Will Crossrail Go To Hertfordshire?
Yesterday, it was reported on the BBC that the government is seriously thinking of diverting some Crossrail trains to Hertfordshire possibly terminating them at Tring.
This is an old idea originally proposed by Network Rail and discussed here in Wikipedia. This is what is said.
Network Rail’s July 2011 London & South East Route Utilisation Strategy (RUS) recommended diverting West Coast Main Line (WCML) services from stations between London and Milton Keynes Central away from Euston, to Crossrail via Old Oak Common, to free up capacity at Euston for High Speed 2. This would provide a direct service from the WCML to the West End, Canary Wharf and other key destinations, release London Underground capacity at Euston, make better use of Crossrail’s capacity west of Paddington, and improve access to Heathrow Airport from the North.[113] Under this scheme, all Crossrail trains would continue west of Paddington, instead of some of them terminating there. They would serve Heathrow Airport (10 tph), stations to Maidenhead and Reading (6 tph), and stations to Milton Keynes Central (8 tph).
I think this could turn out to be an excellent change of plan. It certainly won’t add a billion or so to the costs of the project. Tring station would appear to have quite a large number of platforms and the only major infrastructure for the route would appear to be a tunnel at Old Oak Common.
Crossrail as originally designed went to Heathrow and Maidenhead in the West and Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the East. Sensibly in my view, Maidenhead has been changed for Reading in the West, to add a whole new level of connectivity to the West of England and Wales. Connecting to the West Coast Main Line could add similar connectivity to the North West of England, North Wales and Scotland.
So should Crossrail go to Tring or perhaps a more substantial interchange on the West Coast Main Line, which has cross platform interchange to Virgin’s streams of Class 390 Pendolinos to speed North? The excerpt from Wikipedia, I quoted earlier, says eight trains an could go to Milton Keynes.
I estimate that if Crossrail services terminated at Milton Keynes, the trains would get there within a few minutes of an hour from Canary Wharf. That is only twenty minutes more than it will take from Heathrow to Canary Wharf.
But Milton Keynes is more than a New City on the West Coast Main Line, it is an important staging post on the East-West Rail Link from Cambridge and East Anglia to Oxford and the West Country, so making Milton Keynes one of the Crossrail termini and linking it to the North with frequent services, could give whole new areas of the country like East Anglia and the West of England much better train services to the North.
If Milton Keynes was developed as this major hub, this would have other consequences.
- The East-West Rail Link should probably be built as a 200 kph capable railway, so that Oxford to Cambridge services could be well under two hours.
- The East-West Rail Link connects to the Midland Main Line at Bedford and Chiltern Services at Bicester, so should it complete the set by going to Cambridge via Peterborough, where it can interchange with the East Coast Main Line. It is the cheapest possible route of the rail link, but what people who live in places like Oakham will think about it, I do not know.
- HS2 might be being built in the wrong place, as if Milton Keynes becomes this important rail hub, surely it should visit the city.
All I can say, is that extending Crossrail to Hertfordshire and Milton Keynes, will make planners think very hard about connections from the terminus to points to the North, East and West.
A Pedestrian-Unfriendly City
I mentioned to a friend, who lives near Milton Keynes, that I might come up to see the new electric buses in the city. They suggested I come up and take one of the new buses to Bletchley Bus Station, where they would pick me up.
I got a return ticket on London Midland to Milton Keynes Central for just £9.55 for a journey that takes thirty-five minutes each way. Which I didn’t think was bad value.
There was information at the station about the buses, but compared to London, it wasn’t of the highest quality.
Clear But Fairly Useless Bus Information
Although, the bus stand looked to be all new.
A New Bus Station
But it was all very draughty and after waiting for twenty minutes, I didn’t see any of the new wireless electric buses going to Bletchley.
A New Electric Bus
Although a couple did pass without stopping.
Then my friend sent me a text to say, that they’d had a breakdown and when the AA came, they’d meet me in the central shopping in the city. There didn’t seem to be clear instructions about the best bus to get to the centrre and as it was a sunny, but cold day, I decided to walk, especially, as I could see a solitary lith with a map by the station.
A Solitary Lith In Milton Keynes
The lith said that it would be about a fifteen minute walk, so I set off for the centre. I didn’t pass any other direction signs or liths and eventually, I had to resort to the age-old device of asking a passer-by. I then got another message from my friend, who was still waiting for the AA. A phone call later and we decided, we’ll meet another day.
I carried on walking and found the shopping centre, where I knew there was a Carluccio’s, so at least I could have lunch before returning. Carluccio’s cafes are usually fairly obvious with their blue canopies, but could I find it? Of course not! I couldn’t even find a directory in the shopping centre, giving any useful information. It was a new experience for me, to find a shopping centre without instructions to find your favourite shop. So I decided to go back to London and took a sign pointing to a bus station. But the dreadful place had one more surprise in store for me. To get to the buses, I had to walk into the sun and didn’t see this beautifully camouflaged stone seat, as my eyesight isn’t a hundred percent, in certain circumstances.
A Camouflaged Stone Seat
I didn’t see it at all and it rapped me hard across both knees.
The Damage To My Left Leg
The picture shows the damage on my left leg.
When will those that design our pavements realise that not everyone is fit with perfect eyesight?
I wonder if a personal injury lawyer, would like to take on my case.
And then of course, there was no simple way to find which bus you should take to get back to the station.
When I got back to the station, I was wrongly informed, which was the next London Midland train back to London, so I had to wait for twenty minutes on a cold windy station with no shelter.
I shall never return to the most pedestrian-unfriendly city, I’ve found on my travels. And as my friend will testify, they can’t even get the breakdown service for the cars that they expect everybody to use, correct!
Wireless Electric Buses In Milton Keynes
This is a very good story about how bus technology is getting better. Here’s the intro.
Electric buses which their developers say can run all day are set to begin service.
A fleet of eight new electric vehicles will operate along a busy route in Milton Keynes from late January.
The buses can run for longer by virtue of a wireless booster charge they receive at the start and end of the route from plates in the road.
Remember that a lot of hybrid buses, like the New Bus for London, are effectively electric buses, where the electric power is provided by an on-board generator coupled to a battery or other energy storage device.
So could this type of pick up be fitted to these buses, to top up the battery at each end of the route? If I look the local route I use most; the 38, at the outer end of Clapton Pond, there is a vast bus parking area, which could easily charge buses for several minutes, whilst waiting to depart. I suspect that Victoria might be a bit more difficult, as space is more limited.
Obviously, the bus would need a clever GPS-savvy on-board control-system, that would decide where to get the electricity from. But as the bus would have an on-board generator, it would never get stuck without power.
For this and other reasons, all the buses for towns and cities, we build should be electric or hybrid. The specification of the New Bus for London, says this.
The engine is a Cummins ISBe 4.5l unit, rated at 185kW.
A typical engine like this Ford unit, used in vehicles like a Land Rover Discovery is 2.7l and is rated at about 150kW.
It’s an interesting comparison.
The Anonymous Widower 