What would a "London Central" have looked like?

[DerekC]

Idea prompted by this post in the "Worlds Most Complex Trackwork" thread.

Just imagine what a “London Central” might have looked like!

If the British Government in the early 1840s had decided to take a hand in the strategic planning of the national network, would there have been one or more central London combined stations? If so where and with what connections, and what would it/they have developed into by now?

 

[The exile]

Idea prompted by this post in the "Worlds Most Complex Trackwork" thread.



If the British Government in the early 1840s had decided to take a hand in the strategic planning of the national network, would there have been one or more central London combined stations? If so where and with what connections, and what would it/they have developed into by now?

I believe that the Euston site originally was going to accommodate the GWR as well, which would have got 4 pretty close to each other anyway. Some major demolition along the South Bank could have put the London Bridge terminal platforms at Waterloo East ( or Charing Cross). A massive expansion of both bits of Waterloo ( and associated trackwork) could have absorbed Victoria. Metropolitan line between Paddington and Liverpool Street operated as a mini- Crossrail in the 19th century - so we’re nearly down to two. This is assuming absolute carte Blanche to purchase and demolish all property ( not just slums) at a knock- down price and no influential opposition!

 

[Class45]

I believe at one time there was a proposal for a "London Central" in the Farringdon/Smithfield area.

 

[03_179]

I think London is a bit of a different thing.

Whereas in Vienna they demolished Sudbahnhof and built the huge Haufptbahnhof which has reduced Westbahnhof to just local services.

I can't think of a place in the London area that would be a really prime site for a London Central. Now Maybe the Old Oak area is about the only place it could be done.

 

[UrieS15]

I believe at one time there was a proposal for a "London Central" in the Farringdon/Smithfield area.

I believe this was the preferred option of Goering g.m.b.h the town planning consultants back in the 40s

 

[The exile]

I think London is a bit of a different thing.

Whereas in Vienna they demolished Sudbahnhof and built the huge Haufptbahnhof which has reduced Westbahnhof to just local services.

I can't think of a place in the London area that would be a really prime site for a London Central. Now Maybe the Old Oak area is about the only place it could be done.

Even with the building of Wien Hbf, Vienna still has three separate stations.

I believe this was the preferred option of Goering g.m.b.h the town planning consultants back in the 40s

Don't know if Speer's / his boss's plans for post-war occupied London got that far, but I bet they would have included one as well!

 

[Gloster]

Wasn’t there a proposal to build a central station on the site of St Giles’ rookery off Tottenham Court Road back in the 1840s or so? This would kill two birds with one stone: provide a central station and get rid of the notorious rookery.

 

[Bletchleyite]

I believe that the Euston site originally was going to accommodate the GWR as well, which would have got 4 pretty close to each other anyway. Some major demolition along the South Bank could have put the London Bridge terminal platforms at Waterloo East ( or Charing Cross). A massive expansion of both bits of Waterloo ( and associated trackwork) could have absorbed Victoria. Metropolitan line between Paddington and Liverpool Street operated as a mini- Crossrail in the 19th century - so we’re nearly down to two. This is assuming absolute carte Blanche to purchase and demolish all property ( not just slums) at a knock- down price and no influential opposition!

It wouldn't be overly difficult to combine Paddington, Marylebone, Euston and KX/SP onto one large site, as the lines meet in various places. Bringing the Southern in as well would be a real challenge, and Liverpool St/Fenchurch St are sort of out on their own.

Old Oak would be a non-starter as who'd want to go all the way out into the suburbs instead of the Southern stations in/near the City?

 

[BrianW]

Idea prompted by this post in the "Worlds Most Complex Trackwork" thread.



If the British Government in the early 1840s had decided to take a hand in the strategic planning of the national network, would there have been one or more central London combined stations? If so where and with what connections, and what would it/they have developed into by now?

I guess 'it depends'. What is/was London in 1840? and what was/is 'Central'? Several (most?) of the railways were seeking to serve 'The City' and the 'West End'.
In some ways what has become 'the tube' brought them to various parts of 'the centre' (and arguably in a better- more distributed- kind of way).
Forumites ridiculed my proposal for a 'central' station under Hyde Park, served by HS1,2,3 linking lines from broadly the Channel Tunnel to Birmingham, NorthWest England, North Wales, Scotland and Ireland; South Wales and South West England to somewhere East of London; Southampton, Portsmouth etc to East Midlands, Yorkshire, North East England, Scotland for being 'eccentric' ie too far west of 'Central' London.

 

[Royston Vasey]

I think London is a bit of a different thing.

Whereas in Vienna they demolished Sudbahnhof and built the huge Haufptbahnhof which has reduced Westbahnhof to just local services.

I can't think of a place in the London area that would be a really prime site for a London Central. Now Maybe the Old Oak area is about the only place it could be done.

