Letchworth Garden City and Royston - extra platforms

[William3000]

Originally Letchworth Garden City was planned as two island platforms but the loops were never required. While the lifts slightly impact on the potential track bed, could anybody ever envisage a need to add them to create the 4 platform station. Would this provide many benefits? It could enable trains that terminate at Letchworth to use the additional platforms as well as enabling fast trains to overtake slower ones. Passing loops here could help?

At the very least a 3rd platform on the down side would enable terminating trains to stop before reversing on the return journey.

Additionally could a third platform to the west of platform 2 enabling trains to terminate or be passed there be of benefit? With passing loops to the west of Royston station again enabling trains to pass in addition to the bidirectional platforms running through Royston.

 

[30907]

I haven't visited, but does the present arrangement at Letchworth, with trains reversing on the depot approach line, cause problems sufficient to warrant moving a lift tower?

As for overtaking moves - they are unpopular with the passengers who are overtaken (unless you offer a cross-platform interchange, maybe) and the resource people who see their expensive trains and crews sat around for several minutes.

Letchworth is close to a quadruple-track route anyway, while at Royston you would really only want to loop the stoppers - TBH I doubt the need is there for the foreseeable future.

 

[cle]

I imagine it would only be to increase frequency.

Royston I would say you are getting into the Cambridge-verse where you’d want everything to go there, and the employment / demand catchment is more muddled - but Letchworth is maybe a better place for a more intensive TL service to turn in future. But not a Moorgate service again!

 

[HST43257]

I imagine it would only be to increase frequency.

Royston I would say you are getting into the Cambridge-verse where you’d want everything to go there, and the employment / demand catchment is more muddled - but Letchworth is maybe a better place for a more intensive TL service to turn in future. But not a Moorgate service again!

I can’t see a more intensive TL/GN service happening for as long as HS2 doesn’t reach Leeds/York or Welwyn isn’t 4-tracked.

 

[Royston Vasey]

I've structured my post so it's a bit more digestible!

Southbound

Trains are quite well flighted from Cambridge to avoid the stopper having to be overtaken. In most hours, the Brighton (9SXX) leaves at xx:23, the KGX stopper (2CXX) at xx:26, and the fast Kings Lynn - King's Cross (1TXX) at xx:44. If the stopper is on time leaving Cambridge (and it usually is, having over half an hour of dwell time in P2/3) it clears Hitchin four minutes before the 1T presents itself.

Thameslink trains have a shorter turnaround at Cambridge and being prone to incoming delay, do often follow the stopper out (or delay the stopper), but the stopping patterns of the 2Cs and 9Ss are smart, since Ashwell & Morden is served mostly by the Brighton and not by the local, so the locals only have two more stops than the Brightons along the branch.

The Royston branch is not all that long, and Letchworth is only 3.5 miles from Hitchin after which the 1Ts cross to the fast and the 9Ss stay on the slow until after the Stevenage stop.

The newly instated Letchworth starters/terminators (1LXX) might on the face of it benefit from a terminating platform but since the depot on the down side to the east, you are right it would need to be to the north of the existing platforms (like a mirror image of Bishops Stortford). There's space for the trackwork from the depot, though you'd need to install a crossover to the up immediately south of the station. And if using it as a loop, also points allowing access to back the down Cambridge line.

I have been held a couple of times on the 9S approaching Letchworth for the 1L to clear the platform, but all in all there's not much benefit in a platform 3 over holding the starter in the depot if you really want to give the 9S priority (and they don't!)

Northbound

Coming from London, delays do accumulate up route, and sometimes things can get out of order. Into Cambridge the 1Ts do often have to closely follow delayed 2Cs into Cambridge but if a theoretical platform 3 existed at Letchworth to loop the stopper, you'd just be adding an awful lot of delay minutes to the 2C when you have a comfy five minutes dwell for the 1T at Cambridge anyway (little splitting and joining these days of course) and the 9Ss terminate.

