outlying stations only have the one.

This is a mainline overground and Underground station with five platforms,
perhaps they multi-man them during peak times only.

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The Kite Fliers

--------------------
Kite fliers: An imaginary club of solo members, those who don't yet
belong to a formal team so "fly their own kites" - as the saying goes.

outlying stations only have the one.

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Saw one in the booking office last month at Harrow & Wealdstone Station....

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The Kite Fliers

--------------------
Kite fliers: An imaginary club of solo members, those who don't yet
belong to a formal team so "fly their own kites" - as the saying goes.

2 per booking office. Anywhere from 3 to 6 in the bigger stations.

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750 jobs cut? I didn't even realise they had this amount of staff on the
stations.....never seem to see them when I've used the tube. Therefore I don't
suppose we'll notice much difference when they have gone, just makes you wonder
then, "Where have these staff been hiding all these times"?

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The Kite Fliers

--------------------
Kite fliers: An imaginary club of solo members, those who don't yet
belong to a formal team so "fly their own kites" - as the saying goes.

"Ladies and Gentlemen.

We are sorry for the lack of service this morning. There will be no trains operating on this line until further notice. We will restore service as soon as possible.
The reason for this is that some sections of track have subsided causing the rails to buckle.

Oh by the way Ladies and Gentlemen, as we no longer have booking offices, please note that the ticket machines only hold so much change, so it would be appreciated that you use the correct amount"

Nice one TfL, leave the staff open to robberies when emptying the machines. Wasn't that the main reason to put the booking offices inside in the first place?

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Tube office closures

Every ticket office on the Tube is to shut by 2015 under plans that will see 750 jobs cut. Transport for London (TfL) said staff will be moved from behind ticket office windows to be in the station itself to help passengers. The Tube will also run 24 hours a day on Fridays and Saturdays on some lines. TfL says the changes will be better for customers and help save more than £40m a year. The RMT union has already said it was a "lethal programme of cuts".

It is also promising:

Wi-fi coverage across all below-ground stations
Disabled access at a further 27 stations
Contactless bank card payment to make it easier to pay for tickets
More new trains and updates for stations

Sounds good on paper, but will it happen or work in practice?

Mayor of London Boris Johnson, said: "This is just the first stage in an opening up of the tube network to become 24 hours. London Underground will now go into a 90-day consultation on its proposals but says there will be no compulsory redundancies and has promised that every member of staff who wants a job and who is "ready to be flexible" will have one.

Again sounds good on paper.

But the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union (RMT), which represents most of the station staff who would be affected, has said it would "fight these plans with every tool at our disposal and that includes political, public and industrial campaigning on an unprecedented scale".

Not sounding so good.

No not mistakes, just pure stupidity and short sightedness. As the recent Olympics proved, Britain's athletes can do well but just where are the school playing fields?

Just how many have been sold off for housing developments because some puke of a councillor had interests in the development companies?

Now that chicken is coming home to roost with the obesity issues amongst the young. Just where can they train or play sports?

Too many old fogeys are saying NIMBY!

Just to prove the point.....

Don Valley Stadium to be demolished

I bet though that their council tax will increase year on year to cover the wage increases and expense fiddling of those councillors!

Wonder if the land will be reused for housing and if so, which councillor has interests in the development company?

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A classic example being the London to Exeter West Country route, which has doubled its daily services by converting many miles back to twin track.

Which just confirms the sheer stupidity and short sightedness of local and national governments.

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Picture postcard villages are all very nice

Agree, it would be very nice but impractical when all the public utility services need to be connected, for cost then becomes an issue.

I think you will find that the cost of connections to services will be borne by the public utility companies. They will write off the cost of extending their infrastructure to new developments, upon the basis of expected future income and revenue. It is not usually paid for by the developers.

Still, a lot could have been done to avoid town development bleeding where one town extends and directly couples to another with no intervening space in between. What this has created today is that many towns do not have a direct road link to a major trunk road. To link to this road you may have to drive through several towns to get to it.

There is some truth in what you say, witness the number of bypass schemes constructed in recent years.

Sniffing around Dr Beechings reports gives hints on this yet I don't feel planners ever took it in to consideration.

I think Nick, that Beeching has got an unfair hearing over the years. He was asked to do a job for the government and he simply fulfilled his brief. It was Harold Macmillan's Conservative Government that said that "the railways should be run as a profitable business". Due to competition from road use, by 1961 railway losses were running at £300,000 a day; since nationalisation in 1948 3,000 miles (4,800 km) of line had been closed, railway staff numbers had fallen 26% from 648,000 to 474,000 and the number of railway wagons from 1,200,000 to 848,000.

Beeching's analysis showed that the least-used 1,762 stations had annual passenger receipts of less than £2,500 each (£48.7 thousand as of 2013, that over half of the 4,300 stations open to passengers in 1960 had receipts of less than £10,000, that the least-used 50% of stations contributed only 2% of passenger revenue and that one third of route miles carried just 1% of passengers.

Out of 18,000 miles (29,000 km) of railway, Beeching recommended that 6,000 miles (9,700 km)—mostly rural and industrial lines—should be closed entirely, and that some of the remaining lines should be kept open only for freight. A total of 2,363 stations were to close, including 435 already under threat, both on lines that were to close and on lines that were to remain open.

He recommended that freight services should mainly be for minerals and coal, and that the freight system made use of new containerised handling systems rather than less efficient and slower wagon-load traffic. This was eventually adopted with Freightliner. He recommended further electrification of the West Coast Main Line from Crewe to Glasgow in 1974. Staff terms and conditions were to be improved over time.

Looking back on it it should have been obvious that trying to make the railways profitable by closing parts of the network, was going to increase road traffic many fold. They didn't seem to see that, and now the country is spending millions reopening lines to cater for demand. A classic example being the London to Exeter West Country route, which has doubled its daily services by converting many miles back to twin track.

