Cross-london mainline link

[Relativenewbie]

I realise that there's a historical precedent for terminal stations in London being outside central London, due to a 19th century act of parliament forcing them to not be in the centre. Does anyone know if there have ever been plans to link up some of the terminals to permit through traffic through London? Obviously there's the tube and crossrail (in the future) but what I'm referring to is actual long distance services continuing through to the other side (I suppose a bit like thameslink but central rather than east of central, and more intercity services). this has been done in Brussels in the 60s and in Berlin, first with an East to West axis (the Stadtbahn) running on viaduct and then a North to south axis in a tunnel more recently.

Possible linkups could include Waterloo and Victoria linking to Liverpool Street to permit commuter services across London or Kings Cross/St Pancras/Euston to Charing Cross for services right from the North to the South East.

 

[WatcherZero]

Crossrail, for most other long distance services they would get a better boost by being routed around London rather than through it.

 

[Via Bank]

Crossrail, for most other long distance services they would get a better boost by being routed around London rather than through it.

That's debatable. Remember those awful London Crosslink services that Anglia Railways used to run from Basingstoke to Stratford (and sometimes on to Ipswich, depending on the alignment of the stars and the colour of the Guard's underwear that day)? They had to route via the NLL and took just over an hour to get from Feltham to Stratford, and there was a minimal number of departures daily.

 

[Mojo]

Have a look at the scanned BR documents on the London Reconnections blog about plans from the 1980s to join up lines into various terminals to other routes on the south side of town.

http://londonreconnections.blogspot.com/2011/04/what-if-crossrail-1980.html

 

[b0b]

Have a look at the scanned BR documents on the London Reconnections blog about plans from the 1980s to join up lines into various terminals to other routes on the south side of town.

http://londonreconnections.blogspot.com/2011/04/what-if-crossrail-1980.html

little off topic but a fantastic image of an APT at East Croydon.

 

[EM2]

Thameslink does a bit of that, although the longest single run is currently Bedford to Brighton, you can do Sheffield - Brighton with only one change.

 

[jopsuk]

Unless you designed it so that the ONLY stop inside the m25 was the (deep underground) central london stop, then you'd have to have some sort of plan in place to stop the intercity trains being used as a "fast tube"- one of the problems that somewhat blights Thameslink is that the long-distance bedford-Brighton trains also have to function as short-hop metro trains through the core. Crossrail won't be quite so blighted, as it is explicitly a "metro" service.

Also, the number of common, viable terminal-terminal combinations mean that you'd still not please even a third (I'd reckon) of people unless you had a deeply complicated network with trains running from everywhere to everywhere.

 

[island]

Unless you designed it so that the ONLY stop inside the m25 was the (deep underground) central london stop, then you'd have to have some sort of plan in place to stop the intercity trains being used as a "fast tube"- one of the problems that somewhat blights Thameslink is that the long-distance bedford-Brighton trains also have to function as short-hop metro trains through the core. Crossrail won't be quite so blighted, as it is explicitly a "metro" service.

New York manages to avoid that problem by the fares structure and having drop-off only/pick-up only stops.

 

[Nym]

You mean like Virgin did until pepole moaned at them and they changed it?