Examination of Witnesses (Questions 2220
- 2239)
2220. MR MIDDLETON: Yes, whatever.
2221. CHAIRMAN: You decide. The Promoters
will then comment on what your Petition says, and you have the
final word. I will ask Ms Lieven just to introduce it first.
2222. MS LIEVEN: My Lord, if I could
introduce this by reference to Mr Middleton's first exhibit, Mr
Middleton is a Petitioner who is fundamentally arguing that we
are promoting the wrong scheme; that Crossrail should not go to
the locations that we are taking it to and that it should be a
regional scheme that, amongst other locations, goes to Milton
Keynes (up here), possibly to Aylesbury (down here) and possibly
to more far-flung spots around the East and South-East of England.
He is also suggesting, in his Petition and in his speaking note,
that we are promoting the wrong service pattern within the scheme.
2223. My Lord, your Lordships may have noted
that, in the information papers, A1 deals with the consideration
of alternatives and why we chose the scheme we did, and A2 deals
with the service pattern. It is the Promoter's position that this
Petition, plainly, falls outside the principle of the Bill, and
we made that clear in our Petition response document to Mr Middleton.
I do have Mr Berryman available to give evidence on route choices,
service pattern—all the issues raised in Mr Middleton's
Petition—but given that it is, beyond any doubt, outside
the principle of the Bill I leave it to the Committee to decide
how much of Mr Middleton's evidence it wants to hear and whether
or not it feels the need to hear from Mr Berryman at all.
2224. I am, I am afraid, leaving the matter
entirely in the Committee's hands. I do not think there is any
benefit in saying any more about Mr Middleton's Petition because
it does so plainly fall outside the principle of the Bill.
2225. CHAIRMAN: Mr Middleton, I think
you have heard all this before. There is not anything that we
can do if it does not fall within the principle of Bill which
was given a second reading in the House a little while ago. Your
Petition and your suggestions do not fall within the principle
of the Bill. I am not going to stop you in any way from saying
what it is you wish to say, but if you stray too far afield I
may have to impose certain restrictions on you, because there
is nothing we can do about it. So you go ahead.
2226. MR MIDDLETON: My name is James
Middleton. I live at 5 Crab Tree Close, Olney in Bucks. I am retired
but I have had many years of transport planning experience in
the past. Olney is a small town midway between Northampton, Milton
Keynes and Bedford. It is at the very centre of the Government's
Milton Keynes South Midlands development area.
2227. I am a strong supporter of Crossrail but
it should be a regional scheme serving the South-East and East
of England as well as London, and not the slow, stopping everywhere,
London Underground-type operation currently proposed. I am amazed
that the Promoters have not followed the Thameslink 2000 strategy
which is already under construction. I have circulated my statement
in advance and I have prepared three diagrams. Being a bit old-fashioned,
my three diagrams are rolled up on the table here, but Mr Hackett
has kindly produced a computerised version of my map and I have
done the tables myself.
2228. To start, I started with the problems
with the Promoter's scheme.[12]
Taking my drawing, the Promoter's Crossrail scheme has got 35
stations, 48 trains per hour going through the central tunnels,
and that is a total of 1,308 miles—about 27 miles per train.
Thameslink 2000, which is shown on my plan, stretches from Peterborough
and King's Lynn in the north right down to the south coast, which
is basically a north-south version of Crossrail but is very much
the sort of scheme that Crossrail ought to be, in my view. So
Thameslink 2000 has 168 stations and 48 trains per hour going
through the central tunnels; 4,226 miles; which is 88 miles per
train. So more travellers, longer distances and much greater fare
contribution to the expense of central tunnels.
2229. As I have shown on my plan, the catchment
area of the Promoter's Crossrail is largely limited to the London
suburbs, which are generally mature development and not rapidly
expanding. More than half the trains, 28 out of 48, never get
west of Paddington, and this is an absolutely criminal waste of
tunnelling under London, to just terminate trains at Paddington.
There will be more trains terminating at Paddington than Marylebone
Station at the moment, so it is a complete waste of the central
tunnel that you get trains to Paddington and they have nowhere
else to go.
2230. Developing their schemes, the Promoters
have had to withdraw the trains to Kingston and Ebbsfleet at the
last minute. In the business case, 20,000 of the 36,000 peak-period
Crossrail passengers approaching Paddington from the West would
have come from Kingston. So this change is hugely significant.
All benefits to Waterloo, its approaches and Underground were
lost, and a large proportion of Crossrail's ridership disappeared.
At the other end, the removal of the line from Abbey Wood to Ebbsfleet
cuts out the eight stations that would have served the Thames
Gateway. So three or four years ago Crossrail removed 17 of the
50 stations then in the scheme and this should have required a
rethink rather than just ploughing on with the scheme as it stood.
2231. My Table 1, sheet 008, shows the present
pattern of peak-hour trains going into Liverpool Street in the
morning, and I just took an hour from the timetable, so from Shenfield
there is a train into London about every two minutes.[13]
These are a range of fast, semi-fast and stopping trains and,
as you can see, the services are finely tuned with trains overtaking
or being overtaken down the four-track line. Of the slow trains,
six go from Shenfield into London and a further six from Gidea
Park into London and Gidea Park is seven miles nearer Liverpool
Street. Not one train currently starts at Shenfield and calls
at every station to Liverpool Street. The last few stations before
Liverpool Street are missed out on the Shenfield trains and are
served by the Gidea Park trains, and the stopping trains currently
take 41 minutes compared with about 27 minutes for the semi-fast
trains.
