I was born in Medway and attended university in Reading. The difficulty of travelling back home to see my parents peaked in the years 2003/4. The rail journey from Reading to London still took around 40 minutes, the tube journey to Waterloo for Waterloo East another 20 minutes, followed by a probable wait of 15-20 minutes for a train to Strood. In 2003, the Strood tunnel was closed, extending this last leg of the journey to just over an hour and a half with rail replacement services, rather than just over an hour. The total time required to traverse 68 miles east was just shy of 3 hours.
Now, the same journey takes under 25 minutes to Paddington, 15-20 minutes to St. Pancras via the Circle/Hammersmith or Crossrail and Thameslink routes, and a 17-minute journey from St. Pancras to Ebbsfleet. Without the burden of small children or luggage, I've completed the journey in just 75 minutes, half the time it used to take in 2003.
Having these options helps transform even the most challenging rail journeys into easier ones, reducing car usage. I can easily envision boarding at Reading with my family, luggage and Christmas presents and going on to have a seamless journey to Ebbsfleet. During this time of year, HS1 is understandably crowded, mainly offering standing room. It becomes a challenging route when travelling with family, luggage, and Christmas presents, despite being the fastest option available.
From a professional perspective, I understand the impact that a semi-fast, non-stop route from that part of Kent to Heathrow could have in reducing car usage. Similarly, extending the Bakerloo line out to more areas of South-East London would divert an incremental amount of car traffic bound for Heathrow and other airports.
Something that I found really striking is that I went on holiday to France in the 1990s and first rode a TGV back then, and on the TGVs they had a map of where the high-speed lines (the "LGVs") were going to go eventually.
And most of those have been built now. They were prepared to say "we're going to do this in thirty years' time" and then actually do it forty years later (yes, I do mean to change from 30 to 40, it took longer than planned). While they were building one line, they were doing the detailed planning for the next, so they didn't get the UK problem where a load of people have just finished learning exactly how to build a railway line (by building one) and then they all get made redundant, and then ten years later they have to rebuild all of that training and experience because the first team are probably scattered all over the world or doing a different job.
The only bit of the entire British rail network to have a rolling programme of any sort like this is the electrification of the Scottish rail network. Curiously enough, the cost per-mile is falling (after inflation) as the planners and the electrification teams get more experienced and skilful. Contrast this with England where we still haven't completed all of the electrification schemes announced in 2012 for completion in 2019, and we formally abandoned the "Traction Decarbonisation Network Strategy" in October 2022 after only two years.
There are some truly marvellous pieces of work as a result, e.g. a line upgrade from Church Fenton to York to 125mph and electrification. Church Fenton is only relevant because it's where the HS2 Eastern branch was originally supposed to terminate and connect to the conventional network for trains to York and Newcastle. With the HS2 East cancellation, Church Fenton is just a random station halfway between Leeds and York, so this work (which is still under construction) will never actually be used by any electric trains; it just means that bimode trains will be able to switch off their diesels a bit sooner (ie at Church Fenton instead of at York). Note that, with the Trans Pennine electrification (which is actually underway in places) trains will be able to run as electrics from Liverpool to Leeds and from Church Fenton to Newcastle, but not between Leeds and Church Fenton, meaning that expensive bimode trains will be hauling diesel engines for hundreds of miles for the sake of less than 20 miles of diesel running.
I've caught the Lizzie Line from Reading to Liverpool Street a couple of times but often find it easier to catch it from Paddington instead because I can catch a direct and quicker train into London first.
Nice idea but how much difference would it make? You can already get a train from Northfleet to Abbey Wood to transfer onto Crossrail. I looked at national rail and the changing time at Abbey Wood is only five minutes. Ebbsfleet has a high speed line(!) into London already. I might be missing something but it feels like icing on a cake for an area already well served.
I'm sure you could spend £1.5 - £3billion somewhere else have more impact. For contrast - to introduce mass transit in Leeds, the cost is around £2 billion.
Or just spend the money on hiring more border staff, sorting border controls and getting the costs down for Eurostar so they can run a full service including the Kent stations.
One useful difference is that a whole swathe of south and east London would find it easier to get to Ebbsfleet for Eurostar than to St Pancras. Just hop on the Lizzie. In particular, that's by far the best way to get to Eurostar from Canary Wharf, as the route to St Pancras involves changing at Bank.
Again, this seems marginal gains - we're talking about Londoners not needing to change where we could spend the money far better elsewhere in the country where there isn't infrastructure at all. I'm also aware that this is the problem, transport is treated as a zero-sum game where we spend time arguing about which option is more worthy, instead of doing it all.
