Fantasy: If there was only one London terminal/mainline station

[PTR 444]

Looking at the most important station in London thread, it made me think about where the ideal location for a station in the capital would be in the event that only one London terminal was ever built. Obviously the reason we have so many terminals today is a result of history, when the Victorian railway companies attempted to compete against each other and make interchanging between lines as difficult as possible. What if however, instead of competing, the companies co-operated and worked towards building a single “hautbanhof style” station for all arterial railways that was in an ideal location in the city for its amenities? Where would the ideal location for such a station have been at the time?

Another scenario is what if rail frequencies fell to such a low level that all services could fit in just one London Terminal. We saw this last spring at the height of the first lockdown, but because of the events of history, all trains had to use their normal terminals. If the Victorians had built an orbital railway connecting all main lines and allowing trains from every mainline to use any London terminal, which one would have been best to divert all trains to in terms of capacity and connectivity if all the others had to close?*

*Not that I support closing any London terminals in the real world. This is just me playing devils advocate.

 

[LSWR Cavalier]

I would be best to have no impractical cul-de-sac, dead end stations, rather lots of joining up and through running instead, just like in Berlin, there used to be terminals there but I cannot think of one now, except the S+U Bahn termini in the suburbs.

 

[Mcr Warrior]

I would suggest that the premise of this thread is flawed, and that (i) London is too large a place to have ever had just one terminal station, and (ii) as @LSWR Cavalier has pointed out, a "terminal" dead-end station would be totally impractical.

 

[JonathanH]

There has never been an opportunity to consolidate the railway stations in London in one location. That is why they built underground lines. It should be noted that Paddington, Marylebone, Euston, St Pancras and Kings Cross are all basically on the same road. Liverpool Street and Fenchurch Street reach roughly the same longitude from the east.

Under the premise of the original question, let's suppose that one station could be built at Trafalgar Square. That location is not within walking distance of the City. The premise of a single station for London is flawed and with so much underground infrastructure in the city, it could not happen now.

I suggest that this was the closest that London ever got to consolidation of railway lines.

London's Railways - Planning For Peace - A London Inheritance

Around this time of year, a number of London stations are in the news for the considerable amount of work that is on-going for rebuilding, the creation of new lines and what always seems to be the inevitable overrunning engineering works. The work at London Bridge and for Crossrail being just...

alondoninheritance.com

In 1943 the London County Plan was published, then in February 1944 a committee was established :

“To investigate and report upon the technical and operational aspects of those suggestions made in the County of London Plan of 1943 which relate to the main line and suburban railway system of London, both surface and underground, bearing in mind that these suggestions are intended to contribute towards and form part of a comprehensive scheme for the re-development of the area in question.”

The report from the committee was published in 1946 and made some very far-reaching proposals, that had they been implemented would have had a dramatic impact on the transport system we see in London today.

The options shown in the map are:

Project A: A new deep-level North Bank link from Battersea to Deptford via Victoria, Charing Cross, Blackfriars, Cannon Street, Shadwell, Wapping and Surrey Docks

Project B: A new deep level-loop connecting Waterloo Junction, Charing Cross, Blackfriars, Cannon Street and London Bridge and then by tunnel via the Surrey Canal rising to join the existing surface systems in the south and south-east.

Project C: A north-south tunnel, an underground link to replace the existing viaduct from Snow Hill to Loughborough Junction

Project D: A northern arc suburban passenger route, passing below the main line stations at Paddington, Marylebone, Euston, King’s Cross and Liverpool Street with interchange facilities.

 

[PTR 444]

I would suggest that the premise of this thread is flawed, and that (i) London is too large a place to have ever had just one terminal station, and (ii) as @LSWR Cavalier has pointed out, a "terminal" dead-end station would be totally impractical.

Ah okay. I have edited the thread title.

 

[JonathanH]

Another scenario is what if rail frequencies fell to such a low level that all services could fit in just one London Terminal.

There would be absolutely no impetus to concentrate on a single London terminal if rail frequencies fell that much. The cost of consolidation could never be recovered as it would be associated with a significant fall in land prices.

 

[PeterC]

This requires the assumption of a totally different government view about railway regulation in the nineteenth century and some unlikely forward thinking taking place in the very early 1830s.

The decision to insist on services going to a "union" station would have had to be made by the government before about 1840, preferably by 1830 so we have to think of things in terms on Lonond in the second quarter of the 19th century. At that point the City was still the most important destination and the lines from the north would have probably follow something close to the route taken by the Metropolitan Railway with a station near the foot of Ludgate Hill and a river crossing close to the present Blackfriars railway bridge. There would still have been a second "City East" station to serve Essex and East Anglia even if a route could be found to take trains through to the "Union Station"

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Looking at the most important station in London thread, it made me think about where the ideal location for a station in the capital would be in the event that only one London terminal was ever built. Obviously the reason we have so many terminals today is a result of history, when the Victorian railway companies attempted to compete against each other and make interchanging between lines as difficult as possible.

