as good once allowance is made for that ‘statistical average’. For most purposes, including charging for individual customers on the Brussels airport link, who cares whether a car happens to be filled with 200 5 year olds very occasionally or some such anomoly from the normal pattern? Detectors over every doorway is a significant investment and maintenance overhead on a suburban train (and on busy ones will be defeated by those who get off to allow others to alight and then back on again).
I think the SWT 450 fleet has both methods, a subset of units fitted with IR Counting at the doorways, but they all have load weight measurement as a matter of course. So the IR Count units can be used to continually review what the weight means in terms of numbers.
@ Graham H 2251: I love this Blog, and often smile at the comments, but rarely have I laughed so much at your comment: ‘I look forward to charging people with a handy tape measure… “A 36″ waist? That will be another £20 please.” ‘
Re the count principle, should not the point be to establish and define a metric that is relevant. If flying all major airlines use total number of passengers and a standard internationally agreed passenger unit weight, unless this is not relevant for the type of aircraft (e.g., very small, helicopters etc., for which number and actual weight of passenger and baggage is used). For trains it seems to me that passenger density is most relevant (i.e. ‘How many 36″ waist bodies can fit into this space ?’) so ultimately headcount (based on a standardised body size) seems to be the way forward.
Self judged not to be off topic because the thread title is about capacity 🙂
Suppliers of automatic passenger counting systems these days claim accuracies of 97+% including children, which is somewhat higher than the 90% which no doubt was the level of performance not long ago.
@Mark T “Counting ‘hot heads’ from above as they cross each door threshold sounds to me an excellent method of passenger counting and might also be able to assist in detecting each doorway is clear of (live) obstructions before closing as well.”
Failing to close the doors on a busy train because there’s someone in the doorway will significantly affect dwell time. If they’re still open people will continue to pile in – and busy trains people expand into the doorway until the doors start to close. You may choose to slow the door closure, so any impact is lessened – but not closing may be the point where safety untenably impacts reliability.
And I’d posit that in dragging incidents it’s people’s clothing/bags (which wouldn’t be detected) which pose the risk – as most body parts are large enough the current system detects them if caught in the doors.
This discussion on weighing versus counting started as being relevant to carried over passengers. If a weighing system is calibrated on an empty train could it report the presence of a single individual over and above the driver? This begs the question of whether such systems are calibrated at empty or at ‘half full’; which might be best for its original purpose of enabling acurate and comfortable stopping.
@100andthirty/Bob_G – In the last resort, the choice of metric is essentially a political one and headcount is probably so much more acceptable to explain and justify to the public than weight of flesh accompanied by a discussion on tessellation theory. Notice how the airlines, who have a far more urgent interest in punters’ weight than the rail sector, have stepped round the issue for so long. [But not when travelling to Stewart Island off NZ’s South Island, where we* were all carefully weighed in the village post office before setting off to the airstrip].
Weight gives you a rough and ready overview but it doesn’t tell you about trends without further and different survey data. However, given the minute attention focussed on “Britain’s most overcrowded trains” and so on, weight is not accurate enough to deal with the – to take example cited – “200 schoolchildren in travel hell” case. And nor would I wish to have to argue with HMT (to repeat myself) that the average train punter was getting fatter faster or slower than the population as a whole. As Bob_G implies, girth or something similar may be a better metric, but try selling that on the streets of Essex…
@Caspar Lucas – actually, the UK manufacturers were claiming 97% ten years ago, but the only installations they could point at seemed to be in department stores, where the footfall flow was likely to be both less in volume and less complex than at an airport station. (In the Brussels case, we had negotiated with SNCB for a trial of the equipment against a manual count – staff performing in their annual job appraisals were to be sent to hang around the airport between 0400 and 0800 with a clicker; better staff got the daytime shifts. In the event, SNCB compounded with the banks for a payment based on ticket sales, as we had urged them)
*”we” included Max, a golden labrador who declined to be weighed and who had put on some weight since he last flew six months previously. He was well known to the Stewart Island Post Office who put him on the waybill at a nominal 75 kilos. (he slept soundly at my feet throughout a force 6 gale, unlike the basket of cats on the way out). Now translate that story into human terms.
As a confirmed ‘above doorway counting’ sceptic, I disagree with the claimed accuracy of counting systems used in the application of suburban/metro trains. Much of what follows applies to tube profile trains.
I take the point that modern systems can be 97% accurate. But define this term. Inevitably any counting system will be above the door, but inside the train looking towards the floor. The counting system will clearly have a virtual cone for ‘seeing heads’. I assume that it may be covering the first 300mm or so of floor inside the doorway and it will only be active when the doors are actually opening/open/closing. On busy trains it will therefore give false readings as people move around in this space to let others on and off. On tube trains, the challenge is even greater as the only sensible place to locate the sensors is immediately behind the top of the door and the top of the door itself is about 250mm inside the widest point on the floor.
I can see the value of this technology counting in the relatively crowd free gate lines, by the entrance door of single door buses, and on trains where the normally run all seated, but not on full and standing metro trains. If it is necessary to come up with reasonable estimates of numbers, a good data scientist, with days/weeks worth of load weighed data, mobile phone anonymised data, and gate line data will be able to identify the loading pattern by line, time and train which is surely good enough. We’ll all know its a statistical result, but better to know something is not wholly accurate than be deluded by speudo accuracy when we all know it might be double or triple counting under certain circumstances.
My elementary introduction into the perils of believing measurements without thinking was in an elementary electrical course where we were instructed to measure the voltage across a high resistance and then, with our elementary electical knowledge, calaculate what the voltage should be. Inevitably the two figures differed by a significant amount, because the internal resistance of the measuring device influenced the result.
Related point…..
Londoner is absolutely spot on about detecting people clear of trains. The recent RAIB reports on dragging incidents at West Wickham and Clapham South illustrate this clearly.
100andthirty,
My elementary introduction into the perils of believing measurements without thinking was in an elementary electrical course where we were instructed to measure the voltage across a high resistance and then, with our elementary electical knowledge, calculate what the voltage should be. Inevitably the two figures differed by a significant amount, because the internal resistance of the measuring device influenced the result.
