London outer suburbs circular tube

[adamedwards]

Paris is building a new set of linked metro lines to form a circle through outer suburbs to reduce congestion and save on journeys into and back out from the city centre. So what might a similar scheme do in London and which key stations would you join up? Two or three connected lines will probably be better than a circle. Unleash those crayons!

 

[172007]

Nimby Rail time.

 

[Dr Hoo]

How would this 'fit' with the Overground orbital services? Possibly a chance to 'liberate' the North, West and South London Lines for more freight and get many HGVs out of London and/or off the M25. Just replicate the current pattern largely underground, albeit with some obvious 'tweaks' to take in Old Oak Common, totally re-build all lines at West Hampstead and so on. East London might present new opportunities to integrate at places like Lewisham or Canning Town or Canary Wharf or something. (Needs a bit more thought there.)

 

[adamedwards]

I was thinking further out so Finchley Central - New Southgate - Tottenham Hale - Leytonstone - Barking - ?? So not duplicating current routes.

 

[Bald Rick]

Don’t forget that Paris is much more compact than London. The Grand Paris Express covers a similar area as the London Overground orbital routes.

 

[SynthD]

https://ukfree.tv/styles/images/2014/Tube2050/London%20Infrastucture%20Plan%202050%20Transport%20v6.svg

Related to this series https://www.londonreconnections.com/2014/london-2050-part-1-trillion-pound-time-warp/
Tl:dr yes there’s a route, it requires a few extra bits like a Barking Riverside Thames tunnel.

 

[ChiefPlanner]

A London orbital railway was mulled over - for freight - before WW1 , and with the present TfL financial and investment cases ?

I would certainly consider , strategically ,a proper link from Watford to the GW axis , but as no-one can find a realistic or political way to link the center of Watford to the Met Line on an existing "mostly there" disused rail corridor I would not give this , let alone a bigger package , much hope.

 

[A0wen]

I would certainly consider , strategically ,a proper link from Watford to the GW axis , but as no-one can find a realistic or political way to link the center of Watford to the Met Line on an existing "mostly there" disused rail corridor I would not give this , let alone a bigger package , much hope.

I think that boat was missed in the 1800s when a link from Uxbridge to Watford was proposed.

Uxbridge managed to end up with 3 unconnected stations.....

Post war, the Green Belt saw to any such development - had that not happened and the Central Line made it to Denham as planned, it's interesting to speculate whether the A412 corridor from Denham to Watford would have then been developed and if the Central line would have been routed that way.

 

[stuu]

Don’t forget that Paris is much more compact than London. The Grand Paris Express covers a similar area as the London Overground orbital routes.

They are a lot further out, ligne 15 is generally about 10km out, for London that would the equivalent of running along the north circular.

I have wondered in the past whether a decent modern outer circle would be a good idea, with decent interchanges with each main line and the tube. It could make a lot of journeys quicker, although whether it's enough to justify the cost is a different matter

 

[30907]

Where are the urban centres that need connecting? I don't know North London well enough, but in South London the obvious ones are Richmond-Kingston-Wimbledon-Croydon-Bromley-Lewisham(-Woolwich?). Improving the Kingston Roundabout to 4tph (yes, I know that would cause problems at the Wimbledon end) and extending Tramlink from Beckenham-Bromley-Grove Park-Downham-Lewisham would cover that (other routings are available, and you might opt for extending DLR to Bromley rather than Tramlink to Lewisham).

 

[JonathanH]

I have wondered in the past whether a decent modern outer circle would be a good idea, with decent interchanges with each main line and the tube. It could make a lot of journeys quicker, although whether it's enough to justify the cost is a different matter

Plans to get the Dudding Hill route have never got very far and that is an existing line. Usage of Gospel Oak to Barking has picked up. I guess the issue is actually identifying which urban centres within London actually need linking up and what the purpose is as it won't suit all people making orbital journeys.

Isn't the point that if there was demand for orbital travel, there would be a bus route which covered roughly what we are looking to achieve with something on rails.

X26 does part of this. 119 east of Croydon to Bromley, then 269 to Bexleyheath, 401 to Thamesmead.

On the north side, maybe X140 to Harrow, 182 to Brent Cross, 102 to Edmonton Green but then I'm not sure what you link in the North East Corner as the Gospel Oak to Barking line is already there - aiming for Romford and Upminster would seem a bit too far out.