No not mistakes, just pure stupidity and short sightedness. As the recent Olympics proved, Britain's athletes can do well but just where are the school playing fields?

Just how many have been sold off for housing developments because some puke of a councillor had interests in the development companies?

Now that chicken is coming home to roost with the obesity issues amongst the young. Just where can they train or play sports?

Too many old fogeys are saying NIMBY!

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I wonder here Sirius if the problem was not so much about carrying out
Beeching's recommendations as it was down to the mistake of pulling up
the closed lines then selling off the land. There's many areas today where
they would like to re-run the trains but the land to run them on has since gone.
Also, much of the increase in train commuting is down to traffic congestion on
our roads plus lack of availability of cost effective car parking. So one
could construed, that from my point of view, increase in train commuting is down
to it being an accident rather than an act of design.

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The Kite Fliers

--------------------
Kite fliers: An imaginary club of solo members, those who don't yet
belong to a formal team so "fly their own kites" - as the saying goes.

Ah but what would have been the case if they ignored Dr Beeching and left the railways alone?

We would not be wasting public money on a HS2 link 40 years later.

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Picture postcard villages are all very nice

Agree, it would be very nice but impractical when all the public utility
services need to be connected for cost then becomes an issue. Still, a lot
could have been done to avoid town development bleeding where one town extends
and directly couples to another with no intervening space in between.
What this has created today is that many towns do not have a direct
road link to a major trunk road. To link to this road you may have to drive
through several towns to get to it. Now you can start to understand why we
see so much local traffic congestion on our roads in and around London.
Lets face it Chris, if we had a chance to start town development all over
again immediately post WW2 would you not like to see things done a tad
differently. Especially so since the late 60's when government and council
planners were fully aware of the explosive take off in car ownership.
Sniffing around Dr Beechings reports gives hints on this yet I don't feel
planners ever took it in to consideration.
So today by continually expanding the building of housing in and around London
is just exacerbating traffic congestion issues.

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The Kite Fliers

--------------------
Kite fliers: An imaginary club of solo members, those who don't yet
belong to a formal team so "fly their own kites" - as the saying goes.

Crowding people into tower blocks and estates only results in a poor quality of life, and is endemic to crime and anti social behaviour.

Here we go again, pure tosh from a WCW, just had breakfast then spouts their views of the world.

If you ever lived in one of those you will find that they may have looked shabby from the outside but most if not all were absolutely spotless and well maintained by the residents. People took pride in their surroundings and their homes.

If that is the case that you spew now, the question is what has made that change occur?

Could it be the fact that the local councils and nimbys not putting the unemployed or social misfits in 'posh' areas thereby ending up causing ghettos as the decent residents on those estates no longer wish to put up with neighbours from hell and move out?

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This is though a typical example of town creep gobbling up the country side as London increasingly expands. There are far better way of taking up country side to building housing upon without creating a blight over the landscape such as New Addington is.

I quoted that example Nick, as it is in my neck of the woods and I know something about it.

It goes to justify my claim that planners have been pitifully poor at doing their job. Design small towns to make them look part of the country side and not a scab upon it.

Picture postcard villages are all very nice, but they wouldn't house all the people displaced from tower blocks and sink estates. What is helping the London overcrowding is the houses and accommodation from the 2012 Olympics sites being made available through the London Legacy Development Corporation. That is the way to go for new towns and housing, built around and incorporating open green spaces. Crowding people into tower blocks and estates only results in a poor quality of life, and is endemic to crime and anti social behaviour.

Queen Elizabeth Park

No need to hit the countryside, just take a look at all that lovely green space within London. Build houses on those ready for all those Roma's to occupy from January 1st.

London's lovely green space for housing

Get rid of Buck House and This

pretty sure that could get over 1000 houses there.......

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No, I don't agree, planned correctly small town type villages can be augmented in to the country side without blemishing that specific countryside area.

So, you would like to see more like New Addington then?

New Addington not applicable as this town was planned in 1930 with building
construction only halted because of WW2. This is though a typical example of
town creep gobbling up the country side as London increasingly expands. There
are far better way of taking up country side to building housing upon without
creating a blight over the landscape such as New Addington is. It goes to
justify my claim that planners have been pitifully poor at doing their job.
Design small towns to make them look part of the country side and not a
scab upon it.

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The Kite Fliers

--------------------
Kite fliers: An imaginary club of solo members, those who don't yet
belong to a formal team so "fly their own kites" - as the saying goes.

No, I don't agree, planned correctly small town type villages can be augmented in to the country side without blemishing that specific countryside area.

So, you would like to see more like New Addington then?

Of course new homes should be built, but not at the expense of losing the countryside. What they should be doing is bulldozing all the 1960's tower blocks and sink Council estates, and building proper homes instead.

No, I don't agree, planned correctly small town type villages can be augmented
in to the country side without blemishing that specific countryside area.
What the London councils should be doing, in my mind, is bulldozing those tower
blocks and leaving the resultant spaces open as greenfield sites. Obviously
housing those that have lost their residence will be a problem in the short term.
Only because Councils and the like failed to stop the overcrowding of London
and it's outer suburbs through what I would consider to be down to shear
negligence in planning. Had the planners moved people out from London, rather
than crush them in, industry would have followed them hence less traffic having
to migrate in to the London areas in that quantity that they do today.

The philosophy we have here to day is that of ban the car. Had they banned many of
the people those peoples cars would have followed along with them, result....much less
traffic congestion in/out and around London.

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The Kite Fliers

--------------------
Kite fliers: An imaginary club of solo members, those who don't yet
belong to a formal team so "fly their own kites" - as the saying goes.