Actually, I read this with great amusement. At the risk of appearing to be way off-topic this interpretation by 100andthirty highlights a danger in thinking that can be applied to transport as well as many other fields in life. By finding an error and realising the inaccuracy you have become sidetracked and failed to observe that the whole process was fundamentally unsound from the outset.
What you were almost certainly trying to do was verify Ohm’s law. The problem is that you were measuring the voltage, almost certainly with a traditional voltmeter or similar measuring device. But, here comes the real crunch, you were using apparatus that relied on Ohm’s law to be true in the first place. So really you couldn’t have proved anything regardless of what the readings were. Fair enough, it was an elementary electrical course showing you what happened in the real world and not a physics class where you were trying to verify a law of nature.
Like you, recalling doing the experiment properly, without relying on any apparatus that assumed in advance that the relationship we were trying to establish was correct, it opened my eyes not only to the danger of inaccuracy of measurement but the danger of presuming that what you are trying to measure has any validity in the first place.
PoP
Given that my MSc in Engineering was concerned with Metrology … I think we’d better draw a delicate veil over any further proceedings in this direction.
It’s not just inaccuracies in measurement, but inaccurate “measuring sticks”, measuring something other than what you think you are measuring, wrong statistics pertaining to said measurements, bad or simply wrong experimental design plus lack of concern over the size of one’s error-bars …. ( etc ad mauseam … )
All of which do actually apply to automated methods of passenger-counting, as some of our other correspondents have mentioned.
It’s a lot harder to do than the uninformed might imagine.
And passenger data for individual train operations depend upon all of these, don’t they?
PoP…..thanks……your elegant prose has summed up beautifully why you write for LR and I comment!
By the way, it was part of the metrology part of the course and deliberately designed to highlight to us callow youths to a) think about what you have measured and whether it is valid and b) not to put spurious accuracy onto measurements you quote (economists and estimators ard particularly guilty here!)
@PoP/100andthirty – I’m so glad- as a non-physicist – to hear of your experiments. I repeatedly proved that water boiled at 97.6 C – but that was in a world in which builders carried hods of bricks of differing weight up frictionless ladders, and light behaved like marching troops when arriving at a prism. As if.
100andthirty and others,
I think a lot of people who comment, including yourself, could write good articles. I have a particular mentality and get obsessive about certain issues but we each have our areas of expertise and our own style of writing. And some of my articles tend to be a bit “heavy” anyway so don’t be put off – we could do with more variety.
Re Graham H,
97.6 C : or simply that the air pressure was 929mbar 😉
@ngh – now you’re just confusing me… next, you’ll be asking me to
recall Fleming’s Right hand (or was it left?) rule. 🙁
And it all depends on what the purpose of the measurement is. If you want to know how much revenue you should be collecting, counting heads is fine (and if =you miss a few because they are below the level of your sensor, they are probably too young to be paying anyway). But many trains have weighing technology to calibrate the braking curve, in which case it matters greatly whether your fifteen PiXCs are brownies (pun intended!) off for a summer picnic, or the Harlequins rugby team off for a fortnight’s tour in midwinter. (Weight – and volume – are a function of season – as overcoats are heavy and bulky)
Having a liking for visiting small islands (Scillies, Lundy, Alderney), but being a poor sailor, I too am quite used to the indignity of being weighed before flight. At least I am not yet considered to be excess baggage.
The old designers’ adage of “sixteen to the bum, sixteen to the ton” translates to an average of ten stone (including any luggage) . But I wonder how many people would put up with a seat- or more particularly shoulder room – only sixteen inches wide – less than two sheets of A4 side by side (16.54 inches)? Surely even Bulleid’s six-a-side compartments were wider than eight feet? (External width was 9’3″)
Re Graham H,
There are 2 right hand rules and 1 left hand rule, with 1 Fleming left and 1 Fleming right.
The biggest variation in measuring the BP will have been air pressure not being at standard (BP is 100C at 1bar) and impurities in the water rather than measurement system losses.
In the UK you should assume a 4C range for temperature variation in water BP depending on the air pressure / weather. Which has noticeable effects on the taste of Tea… (Good weather = higher BP = better taste).
And in similar vein – Train manufacturers of stock for the UK also need to take account of humidity in the UK being higher than in most of Europe so the load on air con systems will be higher, ditto TfL’s station air cooling issues becoming harder due climate change induced humidity increase.
ngh / Graham H
Don’t bother with the left-hand/right-hand rules
Simply remember that a direct current induces a clockwise mag-field if looking in the direction of current flow & that a current-carrying wire will “try to move” to an area of weaker field ( conservation of energy)
Here endeth the Physics lesson.
[Indeed. Malcolm]
timbeau
“ten stone” – what that?
Err … 140 lbs div by 2,22 = approx 63 kg
Which isn’t a lot.
I’m not a “big lad” & I mass in at 80-82 kg.
I now very much regret raising Fleming’s rule(s). I have had a happy life so far in ignorance of their detail. Now, I shall be worried that I didn’t pay attention more at the age of 13.
A 16″ seat width sounds ludicrously tight, although it’s probably about what five-abreast on British trains is. (Most of my local trains are suburban Southeastern Networkers, with their hated ‘300 seats per carriage’ layout.)
Parallel to this, there’s quite the debate going on in the airline industry about economy-class seat width—it’s broadly considered that 18″ is comfortable but 17″ (as increasingly seen on large aircraft) is insufficient for long-haul comfort. And on a recent flight I realised that my shoulders were pretty much the width of the seat, despite being about as slight-framed a 5’6″/167cm guy it’s possible to be…
/ducks the off-topic scythe
The last time I used the Fleming LH and RH rules, my waist was about 30 ins. All I now remember is that the physics exam invigilator was rather upset by the rude gestures apparently being made by the candidates. Alas, I have long forgotten which is which and my waist has expanded rather a lot in the intervening years.
