Not only did it have a station, it had a set of water troughs - perhaps even fed from GU canal? (Or is my memory gone awry?)
That board was not on the platforms but on the Network Rail access point adjacent to the Up Slow. At the time there was a local campaign for the station to be re-opened. See last entry on this page, with a picture of the board...
The catchment is actually quite small - it wouldn't get a big car park and once you've driven from Roade that far you'd just continue on to MK. It's really only Castlethorpe (pop. 1,000), Hanslope (2,200), and possibly Hartwell (1,800) that are within the catchment of such a station - and given that 80% of that catchment will need to drive to reach the station, the amount of traffic it would generate is really quite small.
When Northants County Council wanted to reopen Roade, 25-30 years ago, its idea was just for platforms on the slow, but BR (or Railtrack) also wanted platforms on the fast lines.
Not necessarily, if you were prepared to accept not serving Roade during possessions or disruption. It would be a mirror image of Long Buckby in that case. I personally would look for an additional set of crossovers allowing Fast Line-Northampton moves but not putting in Weedon-Slow line crossovers, unless you were to abolish Hanslope Junction completely.
This would be an interesting idea, especially now that the Roade Bypass is on the way. As long as you can get enough space to marshal the buses properly (which looks reasonably possible next to the station site).
The Euston Birmingham slows never get diverted anyway, so its moot. The only LNWR train that would run is the Crewe.
Not in the last 7 or 8 years they haven't on a planned basis. No capacity.
They were diverted at a frequency of roughly 1tph last Sunday, here's just one example of one of the services: https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/service/gb-nr:P69430/2023-07-16/detailed
If Castlethorpe did get reopened (very unlikely), would it attract more passenger than Cheddington station does now? I am not sure Cheddington is any better in terms of its catchment area.
Why not add crossovers and keep Hanslope?
By a very slim margin - there are actually houses at Castlethorpe.
Largely maintenance costs and the performance risk of failure. My guesstimate is that the best option operationally would be to remove Hanslope completely and install both sets of crossovers north of Roade, but that the costs of the intervention at Hanslope are greater than the savings so the question is whether or not you need to allow Northampton trains out onto the fasts at Roade, or if the risk of being trapped behind a stopper between Roade and Hanslope is low enough that you just accept dropping Roade out of the schedules when Northampton is closed.
Pathing should not be a problem. With some Northampton stops lasting 11 minutes (southbound) or 14 minutes (northbound0, at first sight, all you need to do is to reduce the duration of Northampton stops.
Are these lengthy stops at Northampton, a pathing issue? Why the length of time? I was recently on a NS- Euston which ran 8 minutes late, but got back on time with a brief stop at Northampton.
Pathing, cleaning, tanking and crew changeovers on most services through Northampton
Wow, normally they don't consider it. Presumably as the Crewe cannot run it kept the journey time down to the Trent Valley stations.
You are arguably trying to join two services together that have to hit a slot on the WCML south of Milton Keynes and again between Coventry and New St.
They do have a tendency to get freight overtaking when at Northampton, but it shouldn't be a show stopper.
Certainly not until HS2 takes the fast traffic away, and even then there'll be enough legacy traffic that stopping a train in the middle of the fast lines will burn through capacity like nobody's business.
Journey time has a monetary value. Slow trains down too much and their value decreases.