But: I think you might have a business case for the line extension. I know that the Channel Tunnel Operators and HS1 want to run more Europe services but St Pancras is a limiting factor. Perhaps they could be persuaded to fund the extension, knowing that they then have a lot more market from Ebbsfleet?
I think you're right that there are better ways to spend that much money outside London if we are cash-limited (which I don't think infrastructure investment should be, but that's a different argument), but I think that connecting Canary Wharf to Paris could also get a bit of cash out of the Canary Wharf Group as well as Eurostar (ie SNCF) and possibly CTO and HS1's owners. One of the problems with Ashford is that it's not especially easy to get to from a lot of places, so it doesn't pull in that many passengers. Ebbsfleet opening up much of SE London would be accessible from a lot of places. Especially as people would likely ride Javelin from Stratford Intl to Ebbsfleet for Eurostar.
“Gravesend (which is also occasionally talked about as an Elizabeth Line terminus)”
Good article. Worth noting that Gravesend was always the planned destination and the land for any extension is already safeguarded that far.
The switch to Ebbsfleet was (IMHO) an attempt to capitalise on the government’s desire to make garden cities a success and so Ebbsfleet was easier to market/lobby the govt with.
Both are now less likely now the Natural England and the NIMBYs have managed to kill off the proposed theme park. Still, what’s up to 25,000 jobs in a deprived part of North Kent when you could instead save some contaminated industrial wasteland?
Hmm, not for me. What about the issue of the 'Clapham Common' Northern line problem of trains getting into Woolwich and Canary Wharf in rush hour that are already full? Is commuting people from areas not even represented by a London Borough, London Assembly or London Mayor, at the expense of London commuters, actually the best solution? Folks in Stone Crossing and Ebsfleet already have direct services into a London terminus - just not a through-train. Yes, the through-train is better, but nearly everyone else outside of London has to deal with a single terminal end point to their commute - from the richest towns in suburbia (Gerrard's Cross -> London Marylebone) to the least fashionable (Stevenage -> London King's Cross).
I was born in Medway and attended university in Reading. The difficulty of travelling back home to see my parents peaked in the years 2003/4. The rail journey from Reading to London still took around 40 minutes, the tube journey to Waterloo for Waterloo East another 20 minutes, followed by a probable wait of 15-20 minutes for a train to Strood. In 2003, the Strood tunnel was closed, extending this last leg of the journey to just over an hour and a half with rail replacement services, rather than just over an hour. The total time required to traverse 68 miles east was just shy of 3 hours.
Now, the same journey takes under 25 minutes to Paddington, 15-20 minutes to St. Pancras via the Circle/Hammersmith or Crossrail and Thameslink routes, and a 17-minute journey from St. Pancras to Ebbsfleet. Without the burden of small children or luggage, I've completed the journey in just 75 minutes, half the time it used to take in 2003.
Having these options helps transform even the most challenging rail journeys into easier ones, reducing car usage. I can easily envision boarding at Reading with my family, luggage and Christmas presents and going on to have a seamless journey to Ebbsfleet. During this time of year, HS1 is understandably crowded, mainly offering standing room. It becomes a challenging route when travelling with family, luggage, and Christmas presents, despite being the fastest option available.
From a professional perspective, I understand the impact that a semi-fast, non-stop route from that part of Kent to Heathrow could have in reducing car usage. Similarly, extending the Bakerloo line out to more areas of South-East London would divert an incremental amount of car traffic bound for Heathrow and other airports.
Something that I found really striking is that I went on holiday to France in the 1990s and first rode a TGV back then, and on the TGVs they had a map of where the high-speed lines (the "LGVs") were going to go eventually.
And most of those have been built now. They were prepared to say "we're going to do this in thirty years' time" and then actually do it forty years later (yes, I do mean to change from 30 to 40, it took longer than planned). While they were building one line, they were doing the detailed planning for the next, so they didn't get the UK problem where a load of people have just finished learning exactly how to build a railway line (by building one) and then they all get made redundant, and then ten years later they have to rebuild all of that training and experience because the first team are probably scattered all over the world or doing a different job.
The only bit of the entire British rail network to have a rolling programme of any sort like this is the electrification of the Scottish rail network. Curiously enough, the cost per-mile is falling (after inflation) as the planners and the electrification teams get more experienced and skilful. Contrast this with England where we still haven't completed all of the electrification schemes announced in 2012 for completion in 2019, and we formally abandoned the "Traction Decarbonisation Network Strategy" in October 2022 after only two years.