So far as the quantity of heads is concerned, my subsequent professional experience is that one should be very wary of any free standing numbers presented to you unless you know who is counting, for what purpose and whether any inaccuracy in the results will adversely personally affect the counter.
I would very briefly add that, according to my current Body Mass Index, I seem to be substantially underheight.
Just popping back to some comments earlier in the comments about DLR and interconnecting doors. The Captain (though I suspect DLR have dropped that term these days) can open those doors with the triangular key. I’ve seen it done. Example, the train had stopped in between stations because the on-board computers and the signalling system had thrown a hissy fit and refused to talk with each other. Control instructed the Captain over the radio to drive the train in manual override mode – but said Captain wasn’t in the front vehicle. Hence use of the triangle key to pass between the vehicles and get to the front vehicle.
Another DLR anecdote if I may. Shortly after the Beckton extension opened, my father took himself off to ride that branch – just to have a look around. The train was advertised as headed to the terminus at Beckton. En-route the destination was changed to Gallions Reach – but (and Dad never understood exactly how this happened) that message either didn’t reach the Captain on his train – or the message was misunderstood.
So at Gallions Reach, instead of all passengers being de-trained, the Captain closed the doors as normal, and the train then branched off into the depot with about half a dozen passengers still on board. (The Beckton branch was not at all busy in the early days)
Cue much clucking over the Captains radio whilst depot staff and Control tried to decide what to do with the unexpected passengers. Made more complicated because – although all DLR stations are fully accessible – the depot isn’t and one of the unexpected depot visitors was a wheelchair users. If I recall correctly, a number of staff lifted the wheelchair user out in the end and a minibus was called to take them back to a station.
It amused Dad no end – he thoroughly enjoyed his unexpected visit to the depot.
I believe the lift industry uses 75kg as the weight of a person (I’ll stick to metric instead of rocks, stones and pebbles). In most lifts I’ve been in however, the number of bodies that translates into would never be reached due to floor space issues!
Memorably one building I worked in, the lift had a maximum load of 5 persons. Try any more than 3 and the lift would take itself out of service as soon as it set off, due to bounce on the cable….
@Rich Thomas: On the Networkers even a 32″ waist is a tad large for the seats… He says, ducking back onto topic…
Tessellation out of interest is the tiling of a flat surface using one or more geometric shapes ie tiles, with no overlaps or gaps.
@PoP, 130 et al
I for one would love to write up an article on the new London Underground uniforms introduced last year, but am neck deep in writing on a number of topics (Fleet/Jubilee line, River Buses, and more) and have no time to research the textile topic.
@LBM – and tessellation theory is the mathematics of fitting shapes optimally onto surfaces – you see how we have all been missing a capacity trick or two…
@Graham H
Indeed, but as I have no experience in the application of tessellation, I had not speculated on how tessellation applies to headcounts. For that matter, I wonder if heat column sensors are able to ‘see’ through large and felt hats, tuques, helmets (ceremonial or uniform) and other manner of weather head insulators, or what the heat detection co-efficient might be. Alas I may finally be able put my Physics degree into use…
@LBM – Canadian train services seem to have a distinctly odd staffage of passengers if some of them are wearing ceremonial helmets and toques…
LBM / Graham H
You should have seen some (many) of the passengers arriving via the DLR at ExCel in August 2014 …
World Science Fiction Convention
@Graham H
There are few of us that wear ceremonial helmets (ie mainly just me), but toques/tuques (I’ve never understood why it’s spelled in the first instance but pronounced as the second) are common. However we do celebrate many British holidays, ie St Patrick’s Day, Boxing Day, and even Victoria Day which you Brits somehow skip. The latter is our day for parades across the country, and indeed ceremonial helmets. Plus the Santa Claus Parade from Toronto, which we are told here is broadcast around the world. Might it pre-empt Coronation Street in the British Isles? Lest I forget, whenever a Canadian team makes the Stanley Cup Finals they are thrown a parade, even if they lose, and it is the one occasion where Canadians get truly unruly, with much rioting and random destruction of retail frontage.
Ahh…In Canada, a “toque” is what we would call a “Woolly Hat”….it come, says Mr.Wiki, from the Middle Breton for “hat”…
So in winter, the IR sensors may have difficulty detecting people through their thick overcoats. Being somewhat tonsorially challenged these days, I wear a hat in winter – it never occurred to me that it’s an invisibility cloak.
Hat nomenclature seems to be one of those areas that falls down a gap in mid Atlantic. I think your Canadian tuque is what we call a bobble hat, though possibly without the bobble. It may be time for the moderators to start off-topic-snipping each other…
@Malcolm
Indeed. What hath I wrought??
@LBM – a toque /tuque over here refers to the headdress of the late Queen Mary (wife of George V) – v different from a bobble hat. That would definitely fox the “column of heat” counter.
Although the usage varies from the beanie, to Queen Mary’s headgear of choice, to the French term for a chef’s hat, to the traditional headgear in competitive equestrianism, what all toques seem to have in common is that they are brimless.
Slightly back on topic………wearing tall hats on tube lines is a bad idea unless you are as little as the Queen.
@130
Are stovepipe hats coming back into fashion?!? I shall have to upgrade my wardrobe once again before visiting…
LBM. I was thinking of the Queen’s hat for her visit to Bond Street. Wasn’t it good that they’d organised the colour scheme to match her outfit!
If it’s good enough for Lord Ashfield…….
https://geospectives.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/the-tube.jpg
You’d think they could have found a motor car which was in slightly better nick. BTW, if it had been me,I’d have bought a half size larger.
@ Timbeau I believe the (probably unqualified) ‘T/Op’ is little Miss Stanley. (No I wasn’t there when the picture was taken). At least she didn’t have to eat a burger (unlike little Miss Gummer! !). Actually the lass shows better taste in headgear than Papa. The Rev Wilfred Awdry’s ‘Thin Controller’ unaccountably comes to mind.
@Graham H: I think it may be a style thing. I suspect wing collars were démodé by then, too. c.f. The header picture for “Peace on Our Line” on this site; presumably September 1938.
