Absolutely. For instance, Cambridge to King's Cross is 1,450,154... and this pattern of flows to London being massively higher is true for all major stations on the network.
Brighton is the second busiest station in the South East Region, after Gatwick. It is an important destination in its own right. For East of England Thameslink stations, including Cambridge, Brighton is the only seaside destination that can be reached directly by train. Cambridge-Brighton in 2024/25 is unlikely to be skewed by summer weekend journeys: the trains didn't run on many weekends because of engineering work for Cambridge South station.
It's busy because it's less than an hour by train from London!I must take a trip to Brighton some time, find out what I’m missing! I had family in Lewes up until a few years ago, so have visited Brighton in the past - found it a highly average seaside resort with not much to differentiate it from any other. I guess one thing going for it is that it’s nicer than Great Yarmouth, Clacton or Skegness, but that’s not saying much!
Guess I’m missing something, but I don’t get why it’s so busy.
There were major problems on the Brighton Line that day and removing that service (along with Gatwick Express) is one of the first casualties when they have to reduce services overall.Was a rather quick fix.
Incident: Farringdon | National Rail
Lines reopened between London Blackfriars and London St Pancras International. Find details of all current incidents on National Rail Enquiries.www.nationalrail.co.uk
Brighton to Cambridge is suspended according to NR, heavily disrupted service on everything else looking at RTT. Again, a failure of the TL network in terms of not being able to avoid the core.
My recollection is that the boards on the platform show a diagram of the train as "ABCDE" or "BCD" depending if it's 12FLU or 8RLU.
How intuitive is that to the non-rail geek? Sounds like it is information aimed at staff.
It's very intuitive, example below. Unfortunately it is not accompanied by any automated announcements (not that you'd hear it because the platform staff prefer to shout over the PA).
I'm afraid if The Railway feels that notice is in any way intuitive to communicating that the next train will not stop at the front or rear platform sections, relative to where the passenger might be standing, then we have part of the problem. Exacerbated by the additional notice underneath that passengers for certain stations need to walk up to the front of the platform. Which apparently this train stops short of.
I don't see how it's not intuitive. The issue is that this type of zoning is not used anywhere else so people are not used to it. It seems to work well in Switzerland and Germany (provided the train stops in the right position for the latter...).
To be slightly balanced and im an Earlswood user they do put calls on the 9Jxx Horsham-Peterborough service to compensate so its not as bad as this. That said it takes far too long on some days for control to react to this given the 9Rxx Three Bridges-Bedford service group is first up for culling whenever there is an issue along its operating length. Also we are still reduced to drivers being given special stop orders at East Croydon or Gatwick Airport and you would have thought in this day and age there are better ways to achieve that.
It kind of is.
If they were that clever in life, they'd realise it's not a twelve car with the unit number on the front
But why should the reliability of a network be impacted for a proportionally small amount of passengers? IMO these passengers would be better served by reliable connections than an unreliable direct service.
Although the zones aren't perfectly aligned with carriages (let alone doors), partly because of the mix of carriage lengths on GWR, and are absent from some very busy stations like Bristol Temple Meads. I hope now the roof works are done at Temple Meads, GWR are putting/will put the zones in, because passengers are regularly getting caught out by short trains stopping quite far away from the subway in the long London End platforms when reversing or terminating to work back out east.
It may be an important origin & destination in terms of passenger numbers (it is one of the best connected places for London commuting after all), certainly I don't think anyone is denying it is, but when you look at the ODM it's clear that virtually every Thameslink station (including Brighton) is overwhelmed by flows to London and also to local stations. On their own the cross-city flows seem pretty large but relatively they are miniscule and don't exactly justify unreliability.
I'm also sure that someone going on holiday once a year, even a family with luggage for instance, is not going to be too bothered about having to use the Tube once a year. The argument for direct running to Gatwick & Brighton needs to be taken with a pinch of salt in general as most people make these sorts of journeys only around once a year. And with this logic shouldn't we link all seaside destinations to everywhere? Brighton is certainly not everyone's first choice, neither is Gatwick as an airport.
