July 16, 2008
London Underground Caught Fibbing?
Shepherd's Bush + transport woes: discuss. With a brand-new Overground station delayed by short platforms, it now turns out the controversial closure of the Central line station was in fact quite unnecessary. Local MP Andy Slaughter has discovered that the decision to close was made by LU, despite Metronet saying it could remain open during work. Meanwhile, passengers were fobbed off with a porky about it being "impossible to replace one escalator while the other is running." Despite the news, the station will remain shut until October.
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Not terribly surprising considering the farce of LU closing numerous walkways at Bank station in order to make it such a nightmare that no sane person would ever get off the train there. They are still fobbing off the travelling population by saying that you can't get between Bank and Monument when I'm pretty sure you can!
I was always under the impression that developers of the new shopping centre in Shepherd's Bush didn't want the closure of the station to interfere with their stores, so they offered to pay for the work as long as LU would do it in the timeframe that was acceptable for them! Probably completely untrue but wouldn't surprise me too much..
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Sorry, some of use have actually bothered to read the documents, and the MP's spin on them is bollocks.
Metronet had a back-of-an-envelope plan that - if further investigation had gone their way - may have allowed the station to remain open, but come last November that plan was dead, not least because the works to enable had been postponed indefinitely.
When Metronet collapsed late last year, TfL were thus in the position of having no plan of how to replace the escalators, and Westfield made them an offer to replace them during the already-scheduled works to replace the building. Yes, this was very beneficial to Westfield, but it also got TfL out of a serious bind.
This is actually laid out to a certain extent in the BBC article you've linked to, so I'm not sure how you've managed to come up with the summary that the closure was "quite unnecessary".