Examination of Witnesses (Questions 8320
- 8339)
8320. MR ELVIN: I will call Mr Berryman.
MR KEITH
BERRYMAN, Recalled Examined
by MR ELVIN
8321. MR ELVIN: Mr Berryman, I am only
going to ask you a few short questions to start with and then
I will leave it to Mr Francis for any questions from him. In terms
of these various infrastructure improvements that Ms Lambert and
others are promoting, has any costing been suggested to you or
put together to indicate their impact on the project as a whole?
(Mr Berryman) Not
specifically, but you will be aware, I think, from the environmental
impact statement that a number of options which were very similar
to some of those which are being suggested by this petitioner
were examined during the preparation of the scheme design; the
costs which came out of those exercises, I have to tell you, were
very much higher than the kind of numbers suggested by the petitioner.
8322. The Richmond route, for example, was part
of the consideration by Adrian Montague when the business case
was being considered?
(Mr Berryman) Indeed it was. The Richmond route is quite
a difficult one to engineer. The idea of using the North London
line was the first stab that we had at it. We found there were
a number of very severe practical problems with that, in particular
making the connection from the Great Western to the North London
line. The idea of going via Willesden was suggested to us but
the geometry just does not work. One of the things that railways
are not very good at doing is going round sharp corners. They
need a long space to get around a curve like that and there was
not sufficient space there. There was space to do it immediately
adjacent to Old Oak Common but there were then problems on the
North London line itself. There are two level crossings which
would effectively have been completely blocked by the passage
of trains from the Crossrail service to Richmond. There was very,
very vigorous opposition from the inhabitants of Richmond to the
works which would have been needed there. In the end we had to
resort to a tunnelling philosophy to get the trains down into
that part of London and it was very, very expensive and difficult
to do, and extremely difficult to find locations for portals and
shafts and the like. It was dismissed really on the grounds of
very high expense and very difficult operation, particularly when
it gets to Richmond itself.
8323. Mr Berryman, we have made our point that
this is contrary to the principle of the Bill and those various
issues; but putting aside those significant objections for a moment,
what impact is there to be in terms of delay to the project, impact
on the access option, if you were to add all these limbs into
the Crossrail project, even assuming you could find funding for
it?
(Mr Berryman) It would mean a new Bill,
my Lords. There is no way round it—the Bill we are promoting
does not describe these works.
8324. The only other question I wanted to ask
you was with regard to the last example we spent some time on
which was Custom House. I believe you are familiar a little bit
with Custom House?
(Mr Berryman) I am indeed. I was the Project
Manager for the Docklands Light Railway Extension to Beckton,
for which this is one of the stations, so I was very much involved
in not only the design but the construction of this station and
I know the area very well. There are a number of engineering challenges
around that part of the route. In particular the intention is
to re-use the existing Connaught Tunnel to get underneath the
Royal Docks group, and the scheme the petitioner is suggesting
here would require a kind of chicane to get from Custom House
station, which would need to be moved further to the south; to
get that through the tunnel would require a very sharp reverse
curve. The length needed for the viaduct to link with the DLR
at the next station, which is Prince Regent, would be quite difficult
to get into the space; you need a fair amount of space from the
end of a platform to form a ramp to get over the tracks going
underneath, if I can explain that well. Making the connection
to Prince Regent station itself would be very difficult; the station
is on a structure and it would require a significant alteration
and modification. Moreover in that area there is a 132 KV overhead
electric cable which is only just clear of the structures that
will be needed. As the petitioner says cross-platform interchange
is much better, and we did spend quite some time looking at this
both on one level, as the petitioner has suggested, and with a
second level, so that you could put the tracks one above the other,
but we could not make the geometry work for any of the options
that we looked at.
8325. MR ELVIN: My Lord, that is all
I have by way of questions. Would you please wait there.
Cross-examined by MR
FRANCIS
8326. MR FRANCIS: If we could turn to
Information Paper A6 which I am sure Mr Berryman is very familiar
with, in paragraph 5.2 of that it says that at Ealing Broadway
at the tunnel portal at Royal Oak the railway's existing four-track
alignment would require widening to six tracks, this is a thought
for one of the options.[48]
Then it says, "These works would be very costly and of significant
adverse environmental impacts along the eight kilometres of affected
alignment". Could you give the Committee some idea of what
the adverse environmental impacts are, and how much they would
cost? From examining all the plans and so on which have been supplied
in the Environmental Statement there is actually on seven and
a half out of those eight kilometres sidings which could be utilised
for an extra pair of tracks. The only half kilometre where it
would be difficult to fit in is the bit between the North London
line and Acton Main Line station, around about half a kilometre.
