Delays and retrenchment on London high capacity programs

[whole diary]

[grahame]

From London connections.

London, where they struggle to reduce the gap between trains to less that two minutes, in contrast to my home station where we would love the gaps to be less than two hours!

A very interesting article that has kept me reading into the early hours

No Longer World Class Capacity

For many years TfL^» (Transport for London - about) have run an investment programme grandly entitled ‘World Class Capacity’. Its worthy aim was to introduce a frequency of trains on the Northern, Jubilee and Victoria that could be considered world class. This generally meant running 36 trains per hour (tph). As the years have gone by the objectives of the programme have been diluted with only the Victoria line achieving its original aims – an achievement it has only now (November 2019) finally achieved. We look at the programme, what it did achieve and to what extent outstanding items are expected to come to fruition.

[stuving]

36 thp? Huh!

I've requoted the 1965 report "A Railway Plan for London" (P18) below.

Note that figure of 40 tph isn't given as just an absolute limit never to be exceeded and perhaps never approached in reality. It says "can be operated" - then, but apparently not now even with the addition of this fancy CBTC^▸ (Communications-based train control) stuff that's supposed to increase tph.