I am led to believe that catching the Central line on the days of Roundhead v Cavalier re-enactments in Epping Forest is a somewhat surreal experience.
@PoP
I don’t know my Tube stock – Cromwell Stock perchance?
LBM: not really. But some of the said passengers could be riding on a parliamentary train.
The photo is captioned Moorgate December 1st 1924, on the re-opening of the CSLR after tunnel widening work. (although from the state of the train you might be forgiven for wondering if the tunnel was quite wide enough…….) The young lady is indeed Lord Ashfield’s daughter, the Hon Marian Stanley*, then aged 17.
http://www.ltmcollection.org/museum/object/link.html?IXinv=1998/41066
(* Henry Stanley chose to style his baronetcy after his father’s Nottinghamshire birthplace, but the family surname remained Stanley. His daughter would herself have four other surnames, one after the other, later in life).
http://www.cracroftspeerage.co.uk/online/content/ashfield1920.htm
Fascinating stuff – sometimes the off topic comments are more interesting that the topic of the main thread 🙂
So if someone died in an incident attributed to overloading as a result of passengers wearing unsuitable headgear, would we say “Careless toque costs lives”?
LBM (FYI): I have wrought
Thou hast wrought
He/she hath wrought
I’ll get my hat…..
@Nameless
Well put, and the shortcomings of my non-classical education are being exposed…
As a question of etiquette, is it not expected that gentlemen remove their hats when entering a train, a ship, and an underground train? In the latter the low ceilings would make it physically impossible to wear a hat, save for young Masters…
In my Artillery Reserve unit we were told to remove headwear when inside a ship, but not on deck (the battery was based on an island so we often traveled by ferry to face our American counterparts for manoeuvres).
@LBM – famously, in Japan, it used to be the custom to remove one’s shoes on entering a building: the first train in the country pulled out leaving rows of footwear behind…
@LBM
“As a question of etiquette, is it not expected that gentlemen remove their hats when entering a train, ”
I don’t – but then maybe I’m not a gentleman.
In the early days of open-topped carriages, a number of passengers were killed leaping out of trains attempting to retrieve their hats.
Illustrations suggesting that doffing headgear was not de rigeur
http://punch.photoshelter.com/image/I0000mLWpABpQTSMhttps://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/47/2b/b2/472bb26b1a79aa8609f067e457b476d3.jpg
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_AHQDRXmzik0/SWvbh0ZIroI/AAAAAAAAAkk/THomCZuzfbc/s400/District+interior+1880s.jpg
http://www.victorianpicturelibrary.com/images/preview/TR30-railway-carriage-blowing-kiss.jpg
http://punch.photoshelter.com/image/I0000mLWpABpQTSM
but was sometimes done
http://cdn.c.photoshelter.com/img-get/I0000mOb1VyNKZb0/s/900/720/Transport-Motoring-Holidays-Cartoons-Punch-1952-03-19-373.jpg
http://cdn.c.photoshelter.com/img-get/I0000ySesMhhobuc/s/900/720/British-Character-Cartoons-British-Character-Cartoons-British-Character-Cartoons1938-01-19-61.jpg
(note hats on rack or seat)
@LBM
Historical exception: London taxi cab interior height specifications were specifically set to allow a gentleman to travel seated without doffing his top hat.
I don’t know if this is still valid. After all, the driver is no longer required to load a bale of hay for the horse.
By the way, the education wasn’t especially classical but we were exposed to the Authorised Version and some Shakespeare.
@OB
When that photo was taken there weren’t any T/Ops, surely she was acting as motorman.
Gerard Hoffnung….guide for foreign visitors to London….” on entering a railway carriage it is customary to shake hands with all your fellow passengers”. (As far as I remember from the 10″ LP)
I always thought that came from a New Statesman quiz c1981!
@Graham H for safety purposes we’re taking about ensuring that a) everyone can evacuate quickly enough b) no-one is physically being crushed, right? I would think that weight would be a better measure than headcount for both of those (not that either measure is perfect).
@lmm – not really – do you know the old joke about taking a fat friend with you when going bear hunting?
Selling train capacity by weight would be an entertaining thing to do politically and in front of the punters!
Talk of fitting a new scissors crossover for reversing at East Finchley hasn’t mentioned that the platforms there remain as built for 9-car trains. There is therefore up to 50 metres that could be removed to make space for a crossover, listed building consent permitting.
@Taz
There isn’t enough open platform at the southern end without demolishing the main part of the buildings.
Now about tat reversing at East Finchley, if one thinks again about Annonyous’ comment about the depot capacity being improved by using the Highgate tunnels, presumably ejecting the bats, one can then progress to thinking about Highgate High Level platforms presently dis-used. And then about the Archway reversing siding.
So do the tunelling to extend this to join up with the Highgate High Level platforms, and bring them into use, as a terminal, and do the reversing beyond the northernmost existing tunnel, in the present Depot area. You know, I really think this might be the answer, as so much of it exists.
@ Anonymous 21 March 2016 at 18:21 Tunnelling proposals will be undercut by any crossover proposals. Would the bats be content with a false ceiling at tube train height to leave them the upper levels of the old tunnels?
Anonymous: “..as so much of it exists”
Except for over a mile of otherwise unnecessary tunnel, at quite a steep slope, and a rebuild of the upper reaches of Highgate station. All to save a few extra points at the north end of East Finchley station.
This batty idea just shows the tendency of crayons to be attracted to old railway formations. However many of these we rebuild, we will not bring back the past.
I can’t see southbound passengers at Highgate being very keen on having to guess which platform (HL or LL) the next train is going from. And northbound passengers tipped out at Highgate would certainly not be impressed at having to go all the way down to the tube platforms to continue their journey.
Anyway, although you would be gaining a reversing siding at Highgate, you’d be losing one at Archway.
A target for only 30tph on the Northern until around 2040 seems to me to be grossly inadequate, especially if HS2 dumps most travellers bound for the City from the north/midlands at Euston (including ones who currently fly). And yet the addition of later new trains of NTfL design to boost the service would introduce a third type for operation and maintenance on the line. Would it not be better to take 17 NTfL from the early deliveries to boost the current Northern fleet, with a possibility for a further group of NTfL later to boost the service beyond 30tph, and the long-term plan of another delivery after the Central line to eventually replace the current trains. This would provide a path towards a consistent fleet again.
