It would be highly desirable for them to stop at Clapham Junction, picking up only on the Down. But it's not enormously practical. There's not really a need to stop anywhere else beyond the current two intermediate stops.
Would it cause a major problem though if they left a minute or two earlier out of Victoria, as someone else suggested? The previous service on the fast lines is xx24/xx54 so presumably they could go at 27/28 and 57/58. The nice round 00/30 departure time has been lost already anyway, so preserving that is no longer a consideration.
Not sure if it would work in the up direction though.
Well, Victoria-Brighton trains via Gatwick are currently 58mins, not 62 (admittedly slower than the 52 mins London-Brighton in the good old days). Adding a Clapham Junction stop would still mean doing the journey within the hour.
Its value as a fast (-er than Thameslink) Brighton service would still exist if it had an extra stop and if it didn't charge a premium ... more so in the latter case of course.
The paradox, as I see it, is that if the idea really was to get airport passengers on a separate service, to save clogging up other busy trains on that route, then they wouldn't charge a ridiculous premium and price people away from using it. Because of the price differential, most Brits I know would never go near it for a London-Gatwick journey. No, the rationale is to charge a rip-off price from the tourist market - people who don't know better and fall for the con and pay through the nose.
In 1996 it looked like it was just 51 minutes (dep Victoria xx08, arr Brighton xx59, calling East Croydon only). I think it was still CIGs and BIGs then; the buffet symbol is present which would suggest so.
This is an improvement on the 60 minutes (xx00-xx00) from the non-stop days and the
61 minutes 58 minutes from 1982 (
xx05-xx06, xx08-xx06, also East Croydon only).
(
EDIT: apologies, I looked at an atypical hour, the 1005 departure which leaves three minutes earlier than the normal pattern).
All timings sourced from Timetable World.
How did they manage to shave off
10 7 minutes between 1982 and 1996 incidentally? And when did it happen? (I did visit the BML regularly in the mid-to-late 80s but cannot remember the exact timings of the fasts).