Before Crossrail – Romford
An Important Schizophrenic Station – Rating 6/10
Romford is an important station on this line and it is the middle of a fairly large High Street shopping centre.
Although it has some marble facings in the booking hall, it has terrible stairs and passages everywhere.
The station is crying out for lifts, especially as when Crossrail arrives some might transfer to Crossrail here from services that come from further afield.
Before Crossrail – Gidea Park
The Bridge Is Falling Down – 6/10
Gidea Park is another station where I’ve not been before.
One of the station staff told me, that the bridge had obvious corrosion problems and it was being replaced with one with lifts.
Before Crossrail – Harold Wood
A Tidy Station With A Bad Bridge – 6/10
Harold Wood is a station that is deep in my mind, as it the Zone 6 boundary, so I’ve bought many tickets from the station to Ipswich and other places in East Anglia.
But I’d never visited the station before.
The station has toilets but a bad bridge and no lifts.
It won’t take much to get it ready for Crossrail.
Before Crossrail – Brentwood
A Tidy Station With Good Access – Rating 7/10
Brentwood station needs very little work to bring it up to the required standard. But then it has been upgraded in recent years.
A surprise here was the number and excellent standard of the toilets.
Before Crossrail – Shenfield
A New Platform, Signs And Displays And It’s Ready – Rating 8/10
Shenfield is the station at the end of the Eastern Branch of Crossrail.
Other than creating a new platform for Crossrail, the station is nearly ready, except for sign-age and display screens.
There are certain issues that will have to be decided before Crossrail opens.
- At present Shenfield is outside of Zone 6 and I can’t get there using my Freedom Pass. Will that change, when Crossrail opens?
- Will the fast and slow lines at the station, be reorganised to make interchange between Southend and Norwich/Ipswich services to Crossrail, just a simple walk across the platform?
- The station is in Essex, but should it have bus maps and signs to the London standard?
I don’t think that there’ll be much controversy when this station opens.
Before Crossrail – The Shenfield Metro
The Shenfield Metro is a six trains-per-hour local service from Shenfield to London Liverpool Street, run using over thirty years old Class 315 trains.
In the next few years the service will be incorporated into Crossrail and form an Eastern branch that will be linked through the central tunnels to heathrow and Reading. Wikipedia says this about the service, when Crossrail is up and running.
At peak hours the frequency of service will increase from seven trains per hour to 12, necessitating the construction of a new 210-metre long platform 6, which will be built to the north of platform 5, replacing one of the existing three western sidings.
The trains will also be longer at ten opposed to eight coaches, so there will be a gigantic increase in capacity.
Changes start next year, when in May the Shenfield Metro will be taken over and run by Crossrail from May.
So I went to Stratford and then took a train to Shenfield, before coming back a stop at a time, to see the current service in action.
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.
Thoughts On The Borders Railway
I’ve been looking at a page, which describes progress on the Borders Railway.
To my untrained eye, progress appears slow, but as I can’t find anybody saying it is on the Internet, I suspect I’m wide of the mark.
I did find some commentators sceptical about the railway, but unless someone drops a complete haggis, I suspect that the railway will be a success.
Just look what happened with the London Overground, which wasn’t a new railway, but the rebuilding of a zombie line, where the trains smelt like travelling urinals.
Near me, Transport for London took the old East London Railway, which had been part of the old Metropolitan Line and extended it with some new infrastructure to create the East London Line we have today.
They made two miscalculations with the East London Line and its cousin; the North London Line.
In the first place, they underestimated the passenger demand and they have been playing catch-up ever since, my lengthening trains and platforms.
And then, I don’t think they realised how much property prices would rise along the updated lines.
I also think that no-one has found a way to properly model, the novelty factor, which often gets someone to use a new railway or road in the first place.
I know the Scots are canny people and don’t exaggerate, but I would be very surprised if the costs and predictions for the Borders Railway weren’t very conservative, as they had to satisfy so many different politicians, companies and agencies.
East Londoners immediately liked the London Overground and used it, as they’d never seen anything like it. Clean smart trains running to time, even if some of the stations weren’t up to the standard of the trains, got them excited and they recommended it to their friends. Young people got a new way to get to that decent job a couple of boroughs away. New trains were so much more cool than red buses.
I have a feeling that the people of the Borders will embrace their new railway in the same way and in a year or two’s time, they will be clamouring for more trains and extension of the railway all the way to Carlisle.
So at a time when Scotland is probably getting more independence, the railways seem to be getting joined up again!
One final thought concerns the affect a successful Borders Railway may have on England. Will it give further impetus to the reopening of long-closed rail lines?
London To Geneva Has Just Got Easier
I like Geneva, as did my father, who actually lived there for a time. I’ve flown once recently when I went to CERN and I’ve also returned by train.
The train journey via Paris can be a bit tedious, as you have to get across Paris, which often isn’t the easiest thing to do.
But now according to Modern Railways, Eurostar are offering a service four days a week, with a simpler change at Lille. Here’s what they say.
The service will be available on Mondays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays. Departure from London St Pancras International at 12.58 will allow passengers to arrive in Geneva at 20.16 (local time) with a 37-minute connection at Lille. The return departure from Geneva will be at 08.30, with a 33-minute connection at Lille leading to an arrival at St Pancras at 14.05. On Sundays the return departure runs exactly two hours later, with a slightly longer connection at Lille but the same overall journey time to St Pancras. Tickets can be purchased from Thursday 9 October with return fares starting from £116.
That sounds like a relaxed way to do the trip.
For one of my Home Runs, the 08:30 departure from Geneva would be ideal, as Geneva is a good place to spend a relaxed night, after racing across Europe on umpteen trains.
Sheffield To Cambridge By Train
As I wanted to have lunch with an old friend in Cambridge I came home the slow way by taking a train from Sheffield and then changing at Ely.
The journey took five minutes over three hours, which included a waits at both Nottingham and Ely of over ten minutes.
I doubt we’ll see any improvements in this service in the next few years, but it really was a slow journey in a two coach Class 158 trains. Perhaps as some of the InterCity 125 are released as the new Class 800 trains are delivered, we might see services like Liverpool to Norwich run by these trains. After all a lot of the route between Liverpool and Norwich in a few years time will allow trains at over a hundred miles per hour.
There has been talk of electrifying the cross-country routes from Ipswich to Peterborough via Ely, specifically for freight. I think it will happen, but until Liverpool to Sheffield and Nottingham to Grantham are also electrified, it could be many years before electric trains cross from one side of England to the other.
The Anonymous Widower 