@Graham H: Selling train capacity by weight would be an entertaining thing to do politically and in front of the punters!
As ever with such, ahem, innovative ideas the airline industry has got there first…
@Malcolm: we will not bring back the past
The only thing more fascinating than the past is the future that never happened – hence almost-but-not-quite-realised schemes like the Northern Heights can be even more enticing to waxen speculators than merely disused railway formations.
@Taz: if HS2 dumps most travellers bound for the City from the north/midlands at Euston
The total number of HS2 passengers at Euston will not be enormous – a few percent of the tube station’s capacity, as HS2 pointed out when TfL were trying to get the government to pay for Crossrail 2 as a condition of TfL supporting HS2. Short-distance tube passengers vastly outnumber any long distance travellers.
The subsurface lines to the City at Euston Square will also be as easy, if easier to reach from the HS2 platforms as the Northern Line is – a flat access tunnel from the end of the platforms under Euston Road, then leading down ramps to the Euston Square platforms. I wonder whether Euston Square will even be considered a separate station by the end of all the work.
@Ian J 🙂 I’d heard about that – yet another airline practice so loved by the punters which the rail industry will try and adopt… [[I have this niggling feeling that the time will come when the aviation industry requires all its passengers to fly stark naked on security grounds].
A propos Euston Square, the question of a foot tunnel under Melton Street does come around from time to time. When I asked the engineers to look at it c1992, the main problem was a large sewer underneath Melton Street (and, of course, for the westbound platforms, the Circle Line itself ). You would probably need to be even lower than then the present LU ticket hall to clear those obstacles and therefore go down from the main concourse and then come up again to reach Circle platform level (an LU/LU walkway might avoid that however)
@IanJ – I should have added how much I agree with your implied comment that the effect of HS2 on loadings at Euston/KX will be small. Even if all the 18tph on HS2 are full of new punters (two big ifs there), they could deliver only 14-18000 people/hr. Given that a fair number will leave by taxi, bus and on foot, and that many more will take the tube direct to the most sought after destinations such as the West End and the City, that leaves precious few for whom TCR and Victoria are their destinations – well down the four figure mark. Once again, one regrets the lack of intermediate stations on CR2* other than TCR within the central area.
*Now renamed as part of a crowdconsulation initiative “Tubby McTubeLine”
@Taz
“if HS2 dumps most travellers bound for the City from the north/midlands at Euston ”
Why would they do that, when they can change to the ‘Liz at Old Oak Common and be at Moorgate in fifteen minutes?
Re. the Northern Line, I’d be more worried by the Crossrail 2 passengers changing at Angel for 2/3 stops to the city. There may be alternatives via Euston/TCR/Tottenham Hale but this will look on the map like a logical route, and may well be faster for many journeys to Bank/north of Moorgate, not to mention Old Street. It doesn’t take a huge percentage of crossrail’s 55,000 passengers per hour, per direction potential capacity (11 car 345s, 30 tph) to overwhelm the northern line’s 20,000 p.p.h.p.d. at 30 tph (assuming the trains are not arriving full, as the do now).
Wouldn’t Old Street be a better location for an XR2 station than Angel anyway?
(What’s one more kink matter?)
@Graham H I don’t follow your point about the bear – doesn’t that support my view?
Train A has 3 people and 240kg onboard. Train B has 2 people and 300kg. Which is going to take longer to evacuate?
The train with the fatter (and slower) people -hence the joke.
@Imm
Depends, doesn’t it? If one of the 150kg people is “Weeny” Atonio, he’d probably get out quite quickly – possibly without bothering to open the door first.
http://e1.365dm.com/15/02/768×432/uini-atonio-france_3264907.jpg?20150215133249
@timbeau: Unlikely, as the western branch of CR2 already has services to Old Street (Moorgate Great Northern services), with the eastern branch tipping out into Liverpool Street. An additional stop between Dalston and Tottenham would do wonders for bus loadings along the A10, but that would compromise the continued and heroic effort to bypass the entirety of Hackney.
@pseudonymous
“the western branch of CR2 already has services to Old Street ”
Only from Alexandra Palace. A bit circuitous for travellers between the Old Street area and central/SW London
“the eastern branch tipping out into Liverpool Street”
Don’t understand this comment – there are no plans for CR2 to serve Liverpool Street, and CR2 is supposed to be relieving the Liverpool Street-Tottenham Hale line, not tip even more people into it.
“the continued and heroic effort to bypass the entirety of Hackney.”
And yes, if CR2 lets the longer-distance services bypasses Hackney, that will leave more room on the existing lines for trains serving the stations in Hackney. Just as Surrey MPs are misguided in wanting CR2 to come further out (they will do better by shunting the locals onto CR2 so they don’t hold up the fast trains from Surrey and Hants).
A bypass benefits the place it bypasses as much as the travellers actually using it.
@ Timbeau – re bypassing Hackney – I have to say “eh?” Unless I am missing something then CR2 does nothing to increase services on the existing West Anglia locals via Seven Sisters. Similarly it does nothing to increase Chingford services. Therefore we are left with the WAML where I thought the reasoning was locals (the few that there are) go on to CR2 or to Stratford via STAR. Therefore we end up with more fast trains that hurtle through Hackney not stopping as they do today. And just for the sake of completeness we have no contribution from CR2 to adding capacity to Liverpool St’s approaches or terminal platform capacity. These are much debated existing constraints for West Anglia services. Therefore there is no net gain to Hackney at all. Happy to be corrected if someone can show that there is.