Vienna Hbf is big and centrally located, but yes, Vienna and London are very different beasts. It's a through station and also walkable to the main areas of the city, which is far more walkable than London. Vienna Hbf carries all international and intercity services in one station and has about the same footfall as Waterloo per year, but Waterloo is just one of 14 London termini, and has no real intercity services!

The main benefit for Vienna Hbf (other than double length platforms) is that it is a through station convenient for all the main areas, but also with viable through routes that trains can serve and only spend a few minutes occupying platforms, unlike at termini.

All our main London stations (as with Paris) are termini, but even if there was one through station, there are a few issues:

- The sheer size of it would need to be truly enormous for the footfall - dozens of long platforms on different levels.
- One central location isn't very useful for most destinations in the city - one station serving everywhere from Kensington to The City to Shoreditch would need good "Crossrail"/"RER" type connections.
- It would need to be a through station but where do you terminate the routes? Through services would need to connect up but London is not at all central to Great Britain. Vienna can serve Prague, Munich, Bratislava, Venice, Budapest, Zurich and its own airport with just a few different through intercity services with easy connection between them all at Vienna. Frankfurt is similar. But you wouldn't extend an Edinburgh-London intercity service to Ramsgate or Portsmouth because those destinations need high capacity commuter services, not intercity services. Possibly Plymouth or Cardiff but only to join two routes for the sake of it, not for a fast through journey.
- The regional services would also preferably line up, and we are already doing this with Thameslink and Crossrail; you'd add routes like Oxford to Margate, Southampton to Norwich.

Having a very large high throughput central London station where through intercity services continue onto and terminate at Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted would be very interesting though. This is the approach in cities like Munich, Vienna and Amsterdam - the airports are useful terminus points away from the Central stations, to which you can spread out termination points, add useful connection opportunities at the city centre station and shift any sort of layover and delay recovery time away from the centre.

You'd have to tear everything up and start again of course, and it's also a recipe for unreliability, not to mention that not even our electrification matches up north to south, let alone the routes!

 

[S&CLER]

I have a cutting from the Illustrated London News which illustrates the "Proposed Central Railway Terminus for the City of London". It is the issue for the week beginning Sunday 24 May 1846, so presumably the publication date was Saturday 23 May. Overleaf is a map of the site in Farringdon Street . The page number doesn't appear on the cutting. The new station stretches diagonally under Farringdon Street, and at its east end there is a semi-circular fruit and veg. market fronting on the Old Bailey. .The west end is bounded by Shoe Lane.
Unfortunately it's so long since I had to scan anything that I've forgotten how to do it, so much as I would like to, I can't share it with you. If all else fails, I could read the printer manual.

I've now had another go. and it seems to work.

 

[Ken H]

Wasnt there a plan for a big underground terminus in London after WW2? Something to do with Lord Abercrombie? The town planners wanted to get he termini out of sight as they thought them unsightly.

 

[YorksLad12]

A much larger Holborn Viaduct? High- and low-level (Snow Hill) platforms, existing connections to stations north and south? Keep the existing stations open for commuter traffic. 'Just' need track work and tunnels to run through from Paddington, Marylebone and Euston to connect to the main line at, say, Farringdon, and we're there

 

[Senex]

Don't know if Speer's / his boss's plans for post-war occupied London got that far, but I bet they would have included one as well!

Would even Speer have attempted a single station for London? His 1941 plans for the significantly smaller Berlin envisaged two major passenger stations.

 

[krus_aragon]

The idea of having one single station for London would have been directly contrary to the policy of not allowing railways within the centre of London (unless you force railways on the far side to come all the way round the outskirts). If this policy had been abandoned, there may not have been as much of a need for underground railways in London.

 

[Kremlin Stooge]

I wonder if the concept of ‘Central London’, as we understand it today, actually existed during the heyday of railway construction. Certainly the railway companies south of the Thames had two distinct target markets, the City (for well-heeled commuters) and the West End for shopping, theatres and the cluster of hotels, hence the proliferation of termini serving the two areas.

A single London Central station would have been a temptingly vulnerable target for the Speer & Goering Architectural Remodelling Partnership! A direct hit could have seriously crippled operations.

 

[GrimsbyPacer]

Forumites ridiculed my proposal for a 'central' station under Hyde Park, served by HS1,2,3 linking lines from broadly the Channel Tunnel to Birmingham, NorthWest England, North Wales, Scotland and Ireland; South Wales and South West England to somewhere East of London; Southampton, Portsmouth etc to East Midlands, Yorkshire, North East England, Scotland for being 'eccentric' ie too far west of 'Central' London.

A station under Hyde Park does not sound ridiculous to me, no further from central areas than Paddington, Marylebone, Liverpool Street etc.