2232. The Crossrail Promoters are going to impose
a slow, 12-trains-an-hour service into London stopping at every
station, annexing the slow lines entirely. With the extra stations,
these will take about 20 minutes longer than the semi-fast trains,
so there is absolutely no incentive for passengers to change to
Crossrail at Shenfield and they will all continue on to Liverpool
Street. Some of the minor stations, like Harold Wood, Manor Park
and Forest Gate, presently have 12 trains stopping per hour in
the two directions and with Crossrail this would double to 24,
so Crossrail is going to impose a completely new service of slow,
stop-everywhere trains, taking full control of the slow lines,
and this is bound to have a detrimental effect on the other trains
using the line. A typical Crossrail train from Shenfield to Maidenhead
will cover 48 miles and stop at 32 stations. In other words, it
is going to stop every mile and a half, so Crossrail trains will
never get up any speed and they will take about two hours to get
from Shenfield to Maidenhead, so it will certainly not attract
anyone who has got an alternative and people going down the Great
Eastern Line from outside Shenfield will go straight on to Liverpool
Street. Therefore, to compare the two-hour Crossrail journey,
from Paddington or Liverpool Street you would get to Cardiff or
Norwich in two hours. Crossrail hardly crosses the M25, so it
is no interest at all to the wider region and it certainly fails
to serve the Government's development plans.
2233. Giving priority to some trains can disrupt
everyone else. The only sensible way for busy lines to operate
is for Network Rail to signal the trains and operate to the benefit
of all based on a fair timetable. We people who live in Milton
Keynes and Northampton have suffered this problem recently where,
on the West Coast Mainline, Virgin have been given priority on
the fast lines, so people like me who do not want to go to Birmingham,
Manchester or Scotland are forced onto the slow lines, along with
freight trains stopping everyone else.
2234. Looking at the details of Liverpool Street,
about 60 per cent of the passengers currently arriving at Liverpool
Street in the rush hour go onward on foot to their destinations.
Others interchange onto the Underground, buses and so on. As Crossrail
is only going to be used by local train passengers between Shenfield
and Liverpool Street, the vast majority of these passengers are
going to get off Crossrail at Liverpool Street either to walk
to their destinations or go on by bus or Underground, so the Promoters'
Crossrail will attract the minimum number of users over the minimum
distance and create difficulties for other passengers. It seems
ridiculous after Crossrail is built that someone going from Southend
to Reading would still go into Liverpool Street. They would obviously
catch the train from Paddington to Reading and they might use
Crossrail for the four miles between Liverpool Street and Paddington.
Therefore, the relief to central London termini is minimal and
the relief to the Underground is minimal.
2235. The business case for Crossrail stresses
the need for efficient, reliable travel across a wide geographical
area, but Crossrail covers a narrow area and creates problems
for other users. Crossrail really is downgrading a mainline railway
into a slow London Underground-type operation, nothing like the
sort of upgrade that Thameslink 2000 is doing in the north-south
direction.
2236. My drawing again shows a possible regional
Crossrail scheme. It would use the same central alignment, tunnels
and stations, but it would integrate with the national rail system
rather than displace it. It would be of a similar order of cost
to the Promoters' scheme, using the same central tunnels and stations,
but making much better connections to the railway network west
of Paddington and east of Liverpool Street, and these connections
have all been proved in earlier work. Just to go through it briefly
from the west side, one Crossrail line would terminate at Reading
where the Government is about to spend several hundred million
pounds on Reading Station and it makes absolutely no sense to
terminate Crossrail two stops nearer London at Maidenhead.
2237. Some of the 28 trains per hour with nothing
to do at Paddington would serve Aylesbury. Now, Aylesbury is one
of the main towns in the Government's Milton Keynes South Midlands
development area and, if you look at the Promoters' assessment
of the Aylesbury branch, their conclusions were that it performed
strongly on transport, economic efficiency and reliability. In
other words, it attracted a lot of passengers, gave a significant
economic return and would be reliable. It was not selected for
the rather vague reason, to me, of adverse contractual impacts
on the Chiltern Line franchise and the Metronet public-private
partnership for the Tube, and I think Metronet has now failed
anyway, so virtually there is absolutely no reason for not going
to Aylesbury, and it seems a strange logic actually not to do
something that would be really good because of some contractual
basis that should be there to improve the railways, so Crossrail
would be improved in every possible way if some of the trains
went from Paddington to Aylesbury.
2238. The remainder of the 28 trains doing nothing
at Paddington would serve the West Coast Mainline up to Watford,
Tring, Milton Keynes and Northampton. The Promoters did examine
a connection to this line and Lord Bradshaw, in the Lords' Crossrail
debate, said that a service to Milton Keynes would be a simple
connection and essential for the Government's growth proposals.
The Promoters say there will only be a small increase in demand
from Milton Keynes, Northampton and the huge expansion thereof
because the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's plan says that
the communities will be sustainable and not add significantly
to commuting. It is hardly credible that the biggest and fastest
development in the country will not increase rail demand into
London, and the Government's own assessment says there will be
a 32 per cent increase in Milton Keynes rail trips by 2016.
2239. At the other end, instead of just connecting
to the slow lines to Shenfield, better connections would be made
so that Crossrail would serve Cambridge, Stansted, Ipswich, Southend
as well as just Shenfield and, although I have not shown it, the
Abbey Wood to Ebbsfleet service would probably be reinstated,
giving a proper service to the Thames Gateway which has now been
removed from the Promoters' scheme.
12 Committee Ref: A15, Proposed Route Plan of Alternative
Regional Crossrail (LINEWD-1_05-001) Back
13
Committee Ref: A15, Table 1-Trains into London from Shenfield-0700-0800
weekdays (LINEWD-1_05-008) Back
|
