The Anonymous Widower

Will Crossrail Go To Hertfordshire?

Yesterday, it was reported on the BBC that the government is seriously thinking of diverting some Crossrail trains to Hertfordshire possibly terminating them at Tring.

This is an old idea originally proposed by Network Rail and discussed here in Wikipedia.  This is what is said.

Network Rail’s July 2011 London & South East Route Utilisation Strategy (RUS) recommended diverting West Coast Main Line (WCML) services from stations between London and Milton Keynes Central away from Euston, to Crossrail via Old Oak Common, to free up capacity at Euston for High Speed 2. This would provide a direct service from the WCML to the West End, Canary Wharf and other key destinations, release London Underground capacity at Euston, make better use of Crossrail’s capacity west of Paddington, and improve access to Heathrow Airport from the North.[113] Under this scheme, all Crossrail trains would continue west of Paddington, instead of some of them terminating there. They would serve Heathrow Airport (10 tph), stations to Maidenhead and Reading (6 tph), and stations to Milton Keynes Central (8 tph).

I think this could turn out to be an excellent change of plan. It certainly won’t add a billion or so to the costs of the project. Tring station would appear to have quite a large number of platforms and the only major infrastructure for the route would appear to be a tunnel at Old Oak Common.

Crossrail as originally designed went to Heathrow and Maidenhead in the West and Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the East. Sensibly in my view, Maidenhead has been changed for Reading in the West, to add a whole new level of connectivity to the West of England and Wales. Connecting to the West Coast Main Line could add similar connectivity to the North West of England, North Wales and Scotland.

So should Crossrail go to Tring or perhaps a more substantial interchange on the West Coast Main Line, which has cross platform interchange to Virgin’s streams of Class 390 Pendolinos to speed North? The excerpt from Wikipedia, I quoted earlier, says eight trains an could go to Milton Keynes.

I estimate that if Crossrail services terminated at Milton Keynes, the trains would get there within a few minutes of an hour from Canary Wharf. That is only twenty minutes more than it will take from Heathrow to Canary Wharf.

But Milton Keynes is more than a New City on the West Coast Main Line, it is an important staging post on the East-West Rail Link from Cambridge and East Anglia to Oxford and the West Country, so making Milton Keynes one of the Crossrail termini and linking it to the North with frequent services, could give whole new areas of the country like East Anglia and the West of England much better train services to the North.

If Milton Keynes was developed as this major hub, this would have other consequences.

• The East-West Rail Link should probably be built as a 200 kph capable railway, so that Oxford to Cambridge services could be well under two hours.
• The East-West Rail Link connects to the Midland Main Line at Bedford and Chiltern Services at Bicester, so should it complete the set by going to Cambridge via Peterborough, where it can interchange with the East Coast Main Line. It is the cheapest possible route of the rail link, but what people who live in places like Oakham will think about it, I do not know.
• HS2 might be being built in the wrong place, as if Milton Keynes becomes this important rail hub, surely it should visit the city.

All I can say, is that extending Crossrail to Hertfordshire and Milton Keynes, will make planners think very hard about connections from the terminus to points to the North, East and West.

August 8, 2014 - Posted by AnonW | Transport/Travel | Crossrail, East-West Rail, Milton Keynes, Trains