Examination of Witnesses (Questions 8260
- 8279)
8260. MR ELVIN: It would.
8261. CHAIRMAN: In order to meet most
of this Petition additional provisions would be needed and we
cannot do it.
8262. MR ELVIN: Indeed my Lord, and indeed
they were requests which were rejected also at the Commons stage
when additional provisions could have been required. I appreciate
your Lordships may take a different view on that but your Lordship
is right.
8263. CHAIRMAN: Mr Francis, could you
make a little progress before we break for lunch?
8264. MR FRANCIS: Certainly, my Lord.
My name is Alan Francis and I am the transport speaker for the
Green Party and I am here today representing Jean Lambert, who
is the MEP for London, and Darren Johnson and Jenny Jones, who
are Members of the London Assembly. I have supplied the Promoters
and the Clerks with a copy of what I propose to talk about today
and this is basically a plain English version of the issues which
are raised in the Petition, along with the reasons for raising
them and also some responses to the Promoters' responses in their
letter of 31 March. I do not propose to read this out but merely
to highlight some of the points made and then to move on to the
cross-examination. I certainly would like to cross-examine Mr
Berryman. I do not have any witnesses of my own. It would also
be useful to use some of the slides which Mr Berryman showed earlier
this morning, so if they could be available it would be helpful,
and I have one or two slides of my own to show as well.
8265. CHAIRMAN: We have got what is called
the evidence in support of your Petition. Would you like to highlight
the matters in it that you wish us to pay particular attention
to?
8266. MR FRANCIS: That is what I was
about to move on to.
8267. CHAIRMAN: That would be very helpful.
8268. MR FRANCIS: Our main points of
concern are the capacity on the Great Western Main Line, the western
branches—and I have heard what has been said about your
remit and how far you are able to go on that one—and the
layout proposed for Custom House Station in south-east London.
We do still have some concerns about the access options. Having
heard this morning's discussion, I think I will just leave it
to the train operating companies and the freight operating companies
to pursue that but simply say that I think it is essential that
there should be sufficient paths for freight and passenger trains,
particularly on the Great Western Main Line, and not just those
that are running today but those that are included in growth forecasts
over the next ten to 20 years, because we are expecting to see
both the number of freight and passenger trains increase considerably
over that period.
8269. I will move on to the beginning of what
I said in the evidence, and that is the capacity issue. Mr Berryman,
in one of his slides, showed you graphs which showed the difficulty
of timetabling trains on the slow or relief tracks, as they are
called. Of course, what you saw on those graphs was that the lines
must not cross because that would be one train on top of another,
because you only have one track in each direction. What we think
is that we need extra tracks, probably between Slough and the
Royal Oak portal, so you have five or six tracks in total rather
than just the four that are there today. What that does is to
allow one train to overtake another in the same direction, which
you do not have the capability of. That, essentially, allows those
lines on the graph to cross.
8270. Where you have a mixture of speeds of
trains, as Mr Berryman highlighted, it is very important that,
for example, a semi-fast passenger train—be that on of the
regional trains from Reading or one of the Crossrail trains which
does not serve all stations—should be able to overtake either
a freight train, perhaps, or one of the Crossrail trains which
does serve all stations. If you do not have that ability, and
the Bill as proposed does not give you that ability, it puts severe
constraints both on the timetable that you can operate and the
number of trains that you can operate on that corridor. I am not
going to go into technical specifics about where, but that is
the principle: that we need more tracks; we are simply saying
that more passenger and freight trains can be accommodated in
that corridor.
8271. Then on Twyford, basically, again, in
order to be able to maintain the level of service from Twyford
station you do need those extra tracks, particularly between Airport
Junction and the tunnel portal. Moving on to the additional routes,
again I will not go into great detail, but if we can just highlight
to you where they are, and hopefully we can zoom in on the section
between Paddington and Heathrow.[42]
All I want to illustrate here is that the routes that we are suggesting
are different to the routes that the Promoters have considered.
They overlap them but they are not wholly the same. Our G1 there,
which is a branch to Uxbridge, would run up alongside the Central
Line via Greenford and South Ruislip, and then turn off and follow
the Metropolitan Line to Uxbridge. So that is not the same as
route D which the Promoters looked at, which went to Uxbridge
but that went via Harrow on a much more circuitous route.
8272. Our route 2 goes via Willesden Junction
and then Old Oak Common on the high level and then joins the District
Line through Gunnersbury down to Richmond. Again, that is different
to the route that the Promoters considered, which went to Richmond.
G3 is simply incorporating the Greenford loop. G4 is something
which was touched upon this morning, which was a western access
to Heathrow, so that trains could get to Heathrow from the Slough
and Reading direction. If we can just move across a little bit,
G5 was very tenuous with the possibility of including Windsor,
incorporating the existing Slough to Windsor branch as an extension
of Crossrail. As I say, I am aware that you cannot add these routes
but the reason we put those in is to show that there is spare
capacity at the western end of Crossrail.