What is the significant adverse environmental impact that would
be incurred in the other seven and half kilometres?
(Mr Berryman) I think the point to make here
is, as we have heard this morning from Mr George on behalf of
the freight operators, there are a number of facilities alongside
the railway which need to be used to provide access to various
facilities, for freight and so on. If we take over some of those
lines as running track for Crossrail we would have to re-provide
them (we cannot just take them away and say, "They're not
doing anything"), and that means you would actually have
to widen the corridor to a greater or lesser extent depending
on where you are on the route. A very good example is alongside
the Old Oak Common depot where you would need to intrude into
the area occupied currently by Heathrow Express. Their site is
rather constrained and it would be difficult to accommodate them
if you were to do that. There is the aerial photograph. This is
the Heathrow Express depot: if you were to provide two further
tracks down here, apart from having to move this substation of
course, you would also have to do something to sort this lot out.
This is the throat of the depot where all the trains go and that
would all need to be moved back. It becomes quite a complex and
complicated job. We did look at this. Our original thinking, way
back to the inception of the programme, was that six tracks would
be desirable; but once you start to go into the detail you see
it becomes virtually impossible without significant disruption
to others.
8327. We suggested five potential branches to
the west. In your response, and we have read Information Papers
A1 and A6 which you refer to as "having considered them",
you have concluded that the Heathrow and Maidenhead branches are
the most appropriate ones. The routes G1 to G5 that we have suggested
are not the same as the corridors A to F which were evaluated
in Information Papers A1 and A6. If you have not evaluated the
routes that we have suggested, how can you conclude that the ones
you have selected are the best ones?[49]
(Mr Berryman) I hesitate to say this, but I
am afraid several of the ideas you suggest just fall over on inspection.
It is worth just commenting on the fact that we actually looked
at a lot more options before we actually decided which ones we
would properly assess. Things like the geometry of the area, the
obstructions that are in the way and all those sorts of things,
were really dealt with by reconnaissance in the first instance.
We have a very, very long list of original options. There are
almost an infinite number of possible combinations of bits of
existing line that you could use but I think we have covered closely
enough, either in the reconnaissance or in our analysis, the lines
you suggest or something similar to the lines you suggest, so
that we can assess whether any of them are really worth taking
forward.
8328. I would have liked to have seen an analysis
of the alternatives that we were suggesting, because I read your
reports obviously that say, with the Richmond one, one of the
disadvantages there was the very long tunnel, whereas the one
we are suggesting does not have a long tunnel involved, and you
had got it going on to Kingston and there were all sorts of problems
with interaction with South West trains, which is why we had said
"terminated at Richmond" because that avoided all of
those problems. Is that investigation you are talking about, the
much longer list, available somewhere, because we certainly have
not seen it?
(Mr Berryman) I am not sure if we could
lay our hands on it very quickly. Certainly, as I say, the analysis
was effectively done by reconnaissance and sitting in a workshop
and all going through, "Does this one work? Does that one
work?" It would be a fairly informal document. On your alignment
there, G2, which you are suggesting, as I have just explained,
we did look at a possible way of using the North London line;
and the reason we dismissed it is for the reasons I have just
suggested—the two level crossings on the route, which would
require very expensive bridges, and the practical difficulties
of threading this kind of line through what is an intensely developed
residential area. That is why we decided that a tunnel down to
Turnham Green was the most effective solution, and then picking
up the line more or less parallel to the District line down here.
If you were to use these existing lines you would have to take
something off, either the North London line or the District line
trains or you would have to provide more track. Just walking down
there from Gunnersbury to Richmond will give you an idea of the
complexities of doing that. It is a very difficult area in which
to accommodate additional surface works. As regards Richmond itself,
and going beyond Richmond, the problem with terminating at Richmond
is that you need more space to terminate. The reason we were going
to Kingston or, strictly speaking, we were going to Norbury, which
is the next station beyond Kingston, was because there was space
there to provide turnaround facilities; at Richmond there would
not be without displacing someone else who is there already.
8329. I accept your point that you could not
continue to operate both the District line and the North London
line services to Richmond if you ran Crossrail there as well.
