The Site Of The Kings Cross Problems
These pictures show the state of the Canal Tunnels on the Monday after the troubles of the Saturday.
Compare these pictures with the one in this post taken in August, which I have added. All pictures are dated in their descriptions.
The overhead wires now seem to be up for a start. I shall keep trying to get better pictures of these tunnels.
The Problems At Kings Cross
When I was at Kings Cross station early this morning, I asked a guy from the Information Desk, if the problem was with the Canal Tunnels, which will connect Thameslink to the East Coast Main Line, and which I photographed in this post. He said that the problem was in that area.
Network Rail have said they have had some sort of equipment failure. Where the work is being done, is a very critical area.
Incidentally, once Thameslink opens this will build quite a few alternative routes and destinations into the system. For example, if Kings Cross couldn’t be used for some reason, the Thameslink route could be used to shuttle passengers to Peterborough.
Before Thameslink opens, it strikes me that they could have told passengers to go to Cambridge from Liverpool Street or Tottenham Hale, from where they would provide a coach to Peterborough. This option has been used before, when there has been overhead line problems.
In the longer term, I think it is important that as many diversionary routes as possible are electrified and cleared to be able to handle the largest trains. With today’s problems, if Ely to Peterborough had been electrified, GreaterAnglia could have used some of their 12-car Class 379 trains to extend the Liverpool Street to Cambridge service to Peterborough.
How Thameslink Sorts Out London’s Trains
After taking the pictures of the new viaduct at London Bridge yesterday, I thought it would be good to post a map, which showed how it all fits together.
Stations Along The Thames
The picture shows most of the stations along the river that serve the South. And of course the North if they’re connected to Thameslink.
The main stations from left to right (west to east) follow.
Charing Cross is at the far left of the image, where it sits at the end of the Hungerford bridge, by which all trains enter and leave the station. The station is marked by the red British Rail double-arrow symbol, with the London Underground roundel showing the related Embankment tube station.
Waterloo is opposite Charing Cross at the other side of the Thames, although there is no direct rail connection between the stations.
Waterloo East is to the east of Waterloo and this station does have a rail connection to both Charing Cross and London Bridge.
This picture shows the position of the three stations and the rail lines to a larger scale.
Charing Cross, Waterloo and Waterloo East Stations
Note the rail lines going across Hungerford Bridge between Charing Cross and Waterloo East. I’ve never been to Waterloo East or even stopped at it on a train, but you can walk between the two Waterloo stations.
In this image the domed circular roof of the Waterloo IMAX cinema and Nelson’s Column can be clearly seen.
Blackfriars is the next station and its unique position across the river is shown in the middle of the main picture. It is the right one of the pair of bridges and the British Rail symbol indicates the main station entrance on the North Bank of the Rover. This picture shows its position in more detail.
Blackfriars and Thameslink
Note how the Thameslink lines from Blackfriars to the south go in two directions.
One line goes to the East for London Bridge, after joining with the lines from Charing Cross and Waterloo East, at the bottom right of the picture.
The other line goes directly South to Elephant and Castle.
The Temple area is at the top left of this picture, where there is a tube station. London’s new Garden Bridge will between here and the Southbank area, when it is built.
Cannon Street on the North Bank is the next station and like Charing Cross, all trains access the station by a bridge over the Thames.
Cannon Street and London Bridge
Note the triangular junction South of the Thames, that gives access to both Charing Cross and London Bridge from Cannon Street.
London Bridge station is shown in more detail in this picture.
London Bridge Detail
The detail would be a lot better, if it wasn’t for the shadow from The Shard, which is visible at the bottom right.
The pattern of the lines to and through London Bridge that will be in operation with the full Thameslink scheme is beginning to emerge.
1. The number of through platforms at London Bridge, for services on Thameslink and to/from Charing Cross and Cannon Street is being increased from six to nine.
2. The extra viaduct over Borough High Street and the Market can be seen.But it doesn’t have any tracks in this image.
3. London Bridge station itself, appears to be a big building site, with trains going through.
Incidentally, I’m not sure of the date of the Google Earth view.
The Thameslink program is vast and will add a hundred stations to the existing network. Wikipedia sums it up like this.