The point in all of this debate is surely that somewhere like Stoke Newington is busy enough and has a large enough connected hinterland of housing and other facilities to easily warrant having a CR2 service. The lack of a stop there *and* the potential nonsense of losing the New Southgate branch of CR2 (removing a stop at Seven Sisters) means people will remain stuck on overloaded buses to reach the West End, on overloaded trains to reach the City or having to go backwards to go forward (bus to Seven Sisters to get on an overloaded Victoria Line). Some will crowd on to overloaded buses to Dalston to squash on to CR2 there. Anyone even remotely familiar with travel demand in this bit of N London knows that leaving a great big gap is a (lots of swear words) stupid. Perhaps Lord Adonis needs to be forced to commute from Stoke Newington or Stamford Hill for a month at absolutely the worst time possible to help him understand this?
It is exactly this lack of a viable solution for visible, demonstrable travel issues that exist now that makes me so dubious about CR2. I would much rather have had an automated Metro line with extremely high frequencies and longish trains that would allow greater flexibility over station sizes and location because it would address far more of the problems and give people a much better service.
WW says “no contribution from CR2 to adding capacity to Liverpool St’s approaches or terminal platform capacity”
What about the fact (I presume) that there will be fewer (or no) trains from the likes of Northumberland Park going into Liverpool Street? Doesn’t that offer some scope for extra trains from the Edmonton direction (or from Chingford) which will improve the service at Hackney Downs? Or have I got it wrong?
@Malcolm/WW
That was my understanding – that if all trains from the WAML (Lea Valley Line) are routed through CR2 that frees up space south thereof for more trains through Hackney Downs and into Liverpool Street from the Chingford and Enfield directions.
If the Seven Sisters stop is included, this may also take some passengers off the Enfield line trains, making more room at stations further south like Stoke Newington.
Unlike the Balham CR2/Northern Line interchange, transfers at Seven Sisters are more likely to be from Overground to CR2 than the other way, as New Southgate and Ally Pally will still have a direct service to the City via Essex Road.
@ Timbeau / Malcolm – my assumption is that with 4 tracking the following would happen :-
– intenstified local service running into CR2 tunnels
– existing 2 tph from Herts continues into Stratford
– future 2 tph from Angel Rd continues to Stratford
– existing 2 tph stoppers to Liv St are replaced by CR2 stopping service but paths taken over by more fast services. Worth remembering that the WAML “locals” barely serve any inner area stations – a small proportion stop at Hackney Downs but none serve Clapton, London Fields, Cambridge Heath or Bethnal Green.
Now I’m happy to be proved wrong but I’ve seen no claims whatsoever that whatever is surrendered by way of “local” paths on the WAML are used by anything other than extra trains to Stansted / Cambridge. I certainly have not seen any claim that longer distance trains from Stansted, Bishops Stortford or Cambridge / Kings Lynn would ever go into the CR2 tunnels. That East Anglia Connectivity study that NR put out about a year ago had aspirations for far more longer distance trains into Liv St with no great benefit to inner London. In fact, IIRC, it proposed Enfield Town only ever being served as a shuttle from Edmonton Green with everyone forced to change. You can imagine the reaction to that.
The strategy on the SWML is relatively clear – shove the locals down CR2, stick an extra track on the approach to Wimbledon, whack up the number of trains from Surrey and Hampshire into Waterloo. I’ve not seen similar statements of intent about the WAML. There the emphasis has been on new housing and improved local accessibility courtesy of CR2. I suspect the twin centres of development (Central London and Stratford / Docklands) poses problems as to quite where you send the WAML trains. However there are no statements at all about better inner suburban services into Liverpool Street.
Re WW
“The strategy on the SWML is relatively clear – shove the locals down CR2, stick an extra track on the approach to Wimbledon,”
2 extra Wimbledon – New Malden, 1 extra New Malden – Suburbiton
As I understand it, CR2 releases at least 2, possibly 4 additional peak paths into Liverpool Street from the West Anglia routes. It will be a long time before it is decided where they originate. However a few constraints can knock out some options:
Stansted is at capacity due to the single tunnel under the runway, so they won’t be starting there unless a new tunnel is built.
Cambridge does not require more peak trains on the WAML corridor, and in any event, a lot of level crossings would need attention for any increase in service.
My guess is 2 Bishops Stortford starters to give Harlow a better service, and / or 2 from Enfield or Cheshunt.
@ngh. 2 from New Malden to Winbledon only with CR2. 5th track from New Malden to Surbiton is only required if CR2 doesn’t happen.
@ SFD – thanks for the clarification. I would be a bit reluctant to rule out more Stansted trains even if it means someone having to put their hand in their pocket. The airport and the relevant local authorities have been banging on about more / faster trains for years. Whether those trains would have any real value is another question altogether.
I have just spotted that one of the latest proposals for Crossrail 2 is to dispense entirely with any residual inner suburban services into Waterloo (thereby also increasing the total of outer suburban and long distance trains into Waterloo) and that the service then provided by Crossrail 2 on the SW lines could result in a further budget reduction by running shorter trains presumably below the current maximum of 8 20 metre coaches. If this is correct I begin to question the value of Crossrail 2 to users of the south western lines with the loss of both a direct route to Waterloo plus trains of shorter formation on the new route.
@WW. Stansted have made it very clear they will only buy a new tunnel with a second runway. (Sort of buy one, get one free). Given that the airport can take 100% more passengers without a second runway, that’s a long way off.
@Richard B. You’re wrong I’m afraid on every count. There will still be a substantial inner suburban service to Waterloo, perhaps 10 or 12 tph in the peak, compared to 18tph today. Plus 20tph for Crossrail 2 (from the SW lines) makes 30/32 compared to 18 today.
The CR2 trains will be 205m long (10 car equivalent) with provision to extend to 250m (12 car equivalent). Taken together with the increased number of paths, this is roughly doubling peak capacity compared to today. Or about a 70% increase on where it will be at the end of 2018 with the train lengthening already committed.
@ Sad Fat Dad until I read the relevant entry in the latest edition of Rail magazine (page 35 online edition just published) I would have agreed with you. Apparently this is a new proposal from the NIC to both increase capacity for long distance trains into Waterloo and save money by running shorter trains on Crossrail 2
@Richard B
“shorter trains presumably below the current maximum of 8 20 metre coaches. ”
With the rather important exception of Waterloo, all stations on the SWML suburban routes can now take ten coaches.