[I wrote this last night and then started looking at London's Ringway plans for further inspiration on what we are supposed to be linking up but funnily enough they weren't planning to bulldoze through the outer urban area.]

I'm not convinced the demand is there over any specific route to join major locations in what we know as zone 4, 5 and 6 that isn't effectively covered by going into central London, using London Overground or the myriad of routes in South London.

 

[mr_jrt]

I've played with the concept of orbitals for years and year now. Given the levels of development nowadays, you do tend to gravitate towards former lines though. Looking back at one of my old maps, I wonder...

The problem with saying "just go into zone 1 and back out again" is that it concentrates demand precisely where you don't want it. If you can diffuse that demand by serving it further out then it's a lot cheaper to service it at low levels than trying to squeeze a even more tph out of the zone 1 network.

 

[30907]

The problem with saying "just go into zone 1 and back out again" is that it concentrates demand precisely where you don't want it.

I agree, not that anyone in this thread has suggested it. The question is still, where are the flows that rail/light rail can serve?

 

[stuu]

Buses do exist for lots of orbital journeys but they are painfully slow. There aren't many obvious routes for light rail either without getting caught in the same traffic as buses. Even lines like the Dudding Hill line manage to miss the main centres and interchanges.

If it was ever done it would need to be underground, very similar to L15 in Paris. E.g. Kingston-Richmond-Brentford-Ealing-Wembley-Brent Cross-Finchley-Palmers Green-Walthamstow-Ilford-Barking. With decent interchanges with every radial. Very little change from £30bn though

 

[Doctor Fegg]

Isn't the point that if there was demand for orbital travel, there would be a bus route which covered roughly what we are looking to achieve with something on rails.

This is quite a frequent trope on these forums - the existence of a popular bus service as a necessary signifier that any given rail service will work. I would be interested to know if there's any actual evidence/research to show that this is true.

Cycling advocates tend to get a bit exasperated when similar claims are made:

"You can't justify a bridge by the number of people swimming across a river'"

https://twitter.com/fietsprofessor/status/1107684512492912642

Is a bus "good enough" that it can be used as a predictor, or is it more akin to swimming across a river? Do demographics make a difference, for example (i.e. some demographics are more ready to catch a bus than others)? Rail commentators are always keen to talk about a "sparks effect", where electrification drives greater ridership. If that's true for what is a comparatively minor change, can we quantify a "rail effect" where a train is introduced along a bus corridor?

I'd be genuinely interested to know - there must surely be research/economic studies.

(Not getting at you particularly, @JonathanH - you just reminded me of a question I've wanted to ask for a while!)

 

[BayPaul]

Most of London is quite well served with orbital routes. In my mind the biggest gap is in the Northern quadrant, between the Metropolitan line and the eastern end of the Piccadilly line. There are basically no orbital connections between the ~ 8 lines that head north out of the city, and the overground NLL is very close in to zone 1 at this point too, and most of its connections are out of station interchanges.

A route that started at Barking Riverside, using the eastern end of the GOBLIN, then onto the former Edgware, Highgate and London Railway (EHL) from around Harringay to Highgate, run alongside the Northern line to Finchley Central - it looks like there is a fair bit of space (probably not enough, but this is speculative forums after all), take over the Mill Hill East branch, and then extend over the old Northern Heights route of the EHL to Mill Hill Broadway and then Edgeware. It would then run, presumably in tunnel via Canons Park and Harrow & Wealdstone to Harrow on the Hill (about a 4 mile tunnel), then join the Uxbridge branch of the Met through West Harrow, before heading down a new curve to the Piccadilly Line Rayners lane branch, heading south through South Harrow. Where it goes from there - there are a few options, ideal would be through Acton Town and on another new curve through Gunnersbury to Richmond.

Although this runs over a lot of busy existing lines, I believe that all of them have some capacity, as they are all outer branches where other trains have already branched off elsewhere, so something like 4tph is probably workable.

It would obviously be massively expensive, but a lot cheaper than boring a tunnel right around London, and would connect pretty much every line in North London, running to the south side of the river at each end (assuming the extension to Abbey Road happens). This would give a lot of useful connectivity, and given that it runs fairly parallel to the North Circular, the demand would probably be good. Obviously it would need to use dual voltage EMUs capable of running on OHL or 3rd / 4th rail. I think they could be S stock sized trains, as the Rayners Lane branch of the Piccadilly Line can just take a subsurface train, so upgrades to make this possible in service are probably practical.

