As Adelante_CCT posted above, we keep repeating this discussion. Which raises the question - why does this topic exercise so many people? Including me...!
Firstly - some contradictions I have noticed.
One of the things people seem to want to keep is the concept of the ‘walk up railway’ - that is, it is not necessary to book a ticket for a specific train.
The corollary of this is that historically there is no access control to individual trains (with some minor exceptions, traditional Pullmans for example), even if there is access control to the platforms. This means that if lots of people willingly want to squash themselves onto a train - why stop them? That's what 'walk-up' means.
There are two ways to limit access to trains - one is procedural and the other physical. Procedural implies labelling the trains as ‘pick-up’ or ‘set-down’ only for certain intermediate stations. Any regular traveller will know after a day that a particular train which is nominally non-stop does in fact stop at Reading - and board anyway. Revenue control staff have at the most 20 minutes to work through a crowded train - whether they catch more than two or three chancers in that time is questionable. While the, judging by impressions given here, dozens of other chancers on every train will get off scot-free.
Procedural methods also increase the risk of friction between railway staff trying to enforce the rules and someone who knows that the train stops, has paid over £5000 for his ticket and really doesn’t understand the reason he should not get on this train. He is already tired from his day’s work, hot and sticky from the tube and now there’s this jobsworth trying to stop him getting home.
It really will not be an effective deterrent.
If physical access control to individual trains is required then, apart from using an extended Platform 1 at Paddington, holding lounges as used at airports are the obvious solution. I can just see the Secretary of State for Transport signing off a large sum of money to rebuild the required stations to permit such a solution for a couple of dozen longer distance trains a day... And Platform 1 is a non-starter: even if the track layout permitted it, allowing time for turnaround a maximum of 2.5 trains per hour could use it. That will make a big difference.
Lounges? Or more electrification?
I don’t see there is even a problem if people willingly want to stand in a train if it reduces their journey time home - the 10 minute faster train journey might make a half an hour difference to the arrival time at their front door depending on how connections to buses or other trains work. They may stand for 25 minutes to Reading, but they’ve probably already been squashed into a tube train for the 20 minutes previously, so there’s no big difference. The vestibule of the grown-up train is, on balance, probably more comfortable…
Other posters have raised the issue of the effect this standing has on people travelling further. It certainly makes for a less comfortable journey - but only during the peak periods. The key concept to remember is the railways supply
public, not
individual, transport. Part of the deal is you rub shoulders with the other punters.
The real issue is that of numbers.
Taking all the travel modes into account, rail, car and bus, more people travel to Reading to work than travel from Reading to work elsewhere. This has been the case for some years, the Reading Borough Council's Sites and Detailed Policies Document, dated 2008, states:
6.1.3 Reading is a dense urban Borough, containing a broad variety of uses. It has a thriving economy and is a net importer of labour.
There is clearly some imbalance in flows, especially to and from Paddington, but taking all the flows into account (five rail routes meet at Reading, six if one considers the Oxford and Swindon flows separately) the number of inbound and outbound passengers in each of the morning and evening peak periods is roughly balanced. Stand on Station Approach and just watch...
Some 17 million people start and finish their journeys in Reading every year to which must be added the 4 million who change trains. This must be seen against the 3.5 million who use Didcot, the 6.5 million using Oxford and the 3.5 million using Swindon. Comparisons are sometimes made with the situation at Watford Junction and Milton Keynes where ‘pick up only’ and ‘set down only’ is used to try to segregate the long and shorter distance flows. The situations are very different, both in the number of long distance trains stopping and the size of the traffic flows. Watford Junction has 8 million entries and exits and 600,000 interchanges each year. Milton Keynes has 6.8 million entries and exits (one third of the number at Reading) and 462,000 interchanges (a factor 10 lower). Procedural methods to separate the flows have more chance of success with these lower numbers.
The demands on the services are significantly different.
The counterpeak flows west along the Thames Valley to Reading are significant - one only has to stand on the platform in the morning watching the number of people disembarking to realise this - but the to-London flows in the morning (and the reverse in the evening) are, of course, larger. The oft repeated image of the stereotype Reading commuter uniquely insisting on fast trains to London is untrue -
any commuter from anywhere would like a fast train to London, it's just that there are a lot of them using Reading.
To serve all these disparate flows is difficult and the timetable is a compromise. The additional capacity offered by the
IETs▸ , the 387s and, closer in to London, Crossrail will be welcome, but it will be impossible to give everyone what they would like. But they might get what they are prepared to pay for...
Click on the map to explore geographics
