Railtalk
What a way to end a franchise. With a big bang, certainly, but with the risk of a whimper. Stagecoach’s successful 21-year tenure of the South Western is certainly not going gently into that dark night, but with the mother of all engineering programmes: a three-week blockade of the London terminus, Waterloo. The blockade is scheduled for 5 to 28 August 2017, with the franchise terminating midway through the blockade, on 20 August.
In recent years, we have become used to blockades as a way of making rapid progress with engineering work and there is no doubt that this one serves a useful purpose. Waterloo is already the busiest station in the UK – and despite a recent decline in ridership, is likely to get busier as this quarter of the capital is redeveloped with more office space. Suburban services on the main line are hampered by the eight-car length of platforms 1 to 4 at Waterloo – the purpose of the blockade is to ease the crush by extending these platforms to accept 10-car trains.
To effect that, Stagecoach, in co-operation with Network Rail and the Department for Transport, led the development of the plan whereby the platforms at the former Waterloo International terminus that have lain …