If all SWML suburban services go down the hole, what would happen to Earlsfield? The Kingston Loop service would also be a very odd operation: Waterloo – CJ(HL) – Richmond- Wimbledon – CJ (LL) – Victoria – Cheshunt?
Ahhh. RAIL. Well known for complete accuracy.
CR2 is about increasing capacity for longer distance services into Waterloo as well as the inner suburban. There is no plan for shorter trains on the latter. You can read the NIC report yourself to check.
Wouldn’t it have made more sense for Southeastern’s 5 car Class 376 to move to SWT land to use on lines where 10 is the limit? On Southeastern they aren’t going to be utilising the 12 car network. A waste of potential capacity.
Or will they go to Southern in future? I can’t see another 30+ years for them on SE routes running around with 10 cars, when the SE metro network is pretty much 12 cars capable but lacks stock. OK, so some alterations are needed eg Woolwich Dockyard, but moving them away would also have allowed new stock to run 12 car with SDO.
@Ed
There are not enough Class 376 to replace all of SWT’s 455s, so you would end up with mixed fleets with both operators. (Electrically a 376 is very like a 375)
One option might be to reduce the 376s to four cars (so three of them can make a 12-car train) . The spare MSOs could then be used to make up class 375/3s and 377/3s to four cars. This would be a much smaller job than the conversion of 460s to new 458s.
would it not be possible to change 2 Class 376 into 1 four car and 1 six car, thus enabling 12 car operation?
Re Richard B,
I’d always believe SFD instead of anything in Rail 😉
[And I’m not the only one]
Re Ed,
376s make no sense in SWT (siemens) land at any point for whole number of reasons:
Wrong number of units even after CR2 is running
Incompatible with any existing stock
DfT aim to reduce the species in any frachise rolling stock zoo to reduce operating costs from micro fleets…
The performance of Waterloo suburban stock post CR2 may have to match CR2 stock ruling out 376s such as extra wide doors to reduce dwell time…
Post AC traction motor conversion of 455s they may well be more reliable than 376s…
Re Quinlet,
No – The DC power bus cabling would need replacing along with the computer system which can only cope with 5 cars due to the assumed limit of DC bus when it was designed…
@ngh – “DfT aim to reduce the species in any frachise rolling stock zoo to reduce operating costs from micro fleets…” They do a pretty good job of trying not to appear to do this…
Graham H
Including, of course, how many different varieties of incompatible couplers?
Background to Jubilee WCC Upgrade is now on LURS site at http://www.lurs.org.uk/articles15_htm_files/04%20oct%20JUBILEE%20LINE%20WORLD%20CLASS%20CAPACITY%20PROJECT.pdf
Re Taz,
Lovely little gem near the end:
“Canary Wharf … 50% growth is expected there before Crossrail opens. ”
First thought is “Ooh dear”, closely followed by this actually look reasonable given 7-10% growth rates in lots of Station (LU and NR) in London and probably far better than lots of other conservative estimates recently that haven’t matched real growth data or mk1 eyeball survey of growth. (10% compounded between the LU report publication date and CR opening fully is 56%… though I suspect massive Jubilee relief when Bond Street – Abbey Wood CR section opens)
Housing development at Canada Water Driving growth there – err what about an orange line pouring passengers down the escalators to the Jubilee? LU forgetting about the overground???
Taz,
Thanks. Quite a lot to be gleaned from that. Note that the plan seems to have changed from reversing 6tph at Wembley Park, Willesden Green and West Hampstead to reversing 9tph at Willesden Green and West Hampstead.
Auto-reverse would explain a lot including the desire to redact and have parts of panel and committee meetings behind closed doors. I suspect auto-reverse would be harder to oppose if already in daily use on Crossrail – as it will be from December 2018. Amazed at the projected savings in terms of fewer trains required.
I am totally baffled by the postscripts mention of increasing the off-peak, or rather inter-peak service from May this year to 25tph in the central area. It is already 24tph so I can’t see the point. 26.7tph (a train every 135 seconds) would make far more sense but even then why inter-peak and not at least Saturdays as well? The Victoria line basically runs every 135 seconds off-peak seven days a week and the central part of the Jubilee line is comparable.
Interested in running all off-peak trains to Stratford as suggested. I don’t understand why they don’t do that now. Maybe the signalling can’t cope in which case this would be a quick win by upgrading the signalling as they already have sufficient trains. If it is possible then introducing now, or at least in advance of the main works, would reduce the number of unknowns when the time comes to run the full 34/36tph timetable.
I didn’t know about the May 2016 timetable change but that fits in with the original rumour for the Victoria line May 2016 timetable change (almost all existing Seven Sisters trains terminate at Walthamstow Central) and May and December are the usual times for timetable changes. So I think Modern Railways reporting “this month” for the Victoria line change was wrong.
@ Taz – thanks for the link to the article. A few things stand out for me.
1. That there is still quite a load of debate about what to do with the service pattern at the NW end of the line.
2. I am left wondering about the “cross platform interchange problems” at Finchley Road. Have people become even more suicidal in their dashing across the platforms? I do know that the structure of the platforms was / is [1], how shall we put it, not wonderful. Installing PEDs is unlikely to be a simple job and would probably require platform reconstruction. Obviously not impossible but not cheap and potentially very involved if interchange is displaced to Baker St which probably can’t cope with increased Met – Jubilee interchange flows at peak times.
3. The demand analysis is interesting. Confirms the Outer London growth issues that have been much discussed and I suspect there is overspill at Kingsbury from the big developments in the Colindale area. That will likely keep growing as much more building is due at Colindale.
4. I am somewhat shocked that there is no reference to the large scale developments planned at North Greenwich. Coupled with what is planned at Stratford and Canada Water I am left thinking that the Jubilee Line simply will not be able to cope at all with the likely demand pressures. And that’s before anything the Overground might throw at the Jubilee Line via Canada Water. I wonder if the planners know they’re going to be in “deep doo doo” (to coin a phrase) by 2025 but can’t really propose yet another massive line through East London and the Isle of Dogs given the political impetus behind Crossrail 2.
