How did Newark get to be so lucky?

[Waverley125]

As Grantham is the station I use most often (after Leeds) I can confirm that it it usually very busy. Waiting for the 7:25 to Edinburgh on NYE morning there was easily a good 20-30 people waiting to get on going north, all of whom would have had to change at Doncaster if Grantham lost its services.

Also remember several stations serve as railheads for larger nearby towns-particularly Retford, which is a railhead for Worksop, Mansfield, Gainsborough and, for some people, Sheffield.

4-tracking the ECML between Huntingdon and Doncaster would greatly improve capacity, and would give the potential to extend FCC services northwards, though if this did happen I'd hope to see new stations at Stamford Parkway (Essendine), Tuxford, Bawtry & Rossington

 

[HSTEd]

It would be a very expensive job to build a new Stoke tunnel, add a fourth track, presumably on the west side towards Grantham and then on the east towards Newark, remodel the junction with the Nottingham line and build a new Barkston tunnel for a start!

Although it would be ideal, I think in reality it's a non-starter. And a very expensive way of saving a few minutes on the KX-Leeds schedules.

I actually did some thinking on this topic a while back, I concluded that it would be better to refit the four tracks north of Peterborough to be paired by speed and not by direction, because in that case the slow lines could be diverted via Allington if a new chord was built north of the Grantham North tunnel and there would be no need for a junction of any kind at the branch line divergence of Grantham as it would be a simple divergence.


Anyway: back on topic, Grantham is suprisingly busy at all times of day and has a rather large commuter flow that would dissapear if it was required to change at Peterborough to avoid an hour and a half or more journey into london from there.

Although I might be biased as Grantham is my home station and I like being able to take trains that have first class (using my PRIV pass)

 

[34D]

Thank you, you just destroyed the outer commuter market on the ECML.

Grantham and Newark see substantial commuter traffic into London which would dissapear if a change at Peterborough was required or if the trains took half an hour longer (if they were an extension of existing FCC services).

The WCML is an entirely different line to the ECML and different solutions are appropriate, by the standards of towns on the East Coast route Newark and Grantham are quite sizeable.

The other way of looking at this is that people (from say a 20 mile radius) drive to Grantham because this is where the trains go from. If there was a good service from Lincoln and Sleaford to London the people would park there instead (or indeed, go further west to Nottingham.

Lets not forget that the eureka timetable has introduced an hourly fast service London non-stop to York, aswell as the two-hourly London-York stopper, so in a way, the suggestions of the OP are being progressed.

 

[317666]

I believe there was a proposal at one point to run WAGN services as far north as Doncaster?

When the Class 317s still had destination blinds rather than LED displays, they actually had Spalding as a destination. Maybe electrify the line via Spalding and run trains to Doncaster that way?

 

[cle]

Would be quite a weird, slow way but I guess with cheaper fares that via EC at Peterborough, it could be a reasonable route and free up small EMUs for elsewhere. Especially if these were the fast ones with very few stops.