London Rapid Transit Suggestions

I have posted on this before, but then I have done much since. Many issues for London Underground and London Overground are now covered in my suggestions maps.

Explanatory webpage
Diagrammatic Map excluding Crossrail 2 and Barking Riverside
Diagrammatic Map adding Crossrail 2 and Barking Riverside
Geographical Map excluding Crossrail 2 and Barking Riverside
Geographical Map adding Crossrail 2 and Barking Riverside

The London Overground is turned into Chords so that routes are recognisable. They are named to be memorable and related. A Chord is an adopted name for an outer non-central serving railway, but for simplicity the Overground can call all its routes Chords. They offer travel choices: perhaps longer journeys but less crushed at busy times, different routes to the same place, negotiating pay zones better. In addition to Chords are the functional routes like for airports or crossing the river - all services would be part of the same ticketing, including the boats and the buslinks.

There are four stations on Holloway Road so Holloway Road is renamed Holloway. Caledonian Road and Barnsbury is renamed The Cally, as it says on the bridge. There is now only one Bethnal Green so the other is renamed Weavers Fields. The decision to call a station Battersea Power Station when it isn't one is reversed in my suggestion, where the line is extended to Clapham Junction one way and connects with the (missed) Victoria line the other via a new station of Lambeth South. That would be expensive, but the extension is for little real benefit and having to go to Kennington before turning north is ridiculous.

The Northern line as was is broken into its two logical lines: Unity line and Cricket line, according to my renamings. The District line is reduced so that the Tennis line runs between Wimbledon and Edgware. The Metropolitan line is less unwieldy by taking advantage of the Overground and Buslink so removing its Uxbridge spur and relocating West Harrow.

The Victoria line is extended to the north beyond its sidings to Angel Road and to the south beyond Herne Hill to Tulse Hill (for better connectivity). The Bakerloo line is extended but only to Lewisham - the Chords do the rest. The Cricket line, as renamed, goes into the Morden sidings and across the road to join the railway there and thus extend the Underground route to Sutton. The Tramlink is extended to South Wimbledon, across to Bromley - as its council prefers, rather than the Hayes line (Wolf Chord) becoming the Bakerloo - and the tracks to New Addington continue down along/ alongside the grassy areas and roads out across to Biggin Hill Airport and its settlement. This is why a Gatwick Express service must stop at East Croydon.

York Road is reopened as York Way and Maiden Lane is reopened too, providing a walking connection. It doesn't take masses of money to create some Overground connections. Brixton is awkward but not impractical.

What was the Northern Heights Railway, now Mill Chord, might cost some money, but the track bed is there - use of overlapping and single tracks can work with sufficient passing loops and double lines.

Buslinks link spurs and outer stations where useful. Goods lines are brought into passenger use, so better goods lines outside London are necessary. A podlink is driverless programmable vehicles on guided roads to help (in the case of Brent Cross) with the shopping. There are no guided buses.

One would like to see anything near this kind of investment in the north, but the capital city was starved of investment for a long time and needs it to get people moved about more effectively.

Some issues like Charing Cross being, really, two stations and Embankment as actually for Charing Cross are better left to sleep on. Dedicated walkways do the connecting and we now have walking down streets elsewhere. After all, if Crossrail 2 is built there will be one station called Euston Kings Cross St. Pancras International, and include Euston Road. I limit connections to 500 yards but even that is too far for many people. Such outdoor routes need to provide shelters and even covering. So many platforms are outdoors, but they provide shelters.

As for airports for London: there's Heathrow, Luton, Stansted, Gatwick, City and don't forget Biggin Hill.