It's actually 2 MPs for Brighton plus the Hove MP whose nearest station is also Brighton.
From all of this it seems to me that Thameslink only really exists because of operational constraints. It isn’t an effective cross London route like Crossrail or even the Underground and struggles to justify the longer distance links that it makes. Because of the lack of northern Inner Suburban routes in London, most of these always being or eventually becoming a part of the Underground, the places that would have benefited from a crossrail style service were avoided. This is unlike the south, where there are plenty of inner suburban routes (like the Sutton loop and the Greenwich line) that benefit from a crossrail service. Thameslink probably wouldn’t serve Cambridge and Peterborough if King’s Cross were desaturated of their Inter-City traffic. If only HS2 could be built fully!
I really must protest! I've heard Brighton called many things, but bland? Not for nothing is it known as London-by-the sea - which is why, like you, I don't like it much. If you want bland, try Worthing. It's actually quite nice!
Gatwick serves a different market to Heathrow. And the route through the core is hugely popular among those of us from Cambridge and Peterborough and stations on those lines. Thameslink was a game changer and the difference is stark. It makes travel so much easier without having to take large pieces of luggage up and down escalators/or find lifts and going on the underground. Thameslink has been absolutely transformational.
City Thameslink is the 16th most popular flow from Cambridge, Farringdon is 26th and Gatwick is 28th. Oxford is 39th and the highest without a direct train, followed by Edinburgh in 44th and York 48th. About 40,000 passenger journeys a year are made between Cambridge and Gatwick Airport, over 100 a day.
It bothers me hugely and the direct train makes the difference between me choosing Gatwick as an airport. I know anecdotally my position is shared pretty much by everyone I speak to who uses it.
It relatively is not particularly popular. I'm certainly not denying people use it, hell I often have a use for it to get from the BML to Finsbury Park, but clearly more people pick the faster option from nearby King's Cross. The 300k flow from Cambridge to St Pancras is nothing to scoff at but it's simply dwarfed by King's Cross as I said.
What you have described is what the core essentially is, a central interchange corridor that can be used to avoid all the troubles of Tube interchanges. You could run services to inner suburban stations and then passengers coming from further away simply change inside the core, by, get this, stepping off the train and back onto another one in a few minutes!
That was the reason for its creation first and foremost, and the benefits of links to Gatwick and stuff are more so 'residual' if you ask me. Of course if we stopped paying unnecessary money elsewhere we could build massive underground termini in central London, but modern railway planning shows there are pretty big benefits of abandoning the old principle of getting on, say, a fast train from Cambridge or wherever to King's Cross and then using the Tube to get to your workplace or to another terminus for onwards travel - essentially the mainline railway turns into one connected thing and the concept of a smaller-size metro becomes more and more redundant. This ultimately improves connectivity, makes any needed interchanges easier, and helps with overcrowding, but such a railway needs higher standards in terms of infrastructure and crew arrangements. If it cannot be reliable the vast majority of the time we might as well have just built those massive underground termini...
I'm not up in time for the morning peak, but at least half of my day trips out finish on one of the evening peak Brighton-Cambridge trains, and I've boarded at every station between East Croydon and St Pancras. There is a huge amount of both alighting and boarding at all of them, and Finsbury Park too, with all sorts of people making all sorts of journeys. Even at East Croydon, the trains arrive quite full, they are packed by the time the train leaves Blackfriars, and they only start to feel empty after Hitchin. And because class 700s have loadings on the information screens, I can see how the train is filling up and emptying out.
I am sure that you are wrong here. Families with luggage are very bothered about using the Tube. And the same goes for elderly people and people with mobility issues. The alternative to the direct rail journey Cambridge-Gatwick isn't using the Tube, it is going by road. As it happens, one of my neighbours had family visiting from Spain earlier this month. They flew home from Gatwick and got the Thameslink from Cambridge. They would not have gone by rail without the direct train, a family member would have had to drive them to Gatwick in the car.