Before Crossrail – The Proposed Schedule
Wikipedia has a schedule of proposed services. I have broken this down to get the figures for my catalogue of stations. Starting in the East, they can be summarised as follows.
Shenfield Branch
This will have 12 tph (trains per hour) in the peak and 6 tph in the off-peak, calling at all stations and going through the central tunnel to the West.
In addition, there will be other services going into Liverpool Street. Wikipedia is saying 10 tph in the peak and 5 tph in the off-peak. Some will be limited stop, but it does look like that all stations will get at least 6 tph in the off-peak and some will get around ten.
As this is a substantially better service than exists today, you must be extremely pleased if you own or have just bought a house along the branch.
Abbey Wood Branch
Like the Shenfield branch, this branch is scheduled to get 12 tph in the peak, but the off-peak level is not stated.
If the off-peak is the same as the Shenfield branch, then that figure must probably be added to the 10 tph services Abbey Wood enjoys at the moment into other London termini.
Central Section
24 tph in the peak will pass through the central tunnels, with plans for 14 tph to turn-back at Paddington.
The off-peak is not stated, but if the Shenfield branch figures are correct, then it could be something like 12 tph, with perhaps 7 tph to Paddington only.
As the Class 345 trains will be so much larger than the typical Underground train, this will be a tremendous increase in capacity across Central London.
Western Branch – Paddington to West Drayton
As West Drayton will be served by trains to all the Western termini and will also turnback a couple of trains per hour, it should get 10 tph in the peak going through the central tunnels. Wikipedia says it will get ten in the off-peak as well, so that probably means my figure of seven off-peak trains turning at Paddington is wrong.
There will also be other trains going direct to Paddington. 4 tph are currently proposed to be the Heathrow Express. I can’t see this high-priced service surviving long past Crossrail’s opening in its present form.
Heathrow Branch
Wikipedia says that 4 tph will go to Heathrow all day and hopefully all night, running all the way to Shenfield and Abbey Wood. But these services will not go to Terminal 5 and the expensive Heathrow Express will still be running.
I think that there’ll be some replanning here. I know this is old an article in the Daily Mail from 2012, but it shows that Boris Johnson and others, think that Crossrail should go to Terminal 5.
As Terminal 5 could be joined to Reading, it might be that some Crossrail services from Reading go via Heathrow.
Western Branch – Beyond West Drayton
It looks like 2 tph will go to each of Maidenhead and Reading, with an additional 2 tph going limited-stop from Reading to Paddington.
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The Anonymous Widower 
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