How We Use A Cross-City Railway
London has two main North-South cross-city railways; Thameslink and the East London Line, which are shortly to be joined by a third East-West line; Crossrail.
These three lines are characterised by a tunnelled central core, with branches fanning out on either side. This means that if the branch you live on is paired with another branch on the other side of the city, you will probably have to change trains in the centre if you want to go to an alternative branch.
It’s not just London, who use this sort of layout. Birmingham, Cardiff, Liverpool and Newcastle in this country have similar cross-city trains or metros, and I suspect that worldwide there are quite a large number.
I did a journey a few weeks ago, which illustrates how we use these lines. I’d been to my doctor’s surgery, which is close to Haggerston station and afterwards I needed to go to Norwood Junction, which is on the West Croydon branch of the East London Line.
As it was raining hard, instead of waiting for the next West Croydon train on an exposed platform, I took the first train. I then hopped-off this train at Canada Water and hopped-on my desired train, after waiting for a few minutes in a dry underground station.
This hop-off-hop-on behaviour at a convenient station in the core will get increasingly common, as more and more branches are added to these cross-city lines.
If you use National Rail’s Journey Planner for say Sutton to Luton, some routes offered, involve a change of train at either Blackfriars or St. Pancras using Thameslink. But in the current Thameslink, these changes are not same platform ones, like they are on the East London Line and hopefully will be on the upgraded Thameslink, when it opens in 2019.
Crossrail takes this concept to a whole new level!
Most if not all of the central core stations are island platforms, so that if you are on a train from Abbey Wood to Heathrow, but want to go to Maidenhead, you just hop-off and then hop-on the first train that calls at Maidenhead, using a convenient Central London station. But the island platform, also allow you to reverse direction on a hop-off-hop-on basis. So Abbey Wood to Shenfield becomes a simple step-free one-change journey.
Sadly, there is no central core island platform station on Thameslink and the East London Line. This is probably more to do with adapting existing stations, rather than a less than perfect design.
But imagine what a lovely station the below-ground Thameslink station at St. Pancras would be with a large light and airy, central island platform with trains behind platform edge doors! Perhaps it could have a welcoming coffee-shop, where you could refresh yourself and meet friends.
The Anonymous Widower 
[…] We must also take note of passenger behaviour in using cross-city railways. […]
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