Glass half full? Crossrail's wes drain my optimism

摘要

WHEREVER you look in the rail industry, there seems to be trouble ahead. I don't want to be a Cassandra, sounding warnings that will never be believed, but every conversation I have with railway people ends up with gloomy predictions. I'm usually a glass half full sort of fellow, but it's difficult to sustain that in the current climate, despite the railways benefiting from very generous (unprecedented, even) amounts of cash for investment. The situation with the railways in London is a case in point. On the one hand, us Londoners are blessed with a fantastic railway. I have taken a variety of odd journeys to parts of the capital I do not visit very often, and the service and frequency levels are very impressive. Several of these journeys have involved various parts of the London Overground, and it never ceases to astonish me that whatever time of day I travel, the trains round what used to be the North London Line are very well used (a line, remember, that in the 1960s the dear Doctor wanted to close).