The Anonymous Widower

Squeezing Blood Out Of A Stone On The Northern Line

The Northern Line is not the most popular or glamorous line of the London Underground.

It is a line I try to avoid for various reasons.

• It’s often too crowded.
• I have buses, Victoria Line and the London Overground as alternatives. For example, I use Camden Road station instead of Camden Town station and walk.
• In recent months, stations I want to use have been renewing escalators.
• I also want to get to stations, that are on the Charing Cross branch of the line.

I also wonder, if I’m prejudiced against the Northern Line, as I spent so much of my formative years on the Piccadilly Line.

I have just read this article on London Reconnections, which is entitled Twin Peaks: Timetable Changes On The Northern Line.

I have extracted these points from the article.

• Until mid-2014, both central sections and both northern branches of the Northern Line in the peak hours were only able to handle twenty trains per hour (tph). This compares with 30 tph on the Jubilee Line, 33 tph for the Victoria Line and 34 tph for the Central Line.
• In June 2014, with the full introduction of automatic train operation (ATO), this was raised to 22 tph.
• Engineers were working hard to improve the track to allow better speeds and from December 2014, the train frequency in the peak was raised to 24 tph.
• The line is now running at 30 tph between Kennington and Morden.
• The Off Peak service at the start of 2014 was 15-16 tph and it is now 20 tph.

All of this frequency improvement has been attained because they have got ATO working well and they’ve done a good job to allow trains to run faster on much better track.

You could say it’s all down to quality engineering. With probably the input from someone, who understands scheduling.

The article has a section entitled As Good As It Can Get For The Moment?, where this is said.

No doubt the ATO system will continue to be refined but the dramatic time reductions already achieved are unlikely to be improved on much more. Unless more available trains or speed can be coaxed of the existing fleet it is hard to see how the peak timetable can be improved until new trains arrive.

So have we got to the limit of the current lines and the 1995 Stock trains?

If you read the article, you’ll see that Transport for London are talking about peak hour services of 30 tph with new trains after the reworking of track in Summer 2020.

But given the skilful way, the frequency of this line has been ramped up over the last couple of years, I suspect, there’s more blood to come from this particular stone!

November 17, 2015 - Posted by AnonW | Transport/Travel | Automation, Engineering, London Underground