On the other hand, Dorking trains do get tangled up with up trains from the Arun valley. The up trains have a sub optimal departure time from Horsham to avoid a conflict. The proposal you mention would be used by 17 down trains and 15 up trains on weekdays.
Hear hear! I think that it would have some important benefits for passengers such as reduced journey time to beyond Dorking and better connections from the Arun to Mole Valley lines. I'd be interested to know if this was planned for that siding and never happened, or if there is some other purpose. There are a lot of facing turnouts into the engineering yard, after all.
Back to the diversionary trains yesterday, my amateur synopsis is that it went more smoothly than previously. Reviewing my footage it seems that most of the trains were well-loaded, although not packed. Presumably this is because more people are travelling than when these diversions usually take place in the winter. Most trains were running within 5 minutes of schedule where I observed them, approximately in the middle of their journey. I noticed the signallers at Dorking were holding re-starting SWR/SN terminators, which really helped with regulation of the 1Zxx. A few trains lost time at Sutton, Horsham, and Streatham North Jnc. A couple of trains were really late (30+ mins) and had to be cut short at Three Bridges, and late in the evening a train lost 45 mins at Epsom due to a passenger alarm (according to RTT). As always, I'm impressed that the line managed to cope reasonably well with 2 tph fast on top of its normal services – evidence perhaps that the Sutton & Mole Valley lines are underutilised.