To be pedantic, I don't think that was the main reason for having lots of terminals (although it's true that the early railway companies didn't really think about interchange or cooperation much). It was more a case of, you couldn't really demolish a whole area of London to build a huge railway station at a time when the railways were relatively new - so they built the terminals around what was then the edge of London where they could find land to build them. Hence you ended up with stations to the North of London for the trains heading North, a station on the West for trains heading West, and so on.

Having said that, if you were going to consolidate everything into one station and you had enough money to reroute everything that was in the way, I imagine the best bet would be an underground through station at Tottenham Court Road - giving easy access to the shopping area and the West End. I'd imagine though that, even built as a through station with super-efficient departures, you'd need at least 30 or so platforms to absorb everything that runs to the current terminals - and the station would occupy quite a big chunk of the triangle bounded by Tottenham Court Road, Leicester Square and Oxford Circus.

 

[LSWR Cavalier]

There are huge airports, why not a single huge underground station with 60 platforms? How do people find their way around huge airports? I find the thought a bit daunting.

Whatabout other metropoli, Moscow, Paris have several stations, what might be the biggest station in the world?

 

[Western Sunset]

If history had turned out differently, there wouldn't have been a "Paddington", as Brunel's trains from Bristol would've terminated in the allotted land on the west side of Euston station.

 

[telstarbox]

There are huge airports, why not a single huge underground station with 60 platforms? How do people find their way around huge airports? I find the thought a bit daunting.

Whatabout other metropoli, Moscow, Paris have several stations, what might be the biggest station in the world?

Generally huge airports are split into several terminals and your booking paperwork would tell you which one to head for. Plus passengers turn up earlier relative to the departure time than they would for a train.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

There are huge airports, why not a single huge underground station with 60 platforms? How do people find their way around huge airports? I find the thought a bit daunting.

Most air passengers are travelling pretty huge distances with no alternative means of travelling - and would need to spend some time at the airport checking in, possibly clearing customs etc. Hence adding 20-minutes of walking round the airport doesn't - relatively speaking - make a huge difference to the overall journey time. On the other hand lots of train passengers arriving in central London would have only spent 20 minutes or so on the train - so a station so big that it takes 10 minutes to get out of makes a much bigger difference.

I also imagine that if there was a serious proposal today for a single London station, the security services would have something to say about the risk of a single bomb threat or similar security incident preventing London's entire railway network from running!

 

[Bald Rick]

Another scenario is what if rail frequencies fell to such a low level that all services could fit in just one London Terminal. We saw this last spring at the height of the first lockdown

We didn’t - in the first lockdown London still saw something like 50-60% of normal services - at peak time that’s still around 200 trains arriving in the peak hour (excluding Thameslink and Orbital services) That couldn’t fit into any London terminal by a long, long way!

 

[PTR 444]

We didn’t - in the first lockdown London still saw something like 50-60% of normal services - at peak time that’s still around 200 trains arriving in the peak hour (excluding Thameslink and Orbital services) That couldn’t fit into any London terminal by a long, long way!

I mean that’s most likely true but looking at images from the time it certainly didn’t feel like that many.

 

[Bald Rick]

I mean that’s most likely true but looking at images from the time it certainly didn’t feel like that many.

Images are one thing - train reporting is what you want!

 

[30907]

At a quick calculation, you would need 22 running lines under the centre of London, which means 44 platforms absolute minimum (with 2min station stops at that, which might be optimistic.)

 

[Mikey C]

At a quick calculation, you would need 22 running lines under the centre of London, which means 44 platforms absolute minimum (with 2min station stops at that, which might be optimistic.)

That's a similar number of platforms as NY's Grand Central station, though that station only has "commuter" traffic with the Amtrak services using Penn

Going back to the original question, I think London is too big to have one station, as presumably you'd need tunnels from at least 4 directions converging in the centre - you couldn't just have trains all crossing London in one direction (N/S or E/W) as it would create too much of a dogleg for trains approaching from the "wrong" directions.

But if you did just have one station, the only space big enough, yet reasonably convenient, would probably been on the Euston Road. That area between Euston and Kings Cross would be big enough for a monster station if you were building it 150 years ago

 

[LSWR Cavalier]

There would need to be an 'M25' rail ring too, with four tracks each way just like the motorway, or rather two rings at least, like Berlin. Wonderfully complicated.

Stuttgart 21 will be finished sometime, that might be a suitable but very small prototype.

