London’s railway renaissance

There’s a lot going on with London’s transport at the moment, as Robert Williams reports.

Over recent years, upgrades to London’s Underground have gained most of the news headlines, with the new railway under London – Crossrail – also taking shape. The Prime Minister recently called for a new age of infrastructure building to match the ‘confidence and ambition’ of the Victorians. It’s already here. In a few years we may look back on this as the start of a railway renaissance for the capital’s railways.

This is a far more positive scene than anything since at least the 1970s, when investment on the Tube had been at a ‘patch and mend’ level since the war and there was even a proposal to close the North London line, now a key component of London’s orbital rail network (of which more in a moment). The Snow Hill tunnel had long been closed, separating north and south London on what is now the Thameslink route, and the number of passengers on the Underground had slumped to a level that was below half today’s total of over 1.1bn annually.

Suburban rail services suffered from long term under-investment and neglect and a mainline station – Marylebone – was threatened with closure, and a proposal to concrete over railway tracks and use them for bus services was seriously considered.

Now, there are major improvements at Paddington, Victoria and Waterloo stations. At Blackfriars, the bridge has been widened by nine metres and has been 85 per cent rebuilt — while remaining open for commuter services still crossing it.

Crossrail is simply the biggest current rail scheme, and the best known. However, it is the smaller, less grandiose schemes which are really transforming the capital. Thameslink already crosses the capital from north to south, The Snow Hill tunnel was re-opened to passenger trains after 72 years, allowing passenger services to begin on the full Thameslink network in May 1988. Following the success of the original scheme, plans were drawn up to upgrade the Thameslink network to cope with increasing passenger numbers which have led to severe peaktime overcrowding.

Thameslink’s upgrade is London’s biggest rail project after Crossrail. The first phase of the Thameslink upgrade has already delivered significant benefits. New trains and routes have been introduced and the first longer 12 carriage trains are using the Thameslink route.

OrbiRail

And then we have the real Cinderellas of London’s transport system, particularly the London Overground. In 2007 the then

London Mayor Ken Livingstone laid out his vision for a clean, reliable, trusted, orbital service. The origins of that idea actually emerged in 2001. The Mayor’s Transport Strategy issued in July of that year argued that Crossrail was not the only major railway improvement that London needed to deal with its growing passenger numbers. It also needed something else – ‘OrbiRail’.

OrbiRail was intended to be the full integration of London’s orbital railways – the loop around the edges to Crossrail’s dash through the middle. Better integration and services along these lines would, Mayor Livingstone and TfL argued, not only improve services for those already living along those lines, but also have a positive impact on London’s radial traffic. This is because it would provide an opportunity for people to interchange onto other services further out, syphoning off a portion of the traffic that normally travelled into the Capital only to travel out again, or to join a Tube line that they could have joined further out.

Over subsequent years, these plans continued to progress. OrbiRail would become ‘The Overground’ and the early years of the new millenium turned out to be an almostperfect circumstance for it to develop in, now that the idea had champions in the form of both TfL and the Mayor and investment was available both from Government and Olympic coffers.

Since taking over the network and establishing the London Overground service, TfL has made significant enhancements to the level and quality of services. It has introduced new, longer rolling stock; upgraded infrastructure to run more frequent services; and refurbished stations and offers higher standards of customer service.

TfL has also doubled frequencies between Stratford and Willesden Junction, Clapham Junction and Willesden Junction, and Gospel Oak and Barking. Together with the train lengthening, this has increased capacity by 150 per cent on those sections. London Overground routes now include: Croydon to Highbury & Islington; Richmond/Clapham Junction to Stratford; Watford Junction to Euston and Gospel Oak to Barking.

The final link in the London Overground service opened to passengers in December 2012, bringing the first orbital railway to the capital in 128 years. The link has been completed with the construction of 1.3km of track south-west of Surrey Quays station, linking the East London line section of London Overground with existing track to the north east of Queen’s Road Peckham. Such unglamorous journeys are what London’s commuter rail network is for.

Opening up the East

East London was certainly unglamorous, at least until the Olympic Games were held in Straftord. In a part of London known for rather poor transport links, the Docklands Light Railway (DLR), the line was originally opened in 1987 to provide a modest public transport system for the growing London Docklands development, with a dozen trains serving a route just 7.5 miles (12 kilometres) in length.

However, it has since grown dramatically. Today the railway has 45 stations, 46km of track, and 149 units working in multiples of two or three. Usage has risen to 86 million passengers a year. and the DLR’s finest hour to date was during the Olympics when 7.2 million passengers were carried on the system – double its normal levels. A new daily record of more than 500,000 passengers was set on 3 August during the Olympic Games.

Howard Smith, the chief operating officer at TfL London Rail said: “Opening new railways in London is less a case of building new ones and more a case of finding old bits you can reopen.”

London has been enjoying an unprecedented boom in railway investment. It really is a remarkable picture and indeed the only odd aspect is that it has attracted such little attention; it suits national politicians not to shout too loudly about just how much investment is going into the capital.

Do we have a new Victorian age of innovation and imagination? As British Rail used to say, “We’re getting there.” n