There are some truly marvellous pieces of work as a result, e.g. a line upgrade from Church Fenton to York to 125mph and electrification. Church Fenton is only relevant because it's where the HS2 Eastern branch was originally supposed to terminate and connect to the conventional network for trains to York and Newcastle. With the HS2 East cancellation, Church Fenton is just a random station halfway between Leeds and York, so this work (which is still under construction) will never actually be used by any electric trains; it just means that bimode trains will be able to switch off their diesels a bit sooner (ie at Church Fenton instead of at York). Note that, with the Trans Pennine electrification (which is actually underway in places) trains will be able to run as electrics from Liverpool to Leeds and from Church Fenton to Newcastle, but not between Leeds and Church Fenton, meaning that expensive bimode trains will be hauling diesel engines for hundreds of miles for the sake of less than 20 miles of diesel running.
I've caught the Lizzie Line from Reading to Liverpool Street a couple of times but often find it easier to catch it from Paddington instead because I can catch a direct and quicker train into London first.
Nice idea but how much difference would it make? You can already get a train from Northfleet to Abbey Wood to transfer onto Crossrail. I looked at national rail and the changing time at Abbey Wood is only five minutes. Ebbsfleet has a high speed line(!) into London already. I might be missing something but it feels like icing on a cake for an area already well served.
I'm sure you could spend £1.5 - £3billion somewhere else have more impact. For contrast - to introduce mass transit in Leeds, the cost is around £2 billion.
Or just spend the money on hiring more border staff, sorting border controls and getting the costs down for Eurostar so they can run a full service including the Kent stations.
One useful difference is that a whole swathe of south and east London would find it easier to get to Ebbsfleet for Eurostar than to St Pancras. Just hop on the Lizzie. In particular, that's by far the best way to get to Eurostar from Canary Wharf, as the route to St Pancras involves changing at Bank.
Again, this seems marginal gains - we're talking about Londoners not needing to change where we could spend the money far better elsewhere in the country where there isn't infrastructure at all. I'm also aware that this is the problem, transport is treated as a zero-sum game where we spend time arguing about which option is more worthy, instead of doing it all.
But: I think you might have a business case for the line extension. I know that the Channel Tunnel Operators and HS1 want to run more Europe services but St Pancras is a limiting factor. Perhaps they could be persuaded to fund the extension, knowing that they then have a lot more market from Ebbsfleet?
I think you're right that there are better ways to spend that much money outside London if we are cash-limited (which I don't think infrastructure investment should be, but that's a different argument), but I think that connecting Canary Wharf to Paris could also get a bit of cash out of the Canary Wharf Group as well as Eurostar (ie SNCF) and possibly CTO and HS1's owners. One of the problems with Ashford is that it's not especially easy to get to from a lot of places, so it doesn't pull in that many passengers. Ebbsfleet opening up much of SE London would be accessible from a lot of places. Especially as people would likely ride Javelin from Stratford Intl to Ebbsfleet for Eurostar.
“Gravesend (which is also occasionally talked about as an Elizabeth Line terminus)”
Good article. Worth noting that Gravesend was always the planned destination and the land for any extension is already safeguarded that far.
The switch to Ebbsfleet was (IMHO) an attempt to capitalise on the government’s desire to make garden cities a success and so Ebbsfleet was easier to market/lobby the govt with.
Both are now less likely now the Natural England and the NIMBYs have managed to kill off the proposed theme park. Still, what’s up to 25,000 jobs in a deprived part of North Kent when you could instead save some contaminated industrial wasteland?
The big issue for North Kent and this project is the weakness of the crossings of the river Thames east of Tower Bridge.
So really before you can do this you need to do the lower Thames Crossing and probably also upgrade the Reading-Gatwick-Ashford railway line.
And extending Crossrail helps a bit - except that it doesn’t cross the river until you get close to central London.
Come on!
This would mean a tory misgovernment spending money on railways!
What's the likelihood of that?
Hmm, not for me. What about the issue of the 'Clapham Common' Northern line problem of trains getting into Woolwich and Canary Wharf in rush hour that are already full? Is commuting people from areas not even represented by a London Borough, London Assembly or London Mayor, at the expense of London commuters, actually the best solution? Folks in Stone Crossing and Ebsfleet already have direct services into a London terminus - just not a through-train. Yes, the through-train is better, but nearly everyone else outside of London has to deal with a single terminal end point to their commute - from the richest towns in suburbia (Gerrard's Cross -> London Marylebone) to the least fashionable (Stevenage -> London King's Cross).
Politically yet another transport project to benefit London is going to be a hard sell. Even if Kent is actually pretty deprived.
Kent have consistently voted to deprive themselves - e.g. Brexit.