8273. If I now move on to talk about passenger
numbers, I actually do not have any passenger forecasts for the
current layout of Crossrail, but I do have some from a document
called the "Crossrail Business Case Summary" published
in September 2003.[43]
This is a chart at the bottom. The figures are in the evidence,
but what this shows is the morning three-hour peak period. About
50,000 passengers would arrive from the east, 30-something-thousand
from the Shenfield direction and 18,000 from what was the Ebbsfleet
direction but is now the Abbey Wood direction. To the west the
figures are much lower. The figures here are only a guide because
the routes have changed since this report was produced. This report
had the northern branch in the west only going to Heathrow; it
did not include the Slough-Maidenhead extension. To the south
it had the branch to Richmond and Kingston, and that has been
removed entirely. That Richmond-Kingston branch was, in fact,
the main generator of passengers at this time with nearly 20,000.
So they have all gone. Now, the Promoters are only proposing to
run ten trains an hour in the peak from the west; the remaining
14 trains an hour through the central section, which start at
Paddington, would not serve west London at all. Ten trains an
hour gives you a maximum, in the morning peak, of 30,000 passengers
that you could bring in, therefore, from west London, because
each train has a capacity of about 1,000. You are obviously not
going to fill all of those trains all of the time, so we think
that about 25,000 passengers would be able to come in to central
London from the west in the morning peak, compared to 50,000 from
the east. That seems to us to be a tremendous waste of a resource.
Most of the cost of this project is in the central tunnel section,
and to only use, essentially, half of that capacity from the west
is a tremendous waste of a £10 billion-pound project—hence
why we suggested some other branches which could be used from
the west. There may well be other branches as well, but the principle
is that only half the capacity is being used from the west, and
to make sensible use of the central section all of the capacity
from the west should be used so that we bring in about 50,000
passengers in the morning peak rather than just 25,000. Particularly,
the Uxbridge and the Richmond branches that we have identified,
I think, they could each easily bring in 10-15,000 people each
morning, which would bring us up to the 50,000 capacity and, therefore,
make full use of the central section. As I said, I will not go
through all of the details of each of the five possible branches
that we have discussed. It is in the evidence and I suspect it
is something that only I and the Promoters would be terribly interested
in debating.
8274. If I move on to the issue of grade separation
between Crossrail and the relief lines and a turn-back siding,
these two things are very closely related. I wonder if we can
get up one of Mr Berryman's slides, slide 5.[44]
8275. CHAIRMAN: Have we gone on to page
7?
8276. MR FRANCIS: Yes, we have. I am
happy to go through the other couple of pages ----
8277. CHAIRMAN: I will leave you to do
it your own way.
8278. MR FRANCIS: This is a picture of
Old Oak Common from Mr Berryman's presentation this morning. In
the middle of the picture you can see an inverted "Y",
as it were. Where there are two lines there which meet is, essentially,
Old Oak Common West Junction. Going off towards the bottom left
is what is called the Wycombe line, and that is the one that we
have suggested should be used for the service to Uxbridge. Going
off towards the bottom right is the Great Western Main Line towards
Slough, and towards the top of the picture is Paddington. In the
fork there you can see what I think is an electricity substation.
It is in that space there, in that fork between the two lines,
that we think that the turn-back facility should be provided,
because it could then be at a station. What we want there is a
station both on the Main Lines, on the Wycombe lines and some
turn-back platforms. Just off the bottom of the picture is the
North London line, which could also have platforms on it, and
I think, also, going across the bottom of the picture is the Central
Line, London Underground. So you could have a very good interchange
station there.
8279. The Promoters in their response said that
they did not think that a turn-back facility could be provided
at that location without conflicting moves—i.e. one train
having to cross the path of another. This very quick sketch illustrates
a way in which it can be done.[45]
The top pair of tracks is the Crossrail ones coming from the tunnel
portal, the middle pair are the relief lines coming from Paddington
and the lower ones are the Main Lines—the fast tracks—from
Paddington. What we propose is a grade-separated junction at the
location called Old Oak West and then with terminating platforms,
which is where the trains would turn back. Those turn-back platforms
can be reached, without conflicting moves, by trains coming from
the Reading direction, going up the ramp, crossing over the Crossrail
trains heading towards Paddington, going on to the Uxbridge branch
and then turning off into the terminating platforms. The trains
that are starting from that location would leave the terminating
platform and would join the "up" Crossrail line and
then pass underneath the branch to Uxbridge. So that avoids any
conflicting moves. I am sure there are other layouts which can
do the same thing, but that is simply to illustrate that it is
possible to find a station with turn-back facilities at that location
by combining the grade-separated junction for the various branches
with the facility for a turn-back station there.
42 Committee Ref: A45, Crossrail Environmental Statement,
Vol 1, Ch 6, Fig 6.2 Western Route Options (as amended by Petitioner
No. 27) (SCN-20080422-006 and -007) Back
43
Committee Ref: A45, Figure 5.1: Crossrail Passenger Loadings
(AM Peak Period) Central Area, The Crossrail Business Case-Summary,
Cross London Rail Links Ltd, Strategic Rail Authority, Transport
for London, September 2003 (SCN-20080422-008) Back
44
Crossrail Ref: P55, Old Oak Common-Oblique view looking east
(LINEWD-XR7-005) Back
45
Committee Ref: A45, Old Oak Common-Petitioner No 27 proposed
arrangements (SCN-20080422-009) Back
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