The Thameslink Programme, is a £6 billion project in south-east England to upgrade and expand Thameslink to provide new and longer trains between a wider range of stations to the north and to the south of London without requiring passengers to change trains in London. Work includes platform lengthening, station remodelling, new railway infrastructure, and additional rolling stock.
In this post, I have traced it south of the Thames and shown how it interfaces with the lines into Charing Cross and Cannon Street. If the architects have got the design of London Bridge station right, this alone should unlock a myriad of new routes for all those millions of Londoners and those that come into the City.
A couple of years after the new London Bridge is completed, Crossrail with its connection to Thameslink at Farringdon will open, adding even more travel possibilities.
Some months ago, I wrote a post called A Divided City.
Hopefully, the enlarged Thameslink, will help to cross the great divide of the Thames, that without which London wouldn’t even exist.
A Quiet Finsbury Park Station
As Finsbury Park station was quiet I took these pictures.
It’s certainly a lot better than it was just a few years ago.
After the full Thameslink service opens in 2018, the service pattern in Finsbury Park will be very different, as instead of terminating at Kings Cross, Cambridge and Peterborough trains will go through the tunnels to places in the south. So will some of these stop here?
Underneath The Shard
The space between Thameslink and the Shard has been tidied up a lot, as the pictures show.
All is now ready for a start to be made on the next phase of the rebuilding of London Bridge station.
Wikipedia has a section on rebuilding the station.
This link shows the final platform layout. It’s very different to what platforms were used in the past and are now.
But hopefully, it’ll be all right on the night!
The Trains Going North
Today, I went from East Croydon to Luton and then on to Bedford in two Class 319 electric trains.
They were originally going to be fully refurbished, but now according to Wikipedia, the refurbishment will be more basic.
The cascaded trains will get a more basic refurbishment than previously proposed, which will include a new Passenger Information system, LED lighting, new seat covers and an internal and external repaint.
It will be interesting to see the trains in Lancashire. Certainly, the ones I rode today had a poor passenger information system and too much awful pink paint.
But the plus point is like all Mark 3-derived trains, they rode smoothly and quickly through the countryside, at speeds approaching their maximum of 100 mph.
The New Age Of The Train
The Independent today has an article which talks about the proposed costs of building HS2. Buried in the text is this paragraph.
Tomorrow, George Osborne, the Chancellor, will announce plans for what has been dubbed HS3, a line across the Pennines that would act as a major economic boost to the North. Writing on page 42 today, the Shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls, and former Transport secretary Lord Adonis dismiss the promise as “pre-election posturing”.
I shall be awaiting what the Chancellor says with interest.
The problem of trains in the North has existed for years and so if the Labour Party was in government unchallenged for over ten years, what did Balls and Adonis do about the problem?
Since 2010, and the Coalition Government, the closet trainspotter, has signed off the first part of the improvement in the North, the Northern Hub and extended electrification in the area.
In my view this improvement across the Pennines is the most important rail project outside London.
It is worthwhile looking at the list of large rail projects that are scheduled for completion in the current decade.
Crossrail and Thameslink
Crossrail and Thameslink should always be thought of together, as they will have an important hub at Farringdon and will revolutionise travel across the wider South East and possibly further. So many journeys like Ipswich-Gatwick, Reading-Cambridge and Brighton-Heathrow will be easy journeys with a just a change or two.
Last night, I had an awful taxi journey back from the Gherkin, as roadworks meant that the whole area was gridlocked. The taxi driver was sceptical about trains, so I asked him, where he lived. As he said Goodmayes, I asked him how he got to Gatwick and he replied it was an awful drive of well over an hour. By train today it takes nearly an hour and a half, with two changes, although both are step-free at Stratford and London Bridge. After Crossrail/Thameslink is fully open the first leg to Farringdon will take 24 minutes and currently the Farrington-Gatwick link takes 50 minutes. But there is only one change at Farringdon and I suspect that trains on the Farringdon-Gatwick leg will be much more numerous and perhaps even quicker.
This sort of improvement will be delivered all over the South East.
But that is not the end of it!
Many towns and cities will be just a train ride away from a Crossrail or Thameslink terminus. Bristol, Norwich, Nottingham, York, to name just three, all have fast trains, that link to the network. So for many there will be no humping heavy cases across the Underground network to go to and from places like Heathrow, Gatwick, Brighton, Cambridge and the Thames Valley.