Website in Eighteenth Year

My website has entered its eighteenth year of existence; it is eighteen itself next November, in 2016. In that time it has absorbed the relevant remains of a website I set up for YMCA Bonskeid House, once the facility closed, and has tested a Setam Mini-Website. The space I use hosts the Creative Learning Centre Website in Hull, that I wrote, and although there are links the two are separate. I was able to acquire the pluralist.co.uk name and have kept it ever since. It was based on a Unitarian faction, a sort of humanist and multi-faith progressive side contrasting with a liberal Christian conserving side. I was ahead of time in those days: the direction of travel has been mine. But Pluralist includes liberal Christian in the sense of its resources, just not exclusively. In between, however, I was out of the Unitarians and tried the Christian myth liturgically one more time, and it slowly then rapidly unravelled under a liberal theological critique.

I have given the website one big makeover in terms of look, to try and make it more consistent. it also had one big move. Well, starting from Freeserve it moved to several FreeUK accounts for a long time, but then moved to the Dropbox cloud that facilitates free broadband and not having to bother with File Transfer Protocol programs - the Dropbox is automatic FTP.

The website was subjected to a piece of research at the University of Lincoln, on the basis that it was principally a personal website on a similar basis of a photograph album. Yes, and no: it is simply a snail's trail of where I have been and what has interested me. But it is also of broader and general use. Elements used in teaching are available to all; the In Depth Group theology sessions provide a theological resource for anyone. I have just added a page on Search Engine Optimisation, perhaps scraping the barrel when it comes to website content, but it may show the odd employer that with SEO I know what I am talking about. I took the opportunity to overview and add to the Learning/ ICT menu and add in the Music Clips for NoteTab use and the existence of novel writing software.

Most recent changes are ongoing and are to the music list of CDs made for Unitarian services in Hull and to my novel effort that moves along with bursts and pauses. It houses a second place for Hull Unitarian Magazines because I write and compile them, and also because I'm the only one who uses impression software to produce front and back facing book-order pages.

Amazing then that this website is seventeen and a month old, and the very first Internet page is twenty five years old. It took me under eight years to join the number of websites. I remember how the first page I uploaded didn't happen, and it took a few goes with a deliberate choice of .html after the index page name before success. I learnt frames, CSS, how to bolt in Javascript, how to add in a few Java applications, and HTML 4 (XHTML) and then aspects of HTML 5. I understand it all comes under .XML and how that concept has expanded across all kinds of software documentation. My website remains simple, menu driven, mainly for reading and looking. I moved some galleries to Facebook and realised those running it changed the URL links. I asked to my website on a mobile phone and decided to keep frames but to retain the simplicity that other websites were forced to rediscover.  There are no video clips on it. I want it it without adverts and resource lean. It never takes long to load. I intend to do no more than add to it, and respond to anyone telling me something is out of date, if I don't find it first. The worst part for updating is external links, and so I keep these to as few as possible. I'll have to view the Learning external links again for dead ones. I see already that I have some work to do.

Sing Along Time

I don't like this time of year. So here are some carols (I hate) to celebrate. One is a bit naughty. Only one.

I hate carols so here are some made more relevant by me, these having appeared on Facebook:


Once in loyal David's city
Stood a local betting shop and pub.
There our hero drank then put his bet on:
Chose the favourite horse called 'Rub a Dub'.
There he watched it on a screen:
It came first; it ran just like a dream.

***

Silent Night? Noisy Night!
Live along the M1
The fence they put up doesn't them shush
For twenty four hours they go past in a rush
Never a decent night's sleep!
It makes the whole family weep.

***

It came upon a midnight clear
My friends had become rat-arsed:
They drank real ales to great excess
In emptying glass by glass.
Their thought was strained, the toilets gained,
Their talk turned into shout;
And then they tried to walk to homes,
In the gutters they did pass out.

***

Oh little towns of Hull and Barnsley,
They did once build a railway.
It competed with the North Eastern
It went in a round-about way.
It never was a total success:
The other was best for time;
But, in the end, the legacy is such,
It provided Hull's high level line.

***

This one I won't put on Facebook, for obvious reasons, and takes several verses to work through. Not for the faintly offended.


