The Anonymous Widower

Should Crossrail 2 Serve Dalston Junction And/Or Hackney Central?

The latest proposal for Crossrail 2 says this about the routes north of Angel station.

Further work to reduce the overall cost of the scheme and to minimise environmental impacts during both construction and operation has resulted in a potential change to the proposal for Crossrail 2 in this area. Rather than the route splitting at Angel with one tunnel going via Dalston and the other via Hackney, a single route would continue as far as Stoke Newington or Clapton, at which point the line would split, with one branch towards Seven Sisters and New Southgate and the other towards Tottenham Hale and Hertford East. 

So it looks like it’s either call at Dalston Junction or Hackney Central stations, but not both.

Before I discuss which of the two locations is served, I will make a few assumptions.

Crossrail is going to provide up to 24 two hundred metre long trains per hour, that can each carry up to 1,500 passengers between Whitechapel and Paddington as detailed here. Thameslink will also be using a frequency of 24 trains per hour.

So it is reasonable to assume that Crossrail 2 will have similar frequency and probably use similar trains to Crossrail, so there’ll be an awful lot of passengers on the line.

But they are proposing Crossrail 2 for the future not for 2014.

By that time the  Overground will be running more trains and they will be at least five-car trains. Judging by the modular nature of the Class 378 trains, which have already gone from three to four and will be going to five coaches later this year, who’s to say what the length will be? The limiting factor is the length of platforms, but I think I read somewhere, that most stations could go to six. At those that couldn’t take six coaches, selective door opening could be used.

Station improvements will also increase the capacity of the system.

With the redevelopment of the Kingsland Shopping Centre and the various redevelopment between the two stations, I would hope that the walk between the two Dalston stations ; Junction and Kingsland, becomes a pleasant sheltered one past cafes and shops, rather than a precarious scramble up the side of a busy road on a crowded and exposed pavement. If the Dalston Kingsland station entrance was moved to the eastern side of the Kingsland Road, this would shorten the walk and mean that only one major road had to be crossed.

As the Lea Valley Lines will have been fully incorporated in the Overground by then, Hackney Central should have been combined with Hackney Downs to effectively be one station. I’ve believed for some time that the two stations should be made one, with a proper interchange to the buses. I suspect too, that the station improvements could be part of a large property development in the area, as could the improvements at Dalston.

So by the time Crossrail 2 is finished both Dalston Kingsland/Junction and Hackney Downs/Central could be two substantially developed stations with lots of apartments, shops, offices and leisure facilities, with the North London Line between them. At present there are eight trains per hour and an awful lot of buses between the two areas.

I think we can see, why the planners have virtually said that it’s an either..on between the two stations. Cutting out one station supposedly cuts a billion off the bill for the project.

So which will get built?

It’s very much a case of who pays the money gets the tune.

But I think as Hackney Central/Downs will be the better connected station, it might well get the vote.

But remember one of the rules of the planning of large and expensive projects. What gets delivered in the end is often very different to what was originally proposed. Look at the simple example from Crossrail, where the line was originally planned to run to Maidenhead, but was extended to Reading, in March 2014.

So what could happen to change the scope of Crossrail 2?

The Overground has a problem of not enough capacity, which is partly made worse by all the freight trains travelling along it. So will a radical solution be made to remove most of the freight trains away from the Overground? This problem is going to get worse as more ships call at London Gateway, so sending more freight trains on the North London and Gospel Oak to Barking Lines (GOB) will be increasing unpopular, with both TfL and residents. Although hopefully in a few years, the noisy Class 66 diesel locomotives, will have been replaced with quieter electric ones.

But one solution could be incorporated into the Overground that would make the one station in Hackney work better. And that would be to reinstate the Eastern Curve at Dalston Junction to enable trains to go between the East London Line and Stratford.

The more I think about it, to make a one station concept work, freight must be removed from the North London Line. Read what the London Gateway Wikipedia entry says about distribution, which says trains will go partly at night on the GOB.

Rail logistics partner DB Schenker Rail (UK) plan to run four intermodal trains per day (mainly overnight) via Barking and Gospel Oak to the West Coast Main Line. 

What will the residents living by the GOB, think of the noise at night?

June 18, 2014 - Posted by AnonW | Transport/Travel | Class 66 Locomotive, Crossrail 2, Dalston, Freight, Gospel Oak And Barking Line, Hackney, London Overground, North London Line