I think the only problem many passengers will have is choosing the best change to get to their destination. For instance with a journey from Nottingham to Gatwick or Brighton, would you change at Bedford, Luton or St. Pancras. I suspect it wouldn’t be the badly-designed St. Pancras. So if one of the others was just a simple walk across that would get the traffic.
Some main lines out of London and the areas they serve though, are not well-connected to Crossrail or Thameslink. If I go round London, the only major lines that come to mind are the West Coast Main Line and South Western Main Line. There are published ideas about taking Crossrail to Tring or Milton Keynes, which solves the problem of the former, but getting to Waterloo or Clapham Junction from Crossrail or Thameslink is a problem. But then Basingstoke to Reading is down to be electrified as part of the Electric Spine, so surely if this is done properly, this could mean Basingstoke was almost part of Crossrail.
Great Western Main Line Electrification
After Crossrail, the full modernisation of the Great Western Main Line is the next most expensive project at £5-billion.
It is comprehensive and includes resignalling and electrification of the line all the way to Swansea.
It will be interesting when both this project and Crossrail are complete how the passengers use the two lines to get to say Bristol and South Wales. I for one, might get my Crossrail train to Reading to pick up the Great Weatern there, if the interchange is easier.
I suspect too, that in the first few years of the next decade there are various tweaks to the Great Western/Crossrail interface.
Plans at present are for a lot of Crossrail trains to turnback at Paddington, but will train companies tend to run some of these trains past Reading to perhaps Oxford or Basingstoke.
It will all depend on what the passenger statistics throw up!
Northern Hub
Talk to most people, including many in the North, about the Northern Hub and they won’t have heard of it. Even if they’ve seen some of the related projects like Huyton station.
If Crossrail is unlocking tremendous potential for London’s rail network, then the Northern Hub should do the same for the Greater Manchester area. On a personal note, getting from London to places like Bolton, Burnley, Blackburn and Huddersfield should be a lot easier, but even from December 2015, the first tangible benefit of the Northern Hub should be seen, when faster electric trains between Liverpool and Manchester start to run. So they are 1980s-vintage Class 319 trains, but being Mark 3 coach-based, they should scrub-up well and be magnitudes better than Northern Rail’s scrapyard specials.
Electric Spine
If the Northern Hub is invisible, then the Electric Spine is even more so, although it is costed at £800-million.
It will have a big effect, as it creates an all-electric railway from Southampton to the Midlands and ultimately Sheffield, Doncaster and the North, which will enable more freight trains to travel up and down the spine of the country, helping to free up road space on the A34 and the motorways.
Midland Main Line Electrification
Th Midland Main Line electrification is effectively now part of the Electric Spine and the two proects should probably be treated as one large one.
East-West Rail Link
The East West Rail Link is the reinstatement of the old Varsity line between Oxford and Cambridge, via Bletchley and Bedford.
The Western section will be opened first and part of it will be in the Electric Spine. This section of the line will also be used by Chiltern’s new Oxford service, which according to this press release should be fully running by Spring 2016.
But the line’s main use will be probably be freight winding it’s way between Southampton and the West Coast and Midland Main Lines. In some way the East West Rail Link is a new section of the M25 for freight trains.
Cardiff Valley Lines
I explored the Cardiff Valley Lines on my recent trip to Cardiff. This £350-million project is a follow on to the Great Western Electrification. A good proportion of the track-work seems to have already been done.
Greater Bristol Metro
The Greater Bristol Metro is a proposal to upgrade all the local lines around Bristol. The upgrade is not as comprehensive as that in South Wales, but it should provide a substantial improvement to train services in the area.
Waverley Line
Like the East-West Rail Link, the Waverley Line or Borders Railway is another reinstatement of a line closed in the 1960s. I said in this post, that this line has more significance than anybody thinks. If it’s the success I think it will be, it could mean that we see more proposals for reopening lines turning from dreams to reality.
Class 88 Locomotive
I like to think I’m an innovative engineer and the Class 88 locomotive is the sort of idea I like. It is effectively an electric engine with an onboard diesel engine, so that it can work away from the wires if necessary.
I was talking to a freight locomotive driver yesterday and as an example, he said that they have to use diesels like Class 66 or Class 70 to take trains into Felixstowe, as they can’t put wires up in the port, due to cranes loading and unloading the trains.