Ding dong merrily on low,
This woman came and slept with me.
Ding dong on my own pillow,
She lifted her legs and bent her knee.
Gloria, Maria in excessive!
Gloria, Maria in excessive.

E'en so here below below
I thought about an entry.
Had to get myself to show,
Be stiff and charged for plenty.
Gloria, my own self is elusive!
Gloria, my own self is elusive.

Come on, dutifully prime!
Her mouth worked on the donger.
So impressed was I this time,
My rear welcomed her finger.
Gloria, Maria in excessive!
Gloria, Maria in excessive.

Yet so, a girfriend did not land,
She left me to the season;
A flop, reject, one night stand -
It didn't stand to reason.
Gloria, Maria in exit lost!
Gloria, Maria in exit lost.

Since then I have shut my eyes,
To image what she was for;
Come to terms with the bye byes,
And online seeking one more.
Gloria, any for access there!
Gloria, any for access there.

Changing the Electoral Cycle

George Osborne continues to screw the young and the poorest, but has carried out a few retreats, U turns and a Blairite spending review.

Instead of dishing out the pain, come what may, and exploiting a supposed weak Labour party in opposition, he's retreated to a less painful stance, with a reliance on cuts to Universal Credit and its philosophy to do his bidding.

But the news organisations keep missing why he might have altered the electoral cycle in economic terms. It's because whatever happens in the European Referendum, the Tories will then start to eat each other. Whether we stay in, or come out, the accusations will fly, and they are doing already about Cameron's fake renegotiation stance - one further weakened by his need to co-operate over terrorism.

Whatever the result, the Tories will lose, but the loss by bad feeling might be delayed by the first sense that 'a decision was taken' and the losers losing. And that's the best moment the Tories can go for an election. If they wait longer, Labour might strengthen either behind the admirable Jeremy Corbyn or after some coup attempt within the Parliamentary Labour Party.

So I expect an attempt to repeal the Fixed Term Parliament Act,
where the Tories might find sympathisers elsewhere for a majority. At present the PLP and others might well be for its maintenance, plus a few Tories - in other words, it cannot then be changed. But it could well be repealed if it doesn't simply involve a return to the Prime Minister's decision to dissolve Parliament (an ability that derives from him being the Monarch's first minister - how Royal power continued to function).

Osborne is also positioning himself to take over from Cameron, and he will be keen to make this sooner than later, even if he is already acting as Chief Executive to Cameron as Chair. The 'Blairite' positioning is therefore now, deliberate and with the Referendum timing in mind. This government will want more than its effective majority of about 16, certainly as that will be gone after the Referendum.

Islam's Decline

I've resisted rushes to judgment regarding recent terrorism and related activity. My view is, suppose we (military powers) were decided and did clear out Syria and Iraq of the Islamic State, and set up areas where people could rebuild their lives (could be a good idea): what difference would it make to these ideologues operating out of European capitals and other cities?

As for them not being in any way representative of Islam... Well, the IRA used to compromise the Roman Catholic Church (among this Church's other morally dubious internal activities) but the IRA never fought in the name of Roman Catholicism. Islamic State does, and it is one of the children of the Wahabi type approaches to Islam exported from Saudi Arabia, essentially one of the products of Western Imperialism. The Qur'an contains some pretty nasty texts, as does the Bible and even the Bhagavad Gita set in a civil war scenario has Arjuna telling Krishna that it is his duty to fight. The 'religious classics' as David Tracy has them can motivate in multifarious ways. So it does matter that Muslims condemn Islamic State and why, just as Christians ought to condemn the Klu Klux Klan and any form of Christian based ethnic superiority (take the Yugoslav break up as a time when such did not happen). Islam - Salam - should be a religion of peace (with conditions regarding its freedom to operate) but it is, unfortunately, up to Muslims to proclaim this.

