Theatre Review: The Laramie Project @ The Space E14
The Lions of London #1
We have always been at war with Eurasia
One Hundred Days To Make Me A Better Person
Photo of the Day: Caption Required #28
A whole lotta nothing, is the simple answer.
When the platforms closed two years ago as St Pancras International opened, we reported that the Eurostar's former London home was being converted for suburban use, to the extortionate tune of £100,000.
That work was supposed to be completed last December, yet today a Department for Transport document released under the Freedom Of Information act revealed that the platforms won't re-open to passengers until 2014. That's a total of seven years out of action, costing the taxpayer £500,000 annually just to keep them closed.
The main reason, according to the document, is that the platforms are being lengthened to accommodate 10-carriage trains run by South West Trains, the sole operator to work out of Waterloo. The challenge of integrating the Eurostar tracks -- which were carefully laid to avoid the logjam of traffic coming into the station -- into the wider network is also a tough one. Yet the apparent lack of action on this is shocking, and for all the plaudits heaped on St Pancras and the success of High Speed One, those forlorn and forgotten platforms perched at the end of the Waterloo concourse remain the ugly sisters that most people prefer to ignore.
Image of Waterloo station by the author
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They clearly don't understand that Waterloo has three separate mainlines* running into it side by side and the Eurostar platforms are part of the least congested side. To do anything useful with them they need to rebuild the approach tracks to shift all traffic to the left in your picture, freeing up the short platforms on the right to be sacrificed and rebuilt as fewer, longer platforms. And that's why it takes years.
Glad to see the Evening Standard is still spewing ignorant crap.
(* clearly visible in your photo - the blue trains are on the Windsor Lines, the long white trains are on the Mainline Fasts and the short red trains are the Mainline Slows)
But the closure of the Eurostar platforms was known in advance for years. Despite the vagueness of the ES article, it's a weak excuse to say that "it takes years" to do anything useful -- the whole point is Govt and SWT have known about it for years, and yet nothing's been done.
Forgot to add, they're not comparing the lack of progress against some arbitrary measure, but against the government's own promises.
They're lengthening the Eurostar platforms? But Eurostars are enormous. Surely longer than the 1737 to Canterbury or wherever?
Well, as usual, there's money for X and not for Y. Waterloo is being St Pancrasised in due course (so long as Network Rail get to put a skyscraper or three on the roof to pay for it) so the money isn't there yet, the plans for what exactly the new platforms will join are not done and one extra platform isn't going to make much difference to anyone.
There isn't a platform shortage at waterloo so much as there is a need for longer trains - The Eurostar platforms are not going to be lengthened, they are to be shortened to make room to lenthen and reposition the others (which will also require moving the services into the basement and extending the platforms into the current concorse. You can fit a 15 coach train in the eurostar platforms, but sadly it'd have no where to stop. They need to lengthen other stations. The plans as they exist end up with maybe one more platform but all extended to 10 or 15 cars.
Then down the tracks there is the fly over at nine elms that was built for eurostar and needs to be demolished and the old 8th track reinstated.
Is it perfect, no, could it be better? probably. Right now its just not anyone's priority and that is probably the right decision, there are bigger fish to fry.