Before Crossrail – Brentwood
A Tidy Station With Good Access – Rating 7/10
Brentwood station needs very little work to bring it up to the required standard. But then it has been upgraded in recent years.
A surprise here was the number and excellent standard of the toilets.
Before Crossrail – Shenfield
A New Platform, Signs And Displays And It’s Ready – Rating 8/10
Shenfield is the station at the end of the Eastern Branch of Crossrail.
Other than creating a new platform for Crossrail, the station is nearly ready, except for sign-age and display screens.
There are certain issues that will have to be decided before Crossrail opens.
- At present Shenfield is outside of Zone 6 and I can’t get there using my Freedom Pass. Will that change, when Crossrail opens?
- Will the fast and slow lines at the station, be reorganised to make interchange between Southend and Norwich/Ipswich services to Crossrail, just a simple walk across the platform?
- The station is in Essex, but should it have bus maps and signs to the London standard?
I don’t think that there’ll be much controversy when this station opens.
The Best Cafe In Eastfield
Marks and Spencer’s cafes are probably best described as safe, with a boring selection of drinks and pastries, that wouldn’t annoy ladies who drink milky coffee.
But the one on the bridge at their Eastfield store is different.
It’s nice to go to a cafe with proper china and nearly all those in that area of the shopping centre use paper cups.
So it’s a no-brainer as to where I go!
It does mean that if I’m lucky, I have to put up with one of the best views in East London.
As Marks and Spencer now have an extensive range of gluten-free foods in the shop below the cafe, Stratford is an ideal place to break a journey with a pit stop for supplies
Before Crossrail – Stratford
Little of Note Is Left To Be Done – Rating 9/10
Stratford is the station, where you can get a good idea about the major effects Crossrail will have, as the two Shenfield Metro platforms, which will become the Crossrail ones, interchange on the surface with the Central Line.
This interchange is almost unique in London, where an Underground line offers cross-platform interchange to a main-line service. At present, it only means that Shenfield Metro passengers can go easily to and from Central and West London.
But with Crossrail it will be even more important as twelve ten-coach Crossrail trains and upwards of thirty Central Line ones will be passing through the station every hour.
Journeys such as Epping to Heathrow, which can be tortuous and long at present would just need a simple cross-platform change at Stratford.
It is obvious that Crossrail will take the pressure off the Central Line, as the very crowded section I often use from Marble Arch to Liverpool Street, will effectively be duplicated by the new line.
What is less obvious to those from outside East London is that Crossrail helps to solve the Central Line’s poor connectivity between Liverpool Street and Stratford, as it brings Whitechapel into the mix, with all the connections that station offers.
I have watched many times how this Shenfield Metro/Central Line interface works and I’m surprised that it is not duplicated all over the UK’s rail network. I can think of only a couple of places where, you arrive at a large main line station and all of the local services are just a walk across a wide platform.
I suspect that if I come back here in say 2020, the station will look very much the same, except that it will probably have had large cosmetic applications of purple paint.
Before Crossrail – The Shenfield Metro
The Shenfield Metro is a six trains-per-hour local service from Shenfield to London Liverpool Street, run using over thirty years old Class 315 trains.
In the next few years the service will be incorporated into Crossrail and form an Eastern branch that will be linked through the central tunnels to heathrow and Reading. Wikipedia says this about the service, when Crossrail is up and running.
At peak hours the frequency of service will increase from seven trains per hour to 12, necessitating the construction of a new 210-metre long platform 6, which will be built to the north of platform 5, replacing one of the existing three western sidings.
The trains will also be longer at ten opposed to eight coaches, so there will be a gigantic increase in capacity.
Changes start next year, when in May the Shenfield Metro will be taken over and run by Crossrail from May.
So I went to Stratford and then took a train to Shenfield, before coming back a stop at a time, to see the current service in action.
The Anonymous Widower 