For too long, since the Renaissance, Islam has had a chip on its shoulder. The 'final revelation' (also it believes it was the first) was superseded culturally and intellectually by the West. Things really went wrong after the end of the Ottaman Empire and some pretty silly boundaries for Arab and other States post World War I that ended up being ruled by political thugs. The failure of the Arab Spring is a failure of those States as conceived - Egypt should have done better. The result is that Islam continues to dig itself in a hold. For too long it has clericalised and intellectual centres in the east have contracted and been suspicious of Western Islamic intellectuals. Reform is now more than necessary.

The danger is that Islam gets regarded today as Roman Catholicism was regarded at the time of Elizabeth I. This would be tragic and unnecessary. It is already going that way in France, with its secularism tradition - thus Islam becomes a threat, thus extremists target France in particular. Islam is in need of a Reformation, just as a corrupt Christianity had to reform. If it doesn't, it will end up being the loser, it will lose moral authority. The reform has to relativise Islam, see the Qur'an as historical and not perfect, actually teach its content more widely to believers rather than its repetition, and tackle the questions around absence of archaeology regarding the founding years of Islam around Makkah and Madina.

This terrorism will pass because it is a condition of the current condition of Islam and political forces. The lunatics running this particular asylum are young and will rotate through. But the damage done to Islam could be much the greater, unless its adherents address the need for liberating reform - to attempt to return to that intellectual and artistic culture of its heyday, when it could tell an intolerant Christianity a thing or two.

Even More LRT Diagramming

Having made an effort to stretch out the eastern side of the London Rapid Transit diagram, the obvious stared me in the face and presented a huge challenge. The south was too squashed. The basis of the diagram is a magnified middle of complex city lines and the outer lines are compressed. But with the Overground, the outer areas become more important.

The history of the changes in dimensions from the Sameboat original started with a stretch for part of the north west area. This means on my diagram the lines going out north do not have to double back in response to the tilted 'bottle' of the original Circle line. I notice he keeps revising his diagram too, and has a straight line now for Thameslink (there is no longer a 'bucket' effect), but it still has to go back down before it goes up. Having done that, the effect of Sameboat's Docklands Light Railway was to distort the east. I took that distortion further, along with a levelling of the southern DLR regarding the docks in between and the river to the south. Again the bottle tilt meant Sameboat but an angle into the more southern DLR, but he didn't with the one to Beckton. I've flattened both, and thus taken these effects eastwards. The main problem for me was the distantly proposed tunnel north of Abbey Wood to a new link line at Barking Riverside. On my diagram, because of the tilt, this created a vertical River Thames when, in reality, there was a 'bump' up and then down again. The clue to solving this was to flatten the District Line going east, as indeed is the case in reality compared with any contemporary and historical diagram, including Sameboat's. The area around Barking even shows these lines merging and dropping for a while if slightly. This partial adjustment and similar to the Crossrail-in-waiting Shenfield line adjustment takes away most of the vertical Thames, and allows for a more realistic connection from Abbey Wood to Barking.

But to do this exposed the south even more as a jumble under space pressure. What I did was first take a position just south of the new Unity/ Edgware (Sameboat)/ Northern/ line extension to Battersea and increase the space south by 50%. Then I would take lines and names out and replace them one by one, with more curves. Accuracy to geography is nigh-on impossible, but it is possible to be clear. It was also clear that I had to redo the very tricky Tramlink. The first adjustment was with Crossrail 2 redone, and redone with a mind for removing it towards the simpler diagram. Finally came the map with the extended Beck Chord with connection to Barking Riverside. This proved very tricky as I realised part of it didn't work well enough without an additional bend in the Beck Chord west of Beckenham. The idea for this Chord (rather than my own simpler route, as on two maps) comes from a 2050 proposal that represents this zig zag as if on one diagonal after Bickley. No wonder these diagrams build in such distortions (and clarity is questionable with so many lines present). It is also showing northern stretching from Abbey Wood to Barking Roverside. This diagram is another of these never pixelating .SVG diagrams that are above my pay-grade. Sameboat did his mathematically, and sees errors in software programs' performances. Fantastic ability.