[1] I don’t think there have been any major works there to rectify the issues I was aware of a few years ago.
[Snipped as ‘tweaking light pens’ are really just crayons. LBM]
@PoP 1 April 2016 at 09:56 – 9+9 rather than 6+6+6 would save a third of platform staffing to clear reversing trains of course. Suggests auto reversing at both those sidings. At Finchley Rd would a line of PEDS/gates down the centre of each platform be easier, to close when a train is ready to depart?
Finchley Road has the most curved platforms on the Jubilee and amongst the worst curved platforms on the Metropolitan. Whilst some work could be done to reduce the gaps, there is no doubt in my mind that something significant would need to be done if PEDs were proposed to ensure no one could be trapped between closed train doors and the PEDs. Whilst solutions to this have been proposed, both within LU and here, there are no tried and tested solutions.
@S.F.D. regarding your comments on Stansted Airport.
I’ve always been satisfied with the London bound rail service from Stansted but the rail tunnel only seems to be a short single track section, is that really a constraint on increasing the rail service by say 50% or 100%?
The thing you do need to be careful of is getting a train to Liverpool Street and not Liverpool Lime Street (I came close to that mistake once !).
Fortunately, perhaps, at least for those prone to the confusion which nearly affected Mark H above, the through service from Stansted to Liverpool Lime Street no longer runs. If you wish to encounter that sort of confusion nowadays, you have to start from Norwich or Ely.
Re: running all Jubblies to Stratford.
I recently did Canary Wharf – North Greenwich in the evening peak on, as it happens, a North Greenwich terminator. It was, of course, nice and empty. I think I let a packed Stratford one go.
What was notable was the number of people who, presumably thinking they knew better than to heed the driver’s repeated announcements, when turfed off at North Greenwich wandered around looking lost and then looked very unhappy at having to go up and down escalators (quite a lot with luggage) to get to the Stratford platform.
MikeP – my first thought would be that they had poor grasp of the English language.
@Mike P /Edmonton
My first thought was that (at least those without luggage) would be seasoned tube travellers who had long ago learned to filter out the ceaseless recorded verbiage delivered in clear measured tones, so that when an important announcement is muttered at low volume by a driver with no training in public speaking it gets ignored completely.
Remember what happened to the boy who cried “wolf”. Or Hillaire Belloc’s Matilda
@Mark H. Yes it is. Simplifying it greatly, there is a 2 minute running time through the Stansted tunnel, with a 3 minute conflicting junction margin (which means there must be at least 3 minutes between the front of a train passing a junction in one direction, and the front of a second train passing in a conflicting direction). To enable trains to be signalled on greens (which is the basic tenet of timetable principles), which ever way you cut it, the maximum usable capacity of the tunnel is 12 trains per hour. Which is exactly what happens.
There are other complicating factors, like the distance between the tunnel mouth and the station, the number and configuration of the platforms, and the requirement for a fixed interval service. But ultimately it is the single tunnel that is the issue.
Indeed I can’t think of anywhere else in the country that has a significant length of single track that operates 6 trains per hour each way.
“a significant length of single track that operates 6 trains per hour each way.”
Wimbledon Platform 9 manages four each way in the peaks, including a station estop
Timbeau. Wimbledon has 4 anti clockwise, and 2 clockwise in the morning peak, and vice versa in the evening peak.
Regardless, it isn’t 6tph each way. Indeed it is only half.
I am suitably corrected – the occupancy time is considerably more than at Stansted though.
…………there is a longer single track section which runs 6tph each way.
http://www.networkrail.co.uk/browse%20documents/enrt/dec15/TimeTables/Table%20072.pdf
timbeau,
Not quite sure what the point of all this is.
Sad Fat Dad only said he couldn’t think of elsewhere in the country that has a significant length of single track that operates 6 trains per hour each way. He didn’t say there were none. I know you like to rise to the challenge of such comments but …
In any case, being in especially überpedantic mode, there is a longer single track section that runs one train six times per hour each way – not six trains per hour each way. This in a way reinforces SFD’s point. If you are only dealing with a single train you don’t have to provide a conflicting junction margin.
Could we please have fewer of these digressions that where you don’t actually provide a valid counterexample but seem to be trying to be imply that the other person is wrong?
Even more pedantically, the Stourbridge branch is as-near-as-makes-no-difference only half the length of the single line at Stansted. And there are plenty that will argue that the service on the former is provided by a people mover, not a train!
Sorry if my interjection was misconstrued. It goes without saying that a single track line fed by double track at both ends is a much tougher proposition to operate intensively than a “one engine in steam” shuttle, and it was not my intention to suggest otherwise. On the contrary, as you say, the comparison serves to reinforce SFD’s point that in a situation like Stansted the actual proportion of that hour that the single track is actually occupied has to be a mere fraction of the total.
Indeed, the logistics of operating the Stansted single track-section are more analogous to the diamond crossing of a (very elongated) flat junction, and we need look no further than Baker Street to see how they constrain capacity.
But if you really want to create a bottleneck, bung a station in the middle, as at Wimbledon.
timbeau
But if you really want to create a bottleneck, bung a station in the middle, as at Wimbledon.
Or Malton, or Ware?
Or Chafford Hundred,
And to be pedantic, Malton station was double track and the track singled so doesn’t count. This is not uncommon at all. One only has to go as far as Uckfield to see numerous examples and West Croydon-Wimbledon had other examples. No doubt there are others in London and, no, this is not an invitation for people to list them.
In fact timbeau’s example of Wimbledon doesn’t count either because the line in question used to be double track with two platforms so they didn’t “bung a station” [on a single track line].
General comment: it often doesn’t take a lot of effort to check facts first before posting a comment.
PoP
OTOH, the single-tracking at Wimbledon was descoping to get the trams “affordable” – & they now appear to be stuck with it, unless/until the CR2 rebuild gets the trams out of the station again ….
[Discussion about single tracks, with or without stations, is now at an end. Malcolm]
@S.F.D. Many thanks for the explanation.