 

[Mcr Warrior]

But if you did just have one station, the only space big enough, yet reasonably convenient, would probably been on the Euston Road. That area between Euston and Kings Cross would be big enough for a monster station if you were building it 150 years ago

Good shout. Problem of course with a "super station" in that particular location is that it's still some distance from there to other key areas in London, such as the Square Mile (business area), the shopping and various tourist locations, Westminster and Whitehall, the River Thames, etc.; although I suppose that some businesses and shops could always have relocated had it been essential to be in near proximity to Euston Road.

 

[318266]

The inevitable rail crash would disrupt almost all train in/out of London. Fun.

 

[LOL The Irony]

I wouldn't combine every station in London, nowhere near that, although money no object, I would demolish the British Library and combine St Pancras, Kings Cross & Euston into one massive London HBF.

 

[Mcr Warrior]

...although money no object, I would demolish the British Library...

Philistine (!)

 

[JonathanH]

I wouldn't combine every station in London, nowhere near that, although money no object, I would demolish the British Library and combine St Pancras, Kings Cross & Euston into one massive London HBF.

There is a lot more than just the British Library between Euston and St Pancras. Moreover, there would be no practical way of getting the Euston route into a station on the British Library site.

If it was worth doing maybe it should have been done in the 1960s. It wasn't.

 

[tbtc]

Interesting idea.

Maybe one option would be to pair up lines - e.g. all Liverpool Street services run through to all Paddington services, all Marylebone/Euston services run through to all Victoria services, that kind of thing. So that all of the lines crossed at one central location (but on maybe three or four different levels)

OR, you have everything terminate in central London in a big ring, like a turntable without the central section, so that the buffer stops of every service are a big circle - like a giant circular airport terminal building

 

[John Webb]

The principal reason for the position of the termini on the north side of the city centre was the cheaper land available there. Land on the south side of the river was less valuable, hence London Bridge and Waterloo got closer. A Royal Commission was set up in 1846 to look at the question of extending railways into the centre of the metropolis, and it was they, not anticipating the rise in passenger traffic, decreed that basically the present locations should remain. There were various Parliamentary Select committees over the years, one of which allowed the building of Liverpool Street in 1874.
The termini on the north side of the river for railway lines coming from the south were allowed when it was realised this was preferable to an enormous increase in traffic across the bridges and in the City streets that would result from keeping terminals on the south side. Hence Victoria was allowed in 1860, Charing Cross 1864 and Cannon Street 1866. There was one cross-London link via the present 'Thames link' line between the LC&D Railway and some of the northern lines instituted in 1866.

The above history, in more detail, can be found in Alan Jackson's "London Termini", 2nd Edition, 1985, published by David and Charles.

 

[matt_world2004]

The geographic centre of greater London is at somewhere near Lambeth north station this suggests that geography wise the one London terminal would be Waterloo

 

[mark-h]

Problem of course with a "super station" in that particular location is that it's still some distance from there to other key areas in London, such as the Square Mile (business area), the shopping and various tourist locations, Westminster and Whitehall, the River Thames, etc.; although I suppose that some businesses and shops could always have relocated had it been essential to be in near proximity to Euston Road.

If a single "super station" had been built then London, and its local public transport network, would be different to how it is now with multiple stations. The opportunity to create a single London terminus passed many years ago.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

There would need to be an 'M25' rail ring too, with four tracks each way just like the motorway, or rather two rings at least, like Berlin. Wonderfully complicated.

Actually I'd have thought that if you had one central station, the need for a ring would become less, not greater than today - because you'd basically be able to get from anywhere to anywhere else within the SouthEast with a single change of train at London Central (or whatever you call it), so people would make many more journeys by changing in London. The only thing the ring would come in useful for would be for short orbital journeys around London - things like Welwyn to St. Albans - where the overall journey is too short for going via London to be worth it.

At a quick calculation, you would need 22 running lines under the centre of London, which means 44 platforms absolute minimum (with 2min station stops at that, which might be optimistic.)

2 mins would be very optimistic, given that if you had a single London interchange station, then the vast majority of people would be interchanging there. I'd imagine even if you routed all trains as through trains) Manchester-Brighton, for example), then the InterCity ones would be seeing an almost complete changeover of passengers at the London station (how many people do Manchester-London and Brighton-London and how few would be doing Manchester-Brighton, for example?)

 

[telstarbox]

Is Leeds now the biggest place with one station for the city centre? (Please don't @ me with "Westminster isn't in the City of London" etc)

 

[Bald Rick]

Maybe one option would be to pair up lines - e.g. all Liverpool Street services run through to all Paddington services

There’s an idea. Perhaps done with the suburban services first, to test the concept. Getting the Raill to Cross London. I wonder what it could be called.

OR, you have everything terminate in central London in a big ring,

Perhaps with some form of metro service linking most of them in a big Circle? I wonder what it would be called.