coppercapped
Established Member
The situation has arisen because the project has been expanded into something that it wasn't originally meant to be. Those travelling from Reading will have 387s with toilets. Crossrail is TFL! If the trains all turned at Maidenhead, the western arm of Crossrail would resemble many of the other metro routes in London except that it is double-ended. The average journey time on Crossrail will between 15 and 30 minutes. Even if all journeys not including the core were averaged, it would still be well under 30 minutes. The railway is a mass transport system that is intended to cater for the majority. This can't be compromised for a (relatively) small proportion who might want toilet facilities very frequently or the few who travel the length of the route end to end. The route should be considered as two metro routes, each with an overlapping core section, not a line to serve the major tourist route from the Thames Valley to the TOWIE* highlights of commuter belt Essex. How many people travel from West Ruislip to Epping, or Cockfosters to Uxbridge as a proportion of the total.
Think of the 455/466 services with SWT and Southern, the Windsor 707 trains, the 476 trains to SE London, the LO trains around the city and of course the longer LU journeys. . As metro services, the majority of their passengers will be regular travellers who will quickly adjust their travelling pattern to all the facilities, frequencies and durations of services on offer.
* for those who haven't heard of it, 'TOWIE' = The Only Way Is Essex. I couldn't start to describe it here, - just Google it.
If Crossrail has turned into something that it wasn't meant to be in terms of routes, then the trains should have been adapted accordingly.
Even with the western terminus at Maidenhead the route lengths each side of London are unbalanced and are more so with the extension to Reading. An equivalent distance west of central London as that from Liverpool Street to Shenfield places one at about Slough. If Crossrail was intended mainly to be a metro service then an ideal terminus would have been Windsor - reached by a dive-under (and underground platforms because of the geometry) at Slough. Windsor to Slough is GWR's busiest branch and connecting it directly to central London would have benefitted both commuters and the town's tourist business. It would have left longer distance travellers with trains better adapted to their needs.