Central Station Revamp

[Harry]

Good to see that work might finally get under way to revamp Central Station, although I'll believe it when I see it.
Billions is spent on infrastructure in London every year while the rest of the country gets thrown crumbs and Liverpool has always been treated particularly shabbily in this respect as the state of Lime Street Station and our antiquated trains and buses testify.

[Waterways]

MERSEYSIDE?S transport chiefs were celebrating last night after finally securing top-level support for a huge overhaul of the city's overcrowded Central Station.

The Government rejected a bid for just ?12m to re-fit the station in October, because Network Rail (NR) refused to back the plans.

But now NR has set out a three-part strategy for the rail hub. It will see either a new platform built or Central decamping to an entirely new station at a cost of ?hundreds of millions of pounds?.

Passengers will also see more seats with longer trains.

And the entire Merseyrail fleet will be replaced over the next five years, under plans published by NR.

The number of off-peak trains between Liverpool and Chester is set to double and a new route to Skelmersdale has been mooted.

Merseytravel chairman Cllr Mark Dowd last year branded Central Station a ?tip?, and warned of mounting safety risks if nothing was done to boost capacity.

In a significant U-turn, NR now recognises doing nothing to the station ? which handles 15m passengers a year ? is not an option.

In its new Rail Utilisation Strategy (RUS), the industry custodian describes it as an ?extremely poor facility relative to modern standards?.

The station has seen passenger numbers climb 70% in the past five years, and overcrowding has caused the station to shut at peak times on Saturday afternoons.

NR predicts by 2015 passenger numbers will have grown so much that, without action, some or all trains would be unable to call at the station.

Merseyrail saw year-on-year passenger figures surge by 14% last year, and it says in the first quarter of 2009 it recorded ?double digit? growth despite the recession.

http://www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk/liverpool-news/regional-news/2009/03/30/liverpool-central-station-revamp-backed-92534-23261465/

[Waterways]

Merseyrail saw year-on-year passenger figures surge by 14% last year, and it says in the first quarter of 2009 it recorded ?double digit? growth despite the recession.

Time to look at re-commissioning the disused tunnels:
Re-commissioning the tunnels (http://www.liverpoolwiki.org/Extending_Rapid_Transit_Merseyrail)

[gregs dad]

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3297/3504327747_17affe2175_o.jpg
Central Station walls in the nude ready for their new facades

[Ged]

Good stuff Joe.

[Paddy]

Does any one remember the clump of bushes outside they were quite thick? I know some posters might not find this relevant but we had a den in there. Made from boxes we got from the back of the shops. We lived on swiss rolls that we got from the trays at the back of the old woolworth stores. And milk too. One night we were out foraging and the jacks in plain clothes nabbed us. They put us in a bath before we could do anything about it.:002:

[Waterways]

Overcrowding at Central is mainly due to poor timetabling of trains.

From:
Critical Report (http://www.networkrail.co.uk/browse%20documents/rus%20documents/route%20utilisation%20strategies/merseyside/consultation%20responses/h/stephen%20harrison.pdf)

Liverpool Central

The proposals for dealing with overcrowding at Liverpool Central appear to be clutching at straws. If the station is so desperate for space that supporting pillars have to be removed to salvage just a few extra square metres, surely this points to the urgent need for a fundamental redesign? The Draft mentions the tentative possibility of a new station (page 82) but I am quite surprised that a glaringly obvious solution has been overlooked. The excavation of a new underground station near to Paradise Junction on the Northern Line would directly serve the Liverpool One retail site, the very heart of the new relocated city centre. There must be a strong economic case for such an idea, and an extra station would certainly help to disperse passengers more evenly. This option must be appraised as a matter of urgency.

However, in the short term, at least some of the overcrowding can be addressed in a much cheaper way: by revising the crazy timetabling of Northern Line trains through Liverpool Central and Moorfields. Given there are three northbound destinations (Southport, Kirkby and Ormskirk) and each is served by fifteen-minute frequency departures, common sense would dictate that trains should leave, evenly-spaced, at five-minute intervals. Not so. The Kirkby train departs at 5 minutes past the hour; the Southport just three minutes later at 8 minutes past, with the Ormskirk hot on its tail at 10 past. All three within five minutes, followed then by a ten-minute period of silence. If all outgoing passengers are required to be on the platforms in the same five-minute period, is it any wonder the infrastructure is so stretched? The situation is exacerbated further by the Kirkby service using Platform 2 at Liverpool Central, since this leaves the Southport train (from Hunts Cross) stuck in the tunnel behind (there is no facing crossover into Platform 1). Even a minute?s delay to the Kirkby train necessarily affects the Southport train, which in turn impacts on the Ormskirk.

This timetable came into being about ten years ago when the first private operator (Arriva) took over. Previously, there was an even service pattern: the Kirkby used Platform 1; the Ormskirk Platform 2. This arrangement had worked well for around fifteen years, until Arriva decided to run the trains in convoys (hard to imagine of a bus company). Apart from anything else, the skewed distribution of Stephen Harrison ? Individual response to the Merseyside RUS Consultation trains makes for a poor standard of service since waiting times are up to twice what they should be. I wrote to Arriva at the time, but to little avail. The present operators inherited this timetable and have chosen to continue with it. Why? The spread of trains is properly accomplished on the Wirral Line (i.e. one every five minutes) so it is perhaps unsurprising that these platforms are correspondingly less overcrowded. Unless the timetable can be revised, some of your other proposed solutions (such as persuading people to remain on the concourse before their train arrives) are rendered pointless.

I cannot accept that overcrowding is not an issue at Moorfields. Platform 2 always looks extremely busy, especially when viewed from the Kirkby train, because this Platform has been amassing passengers for the previous ten minutes. I would suggest taking a minute-by-minute look at this platform over the evening peak hours, perhaps by taking stills from the security cameras. This would help in assessing passenger movements more accurately.

Also look at:
Merseyrail Overview including negative points (http://www.liverpoolwiki.org/Merseyrail)

[baldyman26]

Are there any updated pics of the progress of the refurb