Unrealistic, yes, but probably less so than most ideas on here. And I did enjoy this bit of crayoning!

 

[mr_jrt]

Ha! I actually started typing exactly that route in my earlier post and thought better of it.

...and the reason I mentioned zone 1 was this: "I'm not convinced the demand is there over any specific route to join major locations in what we know as zone 4, 5 and 6 that isn't effectively covered by going into central London"

 

[BayPaul]

Ha! I actually started typing exactly that route in my earlier post and thought better of it.

...and the reason I mentioned zone 1 was this: "I'm not convinced the demand is there over any specific route to join major locations in what we know as zone 4, 5 and 6 that isn't effectively covered by going into central London"

I'm glad I'm not the only mad one!

I can't remember where I saw info about transport modes in London, but the core message was that basically no-one drives on journeys into central London, but there is still huge levels of car use on journeys between outer suburbs. Looking at a rail map, the lack of orbital connectivity seems to be one of the major reasons for this. I think this line would be about fairly local journeys rather than connections between mainlines - if you want to go from Luton to Stansted, say, it would make far more sense going via Zone 1 than via an orbital tube. If you want to go from Stanmore to Finchley, however, going all the way into Zone 1, change a couple of times, then all the way out again, is slow, overcrowded and expensive, so you are more likely to drive. An orbital line like this would be the obvious way to make that journey. Having good connectivity to as many radial lines as possible means that it doesn't need to be just about major locations - with high frequency services and easy changes there are hundreds of pairs of destinations that suddenly become attractive to do by rail.

Worth the business case? Probably not. Would there be a good demand? Yes, I think there would be. Now I just need to go and find some of Bald Rick's back of a fag packet calculations and work out how many billions TfL would need to find down the back of the sofa.

 

[Mikey C]

One issue would be the sheer number of radials you'd need to interchange with to make it useful. Building a route that roughly parallels the A406 North Circular, and mainly interchanging with existing or under construction stations, and trying to serve more important stations, my clean sheet deep tube line would go

Brentford, Acton Town, Ealing Broadway, Hangar lane, Stonebridge Park, Neasden, Brent Cross Thameslink, Golders Green, East Finchley, Muswell Hill (new station), Bounds Green/Bowes Park, Tottenhall (new station), White Hart Lane, Meridian Water, North Walthamstow (new station to interchange with the Chingford line), South Woodford, Redbridge, Ilford, Barking, Beckton

It would then continue along where Ringway 2 would have gone, so further out than the A205. Woolwich, Eltham, Mottingham, Grove Park etc

Really useful, but somewhat expensive.

 

[30907]

...and the reason I mentioned zone 1 was this: "I'm not convinced the demand is there over any specific route to join major locations in what we know as zone 4, 5 and 6 that isn't effectively covered by going into central London"

But the sentence you were quoting actually said

....that isn't effectively covered by going into Central London, using London Overground or the myriad of routes in South London.

none of which are Zone 1 (apart IIRC from Shoreditch High St).

That said, the northern side of London is lacking in orbital routes - but one following the North Circular is too close to the Goblin/NLL to be of real use.
I don't know North London (west of the Lea Valley) at all well, but perhaps Walthamstow, Enfield, Edgware, Harrow, Uxbridge (or Hayes/Southall) are centres to connect.
Trouble is that would mean new build of some sort Enfield-Harrow, and the Northern Heights have a good deal of open space which wouldn't generate traffic....

 

[Irascible]

I'm glad I'm not the only mad one!

I can't remember where I saw info about transport modes in London, but the core message was that basically no-one drives on journeys into central London, but there is still huge levels of car use on journeys between outer suburbs. Looking at a rail map, the lack of orbital connectivity seems to be one of the major reasons for this.

As a former resident of various bits of N London ( mostly roughly where your proposal would go through ) I'd concur somewhat. Allowing that it takes at least 20 mins to get anywhere in London, even to the corner shop unless you live on an actual main street, going to work in the west end/city/wherever was a no-brainer public transport effort. Going to socialise with friends around the wheel usually ended up being via taxi, until I got a car; I remember when I was a student I just walked for 45 mins because getting a bus would have meant getting three buses! not an uncommon situation unless you happen to live on the NLL.