In practice, Hitchin P2 is used as the passing loop to hold the 2Cs and 9Ss, since the 1Ts diverge from the Down Fast to take the flyover north of the station, which gives an option to "loop" trains only a few miles before Letchworth anyway.

Finally in terms of looping on the down at Royston, where there aren't currently any terminators, you're that close to Cambridge by that point that if you haven't already held the 2C at Hitchin as above, you don't lose that much more time to Cambridge anyway. There should be a 7 minute gap between the 2C and 1T arriving at Cambridge (and the 2C is only once an hour outside the peak) so there's reasonable contingency for the 2C to lose the typical few minutes but not impact the 1T.


So I'd say nice idea in principle but it's already a pretty flexible piece of branch line railway!

 

[Magdalia]

I am very familiar with both stations.

The first thing to say is that both are in cuttings with road bridges going over, at Royston in the middle of the station. There is no prospect of additional platforms with the stations in their current locations.

The track layout at Royston is already very flexible with bidirectional working through both platforms, a leftover from the days when the OHL ended there and the Cambridge service was a DMU shuttle. For many years overtaking at Royston was quite common in both directions, but the introduction of the Thameslink trains has made overtaking much more difficult, because it blocks the line for trains coming in the opposite direction, and now there are more of them.

Trains terminating/starting at Letchworth currently go to/from the arrival/departure lines (A/D lines) which are on the down side. This means that up starters have to cross the down line to get into the up platform.

One possible improvement at Letchworth might be to realign the down line east of Norton Way bridge, to make room for a reversing siding between the down and up lines, like at St Albans.

 

[bramling]

I haven't visited, but does the present arrangement at Letchworth, with trains reversing on the depot approach line, cause problems sufficient to warrant moving a lift tower?

As for overtaking moves - they are unpopular with the passengers who are overtaken (unless you offer a cross-platform interchange, maybe) and the resource people who see their expensive trains and crews sat around for several minutes.

Letchworth is close to a quadruple-track route anyway, while at Royston you would really only want to loop the stoppers - TBH I doubt the need is there for the foreseeable future.

I’d say yes the current Letchworth layout does cause issues at times.

Ideally you’d want to put the through lines on either side of the islands, and have two terminating roads in the middle. This unfortunately would probably be too expensive to achieve in practice.

A cheaper solution would be a central siding north of the station, this would probably be fairly easy to do, especially as part of a wider remodelling of the whole site.

One can probably forget about doing anything at Royston. The site is too awkward, and being further from London probably loses some of the benefits.

 

[Royston Vasey]

Cambridge South will soon present a challenge and an opportunity. A challenge in that it adds another stop for delayed 2Cs in front of 1Ts, but also an opportunity for the 1T to overtake it on the centre roads there instead of following it into Cambridge station. Might shave a minute of delay off since the 2C slows to a crawl to take the turnout into the bays, whereas the 1T can have a straight fast run into platform 1.

 

[gallafent]

This extra capacity will be useful when the "obviously a good idea of mine" link between just south of Luton Airport Parkway on the MML and just south of Hitchin on the ECML is built

 

[MarkyT]

I grew up in Letchworth in the 70s and 80s and knew the station well. I still have a couple of the GNR station benches in the garden my dad saved from the embankment behind the platforms after they were renewed and just discarded out of sight in the 1970s. When I say 'still have', Dad replaced all the rotten timber but the cast iron supports and nameplates are original and intact. Anyway getting back to the subject, the case for a reversing platform at Letchworth has really disappeared since the inner suburban GN trains via Hertford were cut back to the new terminal platform at Stevenage. Before that, regular incoming terminating down trains used to shunt forward into one of the sidings to the east of the station after unloading, then wait until shortly before departure to move back to the up platform to load. A separate terminating platform might have saved a bit of time on that manoeuvre, but probably not enough to save a train on the circuit, or at least not without a major recast of the entire area.