But I do think that the concept of the Class 88, may well be well suited to the UK, where there are still a considerable number of places like Felixstowe, where there is no overhead wiring, but electric lines aren’t far away.
If the first engines delivered in the next few years, prove to be up to the work, I could see lots of Class 88s working the network.
Conclusions
It is a good time to be any sort of railway engineer!
But the public don’t seem to realise what is happening for the better! And in some places like South Wales, they still think it won’t happen!
There’s certainly an awful lot of taxpayers investment going in! Only time will tell, if it’s worth it!
Should Thameslink Be On The London Tube Map?
in 2018, Crossrail and an updated Thameslink will be fully opened to form an East-West/North-South railway crossing London.
Transport for London has stated that Crossrail will be added to the tube map, but should Thameslink be added as well?
In the 1980s, Thameslink was for a period on the tube map, as is indicated in this forum.
But the tube map is very crowded around St. Pancras and Farringdon, which probably led to the line’s removal.
London Tube Map
To make matters worse the upgraded Thameslink will call at more Underground and Overground stations, like Finsbury Park, Peckham Rye and Denmark Hill.
So to put Thameslink on the 2018 tube map might not be very easy.
How Will The New Govia Thameslink Franchise Benefit Me?
Although I don’t live directly on Thameslink, I’ve just looked at the Wikipedia entry for the new Govia Thameslink franchise. The section on franchise commitments is significant and includes the following.
Half hourly King’s Lynn to London services
At present there’s only one train an hour for much of the day.
Increasing Great Northern suburban services to four trains per hour via Enfield Chase and New Barnet
I think it’s just three trains at the moment. As these go into Moorgate, it will make it easier to get to Barnet, Hertford etc
Great Northern suburban services to run to Moorgate on weekends and weekday evenings
This is a big change and it will help spectators get to the Arsenal. Hopefully, it might take a bit of pressure off Highbury and Islington station, when Arsenal are at home.
Working to extend Oyster to Epsom, Gatwick Airport, Luton Airport Parkway, Welwyn Garden City and Hertford North
This will be good for me, as when I travel to any of these stations, I won’t need to buy a specific ticket, provided I touch in and touch out.
I suspect other things will happen, but this is a good start.
Living close to Essex Road station, I would use it more, if it was open for more hours and was a more welcoming station architecturally.
So on balance it’s a good thing!
Is Whitechapel Station Going To Be A Jewel In The East?
When I wrote about Crossrail as a tourist attraction, I said nothing about the station at Whitechapel.
I probably didn’t as although I use the station regularly, you don’t see much as you pass through except for hoardings with lots of graphics, pictures and information. When I went through last time, I took these pictures.
It shows the construction going on over the two north-south Overground platforms. Crossrail will run east-west about forty metres down. Note how the Underground is on top of the Overground.
I was told by a man in an orange suit, that there will be a bridge over the Overground platforms connecting it all together. Escalators to Crossrail will be going down from between the two Underground platforms, where the blue crane is now situated. The space between the Underground platforms will then be filled in to create a wide island platform with the two lines on either side. It will be an easy step-free interchange from Crossrail to the Underground.
There are some detailed architect’s impressions of the new station here. The page also says this.
The new Whitechapel Crossrail station will use the existing Whitechapel Road entrance to the Whitechapel London Underground and London Overground station.
The Crossrail platforms will be in deep tunnels to the north of the existing station but they will all share a concourse, ticket hall, gateline and station operations room, leading to a fully integrated station that provides an easy step-free interchange between the Crossrail, Hammersmith and City, District and Overground lines.
Transport for London’s, Transport Infrastructure Plan for 2050, states that at some point twenty-four trains per hour will run through this section of the Overground in both directions.
This matches the Crossrail and Thameslink frequencies, so once all these lines are complete, London will have gained a high-frequency H-shaped railway, where journeys like Luton, Brighton or Peterborough to Crystal Palace or Walthamstow might be accomplished using two easy step-free changes. In fact, the biggest problem after 2019 about travel in London, will be choosing which of two or three equally fast and convenient routes is best for you.
Travel is going to be fun!
I suspect Whitechapel might be my entry into Crossrail and Thameslink. I’ll just walk to Dalston Junction, take a four stop journey to Whitechapel and then fan out to the myriad destinations, that can be reached directly from there.
The Anonymous Widower 
