Gatwick Express 460's

[Elojikal]

Matt:-

I can only assume the planned service ammendments would consist of services stopping at East Croydon and Clapham during the peaks. It makes no sense to have extra services stopping at East Croydon during the off-peak when there were already seven services to and from Brighton an hour all day.

My point about Thameslink 2000 is that the planned additional services were based on paths that Network Rail said were availible. The extended GatEx services would be taking up the majority of these paths. The Brighton line branches still branch off from the two track section between Balcombe Tunnel Junction and Brighton. The line to Lewes, Newhaven, Eastbourne and Hastings branches off south of Haywards Heath while the line that takes services to Hove, Worthing, Littlehampton and Southampton branches off just a mile north of Brighton station.

Actually the New England Quarter development at Brighton station doesn't affect the old platforms that have been taken out of use. Platforms 9 and 10 are still there in some form and could be brought back into use but nobody wants to pay for it to happen. The old cab road could also be destroyed and turned into extra platforms like they did at Waterloo. With the space availible Brighton could fit in twelve platforms.

A new line would benefit Brighton. The whole original point of the development of high speed lines in France was not so much to improve speeds beyond 125mph but to relieve existing congested two track lines that were at capacity and suffered from severe overcrowding but that were prohibitively expensive to convert to four tracks making the construction of a new line actually substantially cheaper than upgrading the existing one.

Nobody said it has to go through the centre of London. That's totally unnecessary. But it does makes sense to link a high speed line to Gatwick airport and if you're going to do that then it makes sense to extend it to just north of Brighton. Then, just as with the development of high speed lines in France, high speed services would make use of the high speed line for a substantial portion of their journey and then branch off onto existing "standard" lines such as the branches to Eastbourne or Worthing and Littlehampton.

Unfortunately a lot of people in this country really don't understand the reasoning behind high speed line development in France and seem to think it's just like the Japanese bullet train system of having high speed trains going directly from A to B to C to D which it's not.

[viperskil]

WOuld it be feasible to 2 tier Brighton station running some services into a subsurfacce station the only real drawback is the cost and disruption to the current station roads by undermining their foundations