It took three days plus with some hefty sessions to finally complete and replace the previous London Rapid Transit routes. In each case the original tops were merged into the expanded bottoms. The merging is simply done in an old version of MS Paint. I hate the ribbon version as far less easy to use. The good raster lines are done in Real World Paint, along with curvy text, but I learnt quickly a lesson not to use its area eraser - it takes away all gradations and leaves one colour lines with sharp edges. For some straight line text along routes I used a PicPick protractor and custom fine rotation in Irfan View, to paste the text in alongside the route. The software is simpler and free and makes the distinction people forget between a document format and the programs that produce them (e.g. .DOC is not an MS Word document but just fully formatted word processing, and can be edited by different word processors - contrast with .RTF and then .TXT, for example).

I am still tempted to rename the Circle line into the Spiral line, having removed the Hammersmith and City element from the lines. It used to be the Metropolitan and that is restored east in my suggestion. The service is then easier to understand, and indeed TfL has changed Circle line services into a spiral in reality. If it becomes the Spiral line, I'll have succumbed. I'm aiming for clarity but also cost effectiveness. That's why I'd prefer to dismiss Crossrail 2 or at the very most simplify it to two branches south and a one only line to the north.

I've been at these diagrams since July, so they became somewhat obsessive, plus the explanatory document (written in .TXT, translated to .HTML and so continued).

In between I made a Creative Learning Area website for activities inside the Chamberlain House building in Hull (the Unitarian Church) and this was hand-coded with graphics produced by me.

More on London Rapid Transit

Since I wrote the previous blog entry I have added a further map to the Localities area of my website, so that it takes account of proposals for Crossrail 2. Personally I do not like the route, or indeed the proposal as a whole. Should it happen, it must rule out a crossing near Barking Riverside that would link to Abbey Wood. I don't care either for the zig zag of lines that would be the approach to Abbey Wood (my East Chord). The simpler proposal is better and for which there are routes across the Thames via Lewisham and Woolwich. Lord Adonis and the great and the good pressed for Crossrail 2 and it has gone to public response via Transport for London. My first years ago impression of Crossrail (any of it) was that it was going to allow through trains between Paddington and Liverpool Street - a service starting at Norwich might end up at Swansea/ Abertawe, say, via London. It wouldn't have been difficult (in comparative engineering terms) either to have created a kind of ring main of railway terminus lines for through and connecting services. After all, Thameslink is a squeeze, first through Kings Cross and now through St Pancras. I propose Riverlink to go via Imperial Wharf. And this Crossrail 2 proposal would make one enormous cavernous station at Euston St. Pancras Kings Cross. What a name for a roundel! All three stations would presumably end up with one name, hopefully not Eupancross. Crossrail has turned out to be a poor compromise between concepts - mainline railway size, fewer but not few stops - and basically they amount to slightly souped up Underground routes.

All this investment amounts presently to about £5000 per person in London compared with about £5 per person in the North East. When the Conservatives made the railways and buses an operating joke around Britain, they left alone the integrity of London rapid transit. We need this for the rest of Britain and a much more rigorous regional policy - get public sector jobs out of London wherever possible, for example. The BBC has created a media hub in Manchester, but only a public body could have started this. Now Mr Corbyn is Labour leader (60%! - and all that 'writing up' Yvette Cooper was so much journalistic hogwash) perhaps we will get some imaginative ideas regarding returning rail and bus to public ownership. It should start with turning private contracts into fee paying only with tickets united across the country and purchases going to National Rail, and one livery for England and Wales. I'd allow 'service provided by' but that's it. When the contracts are up, or they go bust, the state takes over. Same for the buses - contracts up, the state takes over.

What London needs is the development of the London Overground as fast, frequent and alternative routes, so that some passengers take a little longer to go around the city to come in at a later point. Stations should be moved and extended to provide more junctions. Major new lines will be like new roads: they fill up rapidly and then someone starts thinking about the next one. So much of this is like the dog chasing its tail.