I think the obvious thing would be to divert the North London
line services to Hounslow, for example. Hounslow I know, having
seen some of the evidence, want a connection; and I think they
wanted Crossrail to go there but one could easily divert the North
London line there and then the branch down to Richmond would only
have to cope with the Crossrail and District line, which I think
it could handle, without extra tracks. I quite agree that fitting
extra tracks on that section would be very difficult.
(Mr Berryman) My Lords, there is a great
temptation with these kinds of projects to take a map and a pencil
and start drawing lines on it. There are an infinite number of
combinations of lines that you can draw. All of the ones you have
mentioned so far we have looked at in one way or another. The
only one I do not think we looked at was a loop going round via
Castlebar Park, which would be rather unfortunate for people who
wanted to go the other way along that line. That is the only one
I think we did not look at in some shape or form.
8330. If we could move on to issues around the
grade-separated junction at Old Oak Common West and the turn-back
siding. If there was a grade-separated junction at Old Oak Common
West where Crossrail trains joined the relief lines, would it
then be possible to run more trains from west of Maidenhead into
Paddington, because currently you are proposing a flat junction
somewhere near Westbourne Park?
(Mr Berryman) We are not proposing a flat
junction to the best of my knowledge. Do you mean a junction to
take the residual diesel service into Paddington high level?
8331. That is the one, yes.
(Mr Berryman) That is only two trains
an hour; that is not a difficult movement.
8332. But it is a flat junction, is it not?
(Mr Berryman) It is a flat junction, yes.
8333. As I understood it the reason that you
were limited to two trains an hour and turning back another two
trains an hour at Slough is because of the flat junction. If the
junction became a grade-separated one which eliminated the conflicting
move would you, for example, be able to extend those two trains
an hour which you are now proposing to truncate at Slough; would
they be able to go all the way to Paddington?
(Mr Berryman) They would but there is
not enough traffic on offer to justify that by quite a large margin.
We would expect those to be two or three car trains, rather than
the ten car trains which would be a typical Crossrail train.
8334. But technically it would be possible for
them to go on if that was a grade-separated junction?
(Mr Berryman) Well, I do not know whether it is a grade-separated
junction or not, is the difficult point. It will be a question
of timetable planning and of course it would be easier if there
was a grade-separated junction, but not impossible. As you will
have noted, we are only running ten trains an hour from Paddington
westwards and that is not an enormously heavy load.
8335. I put up a possible track diagram before
lunchtime of the turn-back siding at Old Oak Common.[50]
Do you accept that that is a design which would avoid conflicting
moves between the through and the terminating trains?
(Mr Berryman) I not only do not accept that,
I do not accept it is even technically feasible or possible. The
space required for the flyovers that you have shown and the space
required for platforms would just be far too big compared with
the space that is available. It just would not fit in.
8336. But, if it can be fitted in, operationally
it could work?
(Mr Berryman) If it could be fitted in.
I do not see what is the point of progressing the argument because,
if it cannot be fitted in, it cannot be fitted in and that is
the end of the story.
8337. What can or cannot be fitted in depends
obviously upon what else gets moved aside.
(Mr Berryman) What can or cannot be fitted
in depends on things like gradients of slopes, length of transition
curves, curves that can be fitted in, position of points and crossings,
signalling diagrams and many, many other things. You will have
to take it from me by inspection that it will not go.
8338. You did say in your response that you
had identified a potential site for a station at Old Oak Common.
Can you tell us roughly where that was?
(Mr Berryman) We have identified a potential site for a station
at the very east end of the
Old Oak Common site.[51]
The local authority, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea,
would like to have a station there and we do not think there is
a business case for such a station, but what we have done is moved
some of our points and crossing work so that, if ever a business
case does make itself realistic by the development of the area,
then a station could be provided there.
8339. So that is near the entrance to the depot,
if I have understood you? Is that right?
(Mr Berryman) It is beyond, further back.
On that plan, it is about there (indicating).
48 Crossrail Information Paper A6-Selection of Western
Termini, http://billdocuments.crossrail.co.uk
(LINEWD-IPA6-004) Back
49
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
50
Committee Ref: A45, Old Oak Common-Petitioner No 27 proposed
arrangements (SCN-20080422-009) Back
51
Crossrail Ref: P55, Old Oak Common-Oblique view looking east
(LINEWD-XR7-005) Back
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