I was wondering how long it would take for somebody to raise that!
It looks really odd having buffers at the north end of P2, whereas it would appear straightforward to be able to link it into the Up Slow. Yes, theoretically we could have linked it in, but that would have stuffed the Slow Lines in two different ways:
Firstly, as things currently stand, if you route a Down train into P2 to terminate (at the buffer stops) you can do so entirely independently of anything passing through on the Up Slow (P1). If you reconnected the track by abolishing the buffers at the north end of P2, the signalling overlap would fall foul of the Up Slow. So any move into P2 would block the Up Slow, and any move on the Up Slow would block P2. For capacity and timetabling reasons that is a really poor idea.
Secondly, as Ianno87 explained above, making the connection would have reduced the speed through the station on the Up Slow quite considerably. That was entirely counter to the aim of the project.
So the layout on the Slow Lines looks a bit mad - especially if you can remember what it looked like before - but it all makes good functional sense.
Milton Keynes
