Topic: | Re:Specifics please | |
Posted by: | Patrick ONeill | |
Date/Time: | 08/01/14 09:17:00 |
London Reconnections has the view that all day stopping at Turnham Green will depend on Crossrail for relief of Heathrow and replacement of current Piccadilly line trains with the "new tube for London" so an optimistic estimate of 2023 for that. The primary driver for the "new tube for London" appears to be energy savings. The train will be capable of driverless operation although will likely not operate driverless initially. A point of discussion and debate is whether driverless operation will require platform edge doors and if so, then stations served by the trains will need to be fitted with these before driverless operation is enabled. This would obviously mean that stations served by the these trains should be capable of being fitted with platform edge doors and the costs to do this may be large in some stations given the variety of platform heights and "mind the gaps" in the current network. Then additionally, Crossrail provides the opportunity to "rebalance" the network so, for example, moving Ealing branch District trains to the Richmond branch to serve increased demand from places like Gunnersbury (yes, Gunnersbury station is inadequate but that's another story...) Like a lot of engineering challenges, what appears to be simple on the surface is very, very complex when looked at in more detail... |