Unfortunately until cars are made monstrously inconvenient I suspect cars - even if you pay someone else to drive them - are *always* going to be the popular option in a place as sprawling as London suburbia. Somewhere you want to go is very likely to be inbetween a spoke of the wheel...

 

[MontyP]

Wasn't there a concept floated a few years ago for an orbital route called the "R25"? I'm sure it was on one of those future London transport maps that crops up from time to time ...

 

[swt_passenger]

Wasn't there a concept floated a few years ago for an orbital route called the "R25"? I'm sure it was on one of those future London transport maps that crops up from time to time ...

Yes, it’s what the first link in post #6 shows.

 

[JonathanH]

I think drawing the "R25" route on non-diagramatic map would be helpful if it ever became a serious proposal. Clearly it links up the available routes but in some cases would be dreadfully slow and tortuous. Somewhat interesting as to whether people would be prepared to lose their radial service in return for this orbital service starting. The reverse curves at Twickenham and Wimbledon don't look easy to install. It wouldn't be easy to path through West Hampstead either. However, if you wanted to maximise the use of existing lines, it does seem to be the route most people would come up with.

 

[Mikey C]

That R25 is just a botch up of existing lines, rather than a proper purpose designed new radial route.

Even the "25" in its name, hinting at "M25" is misleading as it goes nowhere near the M25, and indeed the vast majority operates within the A406

 

[A0wen]

That R25 is just a botch up of existing lines, rather than a proper purpose designed new radial route.

Even the "25" in its name, hinting at "M25" is misleading as it goes nowhere near the M25, and indeed the vast majority operates within the A406

The challenge is London isn't a consistent size / shape - the M25 being a case in point as it was cobbled together from two of the planned Ringways.

The same issue runs true for any such plans for a radial railway.

 

[mr_jrt]

But the sentence you were quoting actually said

none of which are Zone 1 (apart IIRC from Shoreditch High St).

We could argue the grammar, but due to the comma I would direct you to:

https://www.ef.co.uk/english-resources/english-grammar/comma/

​

Separate phrases, words, or clauses in lists​

When making a list, commas are the most common way to separate one list item from the next. The final two items in the list are usually separated by "and" or "or", which should be preceeded by a comma.

...so states three items:
"...that isn't effectively covered by

1. going into Central London,
2. using London Overground
3. or the myriad of routes in South London."

 

[cle]

We have this in a few ways. No it isn't a loop, but yes it facilitates journeys without having to head into Central London and back.

Even Clapham Junction functions in this regard. The existing Overground and Tramlink work well here too - the former misses a few useful connections though, especially the GOBLIN. The DLR and eastern Jubilee work well for this too.

We have this tactically, but not strategically. It's piecemeal but it works, so given it doesn't actually need to be a full loop, which well-trodden interventions might help to connect a few dots:

GOBLIN to Thamesmead and Abbey Wood.
Bakerloo from New Cross Gate - Lewisham - Beckenham/Elmers End for Tramlink.
Tramlink to Bromley
GOBLIN Junction Road station for Tufnell Park
OOC full Overground access (WLL and NLL)
4tph Victoria - Lewisham (covers inner Camberwell / Peckham / SE flows) - Brockley high level here would add another node. And ELL higher frequency to Claphams High St (for tube) and Junction. Brixton, if only.

etc etc

 

[30907]

We could argue the grammar, but due to the comma I would direct you to:


...so states three items:
"...that isn't effectively covered by

1. going into Central London,
2. using London Overground
3. or the myriad of routes in South London."

Even if you add the missing verb to 3, "via Zone 1" is only one of 3 options in the post you objected to.
I entirely agree that providing alternatives to travel via Zone 1 makes sense, certainly for shorter distances within the Zones (see BayPaul's point upthread about Luton to Stanstead).

 

[Irascible]

Thinking about this, I'm wondering if maybe going in zigzags would be more useful than a more pure circle ( triggered by remembering my annoyance that Highgate - Finsbury Park never actually became a full tube line, and the drudgery of buses in the area ). Will have to look at a map again to see if there's more obvious interchanges to link like that.