 

[LNW-GW Joint]

Paris has its central underground station at Châtelet-les-Halles, where the RER routes cross (A, B, D) - although I wouldn't call it a pleasant station.
But it has had little impact on the original main line termini, which are all still working (Nord, Lyon, Est, St Lazare, Montparnasse).
Austerlitz has been downgraded (Orsay nearby had already closed) and most of its services are now on RER C.
The London equivalent to Châtelet will be Farringdon when Crossrail finally opens.

Berlin had the significant advantage of the empty cold-war wall strip to build a new through central Hbf on the site of the old Lehrte station.
But the original Staatsbahn and later Ringbahn, built in the 1880s, were critical to the design.

Vienna Hbf is a superb new through station, but it is not really central.
There is however a cross-city tunnel for local/regional services, via Mitte and Praterstern (old Nord).
Warsaw has reoriented its services via the central tunnel, linking its 3 main stations.
Prague has rationalised its former termini and limited through routes with new link lines and tunnels via hlavni.
Madrid has linked its two major termini (Atocha and Chamartin) via a tunnel (capable of passing AVE trains).
Milan has upgraded it east-west tunnel through Porta Garibaldi to bypass the terminus at Centrale.
Elsewhere Italy has built new through stations in the suburbs to allow long distance through trains to avoid termini (Rome, Florence).

New through routes linked to high speed lines have been built under Lille and Antwerp.
A mega-project is in progress at Stuttgart to eliminate the current terminus.

 

[Senex]

Berlin had the significant advantage of the empty cold-war wall strip to build a new through central Hbf on the site of the old Lehrte station.
But the original Staatsbahn and later Ringbahn, built in the 1880s, were critical to the design.

I think you mean the Berliner Stadtbahn of the 1880s, not the Königlich Preußische Staatseisenbahnen. That empty strip resulting from the zonal boudary line was absolutely crucial to the planning of the new station (which if local views had been taken account of would have kept the old Lehrter Bahnhof name—indeed its station-code remains BL).

 

[StephenHunter]

I think you mean the Berliner Stadtbahn of the 1880s, not the Königlich Preußische Staatseisenbahnen. That empty strip resulting from the zonal boudary line was absolutely crucial to the planning of the new station (which if local views had been taken account of would have kept the old Lehrter Bahnhof name—indeed its station-code remains BL).

The city centre was pretty well defined; Mitte was located within the old Berlin Customs Wall, of which the Brandenburg Gate is one of the few surviving bits; the other 'Tors' can be found on the BVG map to this day, even if the actual gates are long gone.

 

[Bevan Price]

Even in 1820, there seem to have been few central areas suitable for a "Central" station without significant demolition. See:

http://ctgpublishing.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/map-of-london-england-circa-1820-by-william-darton-publishing.jpg

Edited on 7 August:
According to John Wrottesley's History of Great Northern Railway (GNR), in 1851, Charles Pearson, solicitor to the (London) City Corporation, proposed a large central London station. The line would have run from Paddington to Kings Cross (the route later used for the Metropolitan Railway), there joining the proposed City Terminus line via Fleet Valley to a terminus at Holborn, with connections from other railways. The GNR (and other railways) considered the cost was too great, and declined to participate.

With Charles Pearson as a promoter, the Metropolitan Railway then built the line from Paddington & Kings Cross to its initial terminal at Farringdon Street.

 

[Helvellyn]

Even if a London Central had been built in the 1840s I think an issue would have emerged over the next fifty years with trying to expand it, so likely other stations would still have been needed. It's probably also the case that the multiple stations in part helped in the rationale for the emergence of the Underground to link the terminals and parts of London.

Could you imagine the congestion a major central station would have suffered? If it existed it would probably have been rebuilt in the 1950s or 1960s as some concrete monstrosity to "improve" things, and no doubt have needed rebuilding again.

 

[LNW-GW Joint]

I think you mean the Berliner Stadtbahn of the 1880s, not the Königlich Preußische Staatseisenbahnen. That empty strip resulting from the zonal boudary line was absolutely crucial to the planning of the new station (which if local views had been taken account of would have kept the old Lehrter Bahnhof name—indeed its station-code remains BL).

Of course. There were too many Staatsbahns!
The ability to route trains through Berlin via either the east-west Stadtsbahn and the new north-south through line is a great design.
They just need to finish the rebuild of the old Dresdnerbahn route out of Berlin for completeness, avoiding the present diversion via the Anhalterbahn and outer ring.

