Waterloo disruption
Upgrades at London Waterloo are set to cause severe disruption to passengers as half of the station will close during much of August.
PASSENGERS have been warned to expect severe disruption at London Waterloo from August 5-28, as half of Britain’s busiest station closes for a major upgrade.
Industry sources are suggesting that the long-arranged platform changes will not go to plan, because of late alterations to the project.
Network Rail has been warning passengers for a year that it will close nine of the 19 platforms during August. In July it confirmed that a tenth platform would be withdrawn, leaving South West Trains no flexibility in an already challenging service pattern. It is thought that a single signal failure or train delay could upset a day’s operations.
Platforms 1 to 10 will be withdrawn from end of service on Friday August 4. Platforms 1 to 4 will be extended to accept longer ten-carriage suburban trains.
Due to the layout of the track and the curve of adjacent platforms, new track will have to be laid on the approaches to Platforms 1 to 8, and the ends of Platforms 5 to 8 will need to be rebuilt.
The work is at the heart of an £800 million programme to increase capacity at Waterloo by 30%, enabling an additional 45,000 passengers to use the station each morning and evening.
During the work many trains will not run at all, while others will be disrupted. Passengers have been urged to avoid Waterloo if at all possible.
Owen Johns, of Network Rail, explained: “We reviewed our programme and took the view that the safest way to carry out the work would be to close ten platforms rather than nine. That will have an impact on passengers. There will be fewer services offpeak. We will run the same peak timetable, but it does mean that other delays on the network may have more of an effect.”
Independent passenger watchdog Transport Focus reckons that half of all regular commuters are planning to work from home, work from a different office, or take annual leave. It says 84% of passengers are aware that the upgrade will be taking place.
“Platforms have already been lengthened at 60 stations on the SWT network,” said South West Trains spokesman Andrew Commons. “This is the final piece in the jigsaw.
“We have been very honest with passengers - these are exceptional works. We have contingency plans - extra staff at stations, bottles of water and ice creams. We have “hot spares” - these are spare trains on the route which we can bring in at very short notice if they are required. But it is a very challenging project.”
SWT services will be managed from the Basingstoke Rail Operations Centre, recently opened at Network Rail’s new Gresley Road campus north of Basingstoke station.
Network Rail will temporarily reopen the five former Eurostar platforms in the International
Terminal to ease the bottleneck. These will be used for Reading and Windsor services.
Test trains have been running into the platforms. New gatelines and escalators have been installed.
After the Waterloo platform work is complete, the international terminal will be used for one week by Southeastern, while a separate project closes part of London Bridge station. After that the international platforms will then close once more until the terminal rebuilding is completed in 2018.
Further work will be required at weekends through the autumn. Ten-carriage suburban trains will be in place for a timetable change in December this year.