Quote:
Originally Posted by lightrail
True re: London. However, there are two routes where this occurs - on the Circle Line (intermixing with the District, Metropolitan and Hammersmith and City lines, and on the Northern Line where it branches into the City and Charing Cross Branch, and then rejoins.
for the Circle - London Underground will tell you it is a nightmare logistically and the Circle Line is the reason more capacity cannot be added. They're actually thinking of ditching the Circle to increase capacity.
For the Northern, there is discusison of splitting it into two lines (Edgeware to Kennington via Charing Cross, to be called Edgeware Line, and another High Barnett to Morden via City called Northern Line). To do this, considerable expense would be required on new tunnels at the Camben deep-level junctions, and new interchange capacity at Camden Town Station
So yes, it is done, but not ideal.
Re: east-west southern routes - totally agree.
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Does the Northern Line "reattatch" up north, or does it simply fork permanantly at Kennington station?
Anyways, I wasnt refering to either Circle (well, sort of, but differently) or Northern (the Circle Line especially is a different situation, its timing a bunch of different lines to use the same track, not timing one line to share a bunch of different sets of tracks), but rather just a line which interlines with two other seperate lines at different points. For example, Metropolitan interlining with Picadilly, and then by itself, then later 3 other lines at the Circle Line. Or the Hammersmith and City line sharing tracks with District and then by itself, before with the other three "circle lines".
I wonder if the issues with the Circle Line are simply due to such a high number of lines to co-ordinate all on the same stretch (4 lines), plus some of them must be acoomodated with other lines as well (i.e. Hammersmith+City joining with District), rather than issues like the one that would be present for the Millenium Line once Evergreen is built. There are several other cities which do the same thing the Millenium Line would. For example, in Washington DC, the Yellow Line has a (share with blue-by itself-share with orange) setup. The Blue Line also has a (share with yellow-by itself-share with green) setup. San Fransisco's BART also does something fairly similar in Oakland (actually its even more complicated, it would be equivalent to then also interlining Evergreen with Expo).