The Anonymous Widower

A New South London Orbital Rail Route

In the June 2016 Edition of Modern Railways in an article is entitled Turning South London Orange.

One of the proposals is to create new orbital route across South London.

The route is proposed to go through these stations, after starting at Woking.

• Guildford
• Horsley
• Leatherhead
• Epsom
• Sutton
• Wallington
• West Croydon
• Norwood Junction
• Beckenham Junction
• Bromley South
• St. Mary Cray
• Swanley

After Swanley, two of the proposed four trains per hour (tph) would go to the Medway stations, with the other two going to Maidstone East.

What Does The Route Do For Me?

From, where I live at the Northern end of the East London Line, this might seem a proposal with not much benefit to North Londoners.

But the link to the proposed route at Norwood Junction and West Croydon stations could prove very valuable.

• Getting to London terminals for the South like Victoria, Waterloo and Charing Cross, is not an easy journey, especially in busy times.
• Thameslink is promising to remove the one-change-route via New Cross Gate to get to East Croydon and Gatwick.
• Getting to Kent is particularly difficult, unless you use High Speed 1 from Stratford.

Crossrail 2 will help matters in a few years, but more needs to be done.

As an example of the difficulties we face in Hackney, today, I want to go to New Malden to take some pictures for A Very Bad Level Crossing Problem.

• Angel station is on the wrong branch of the Northern Line to get to Waterloo.
• I could take a 76 bus to Waterloo.
• I could take an East London Line train to Clapham Junction.
• I could take a Victoria Line train to Vauxhall.
• I could take a bus to Bank and get the Drain to Waterloo.

In the end i took the bus to Bank for the Drain.

You can see why Crossrail 2 is important for Hackney, Haringey, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest.

The new route may not help me today, but for many other journeys that need to be done from North East London, it creates an important by-pass of the inaccessible South London termini.

Two planned improvements will help this appalling connectivity in the next couple of years.

• |Crossrail will open up Kent from Abbey Wood. But why doesn’t it connect to Ebbsfleet International?
• Increased frequencies on the East London Line will increase services to Clapham Junction to 6 tph.

But there will be no major improvement until Crossrail 2 opens.

So Is The New South Orbital Route Feasible?

The Modern Railways article says this.

The major infrastructure addition would be a 3.2 km tunnel running northwards from Norwood Junction to Kent House, west of Beckenham Junction.

This map from carto.metro.free.fr shows the stations on and around the proposed route of the tunnel.

I would assume that the tunnel would be double-track to accommodate the four tph, that are proposed for the route and its turn-up-and-go service.

This Google Map shows the same area.

Norwood Junction station is in the South-West corner of the map, with Beckenham Junction station in the North-East.

A friend of mine lives in the area and I wonder what he and his wife think of a tunnel under their house!

It may be possible to dig the tunnel in an affordable way, but I suspect another route could be used to bridge the gap between Norwood Junction and Beckenham Junction stations.

I don’t think that four trains per hour in both directions could be squeezed through the single-track section through Birkbeck station, but if they could it would avoid building the expensive tunnel.

There is always the option of splitting the service, as has been proposed for services across Suffolk, that I wrote about in Better East-West Train Services Across Suffolk. In that concept you have an island platform, where the trains meet and passengers just walk across to continue their journey. If say, Norwood Junction were to be used as the station for the split, then the Western service would go between Woking and Norwood Junction and the Eastern service between Norwood Junction and Swanley.

It’ll be interesting to see if the Newmarket scheme is ever built and if it is, how passengers react to it. If it comes over as a success, I think we’ll be seeing more innovative layouts to create new services from existing infrastructure with nothing more than minimal changes.

The Aim Of The Service

The Modern Railways article also says this.

The aim would be to provide a limited stop ‘turn up and go’ service that is competitive with the car, with train interiors designed to a comparable standard of comfort with more seats and Wi-Fi, rather than being of the metro-style used closer to the centre of the capital.

That I like! Sounds like the author is talking Class 387 trains with Wi-fi!

Thoughts On Stations Served

I’m giving each station their own separate posts.

 

 

Leatherhead

Cheam

Sutton

West Croydon

Norwood Junction

Beckenham Junction

Bromley South

Swanley

Maidstone East

Rochester

Chatham

Gillingham

 

Note that I’ve also included some lesser stations for completeness.

Conclusions

The conclusions are best put together for the various sections and features of the line.

Conclusions In The East

Swanley station with its four long platforms arranged in two islands is the key to the East.

Two tph to and from each of the Medway Towns and Maidstone East would give a turn-up-and-go service across the South of London through Bromley, Croydon, Sutton and Epsom.

But given that the station currently has the following services.

• 2 tph West Hampstead Thameslink to Sevenoaks
• 1 tph Victoria to Dover Priory
• 1 tph Victoria to Canterbury West
• 1 tph Victoria to Ashford International

It wouldn’t take a lot of imagination to see Swanley as a major interchange, providing 4 tph services to a whole range of destinations across London and in East Kent.

Sadly, at the moment Ebbsfleet International for Continental trains isn’t possible, but Ashford International is.

I feel that.

•  Continental services will increase in importance, over the next few years.
• St. Pancras International will run out of capacity,
• Some Continental services will terminate at Ebbsfleet International.

Which leads me to feel that getting from Victoria and across South London quickly to Ebbsfleet International will be increasingly important.

A direct Swanley to Ebbsfleet link would be ideal.

But as I showed in Rochester Station, that problem could be solved by an enlarged Crossrail.

June 6, 2016 Posted by AnonW | Transport/Travel | Centre for London June 2016 Proposals, Crossrail 2, Thameslink, Trains | Leave a comment