Manchester had a vague post-war plan for a combined station ("Trinity", combining Central/Victoria/Exchange), but it never had any realistic prospects of being built - and would still have left London Road/Piccadilly/Oxford Road separate.
Leeds and Edinburgh rationalised their railways at one station, and Bristol TM and Newcastle were always single stations, to their great advantage.
Liverpool has its loop/link lines, but it's not ideal.
Manchester and Glasgow have still to achieve anything similar, despite the Ordsall Curve in the former.
Birmingham briefly centralised everything at New St, but it's looking more complicated now.

 

[Dr Hoo]

The great (but largely overlooked) railway visionary, William James, mused on multi-purpose railways for Central London as early as about 1806, thinking in terms of 'up-scaling' the Surrey Iron Railway. He envisaged a South Bank station, relatively close to where Waterloo later went and a new Thames crossing (either bridge or tunnel) lined up with Tottenham Court Road.

His thinking probably influenced John Rennie's 'Strand Bridge' (very slightly downstream) for which the foundation stone was laid in 1811. It was constructed as absolutely flat, suitable for a railway track.

James' later ideas for his '100-mile railway' (which only ever saw the light of day in the reduced form of the Stratford and Moreton Horse Tramway) around 1820 envisaged a terminus at Paddington, showing that the opportunity for a line through Central London had already passed and a 'northern arc' of termini along what became the Euston Road corridor was as close as railways were going to get.

(With apologies for this slightly superficial summary of a very complex topic.)

 

[StephenHunter]

Why did the Snow Hill Tunnel fall out of use for passenger operations in 1915?

 

[Kremlin Stooge]

The great (but largely overlooked) railway visionary, William James, mused on multi-purpose railways for Central London as early as about 1806, thinking in terms of 'up-scaling' the Surrey Iron Railway. He envisaged a South Bank station, relatively close to where Waterloo later went and a new Thames crossing (either bridge or tunnel) lined up with Tottenham Court Road.

His thinking probably influenced John Rennie's 'Strand Bridge' (very slightly downstream) for which the foundation stone was laid in 1811. It was constructed as absolutely flat, suitable for a railway track.

James' later ideas for his '100-mile railway' (which only ever saw the light of day in the reduced form of the Stratford and Moreton Horse Tramway) around 1820 envisaged a terminus at Paddington, showing that the opportunity for a line through Central London had already passed and a 'northern arc' of termini along what became the Euston Road corridor was as close as railways were going to get.

(With apologies for this slightly superficial summary of a very complex topic.)

I had never heard of William James before. Having done a brief search, it looks as if I’ve got some potentially fascinating reading to do, so thank you for the reference.

If I may be permitted some further thread drift, we are all probably looking at this topic through the eyes of the largely passenger-centric railway we have today, but of course the prime mover behind a lot of railway projects ‘back in the day’ was freight traffic. The mind boggles at the thought of a London Central marshalling yard...

 

[Dr Hoo]

I had never heard of William James before. Having done a brief search, it looks as if I’ve got some potentially fascinating reading to do, so thank you for the reference.

If I may be permitted some further thread drift, we are all probably looking at this topic through the eyes of the largely passenger-centric railway we have today, but of course the prime mover behind a lot of railway projects ‘back in the day’ was freight traffic. The mind boggles at the thought of a London Central marshalling yard...

James was an amazing chap. Sadly the biography by Miles Macnair is virtually unobtainable.

He had plenty of ideas on the freight front as he was heavily into coal mining, quarrying and canals too. He owned the closest colliery to London at the time, at Wyken, near Coventry, with a view to displacing sea coal from Newcastle.

But his biggest freight idea was to simplify the movement of naval stores between Portsmouth and Chatham via a 'South Downs/Weald' line roughly via Crawley and the Gatwick area, with branches to London (Surrey Iron Railway extension) and to Shoreham (which he saw as having great port potential). He published a plan in 1823. Nothing about rail freight through London though.

 

[30907]

Why did the Snow Hill Tunnel fall out of use for passenger operations in 1915?

The inner suburban services that used it, both to North London and to Moorgate, were extremely vulnerable to tram (and tube) competition.
IIRC the Government also put pressure on the railways to cut services to save locos, coal and manpower.
I suspect the companies concerned might have been glad of the excuse
Possibly it also freed up paths for coal traffic (eg for the Navy) but that's a guess.

 

[D6130]

Bristol TM and Newcastle were always single stations,

Depends how far back you want to go. Did not the Midland line from Derby originally have its own Bristol Terminus at St Phillip's and likewise the Newcastle & Carlisle at Forth Banks?

 

[Kremlin Stooge]

Bristol TM and Newcastle were always single stations

Depends how far back you want to go. Did not the Midland line from Derby originally have its own Bristol Terminus at St Phillip's and likewise the Newcastle & Carlisle at Forth Banks?

Plus, in its very early days, wasn’t Temple Meads actually two separate termini? One for the Great Western and one for the Bristol & Exeter, that were set at a right angle to one another.