The Croxley Rail Link is an approved plan to re-route part of a London Underground line in Hertfordshire, outside London, UK. The project would divert Metropolitan line Watford branch services after Croxley station away from Watford station to Watford Junction, via a stretch of new line on a viaduct over the Grand Union Canal/River Gade and intermediate stations using a reopened section of track.
The project, in its current form, involves the ending of passenger services between Croxley and Watford Underground Station. As this constitutes a proposal to close a route to passenger services, and to close a station, a formal closure process involving London TravelWatch is required. The London TravelWatch Board have set up the Watford Station Closure Panel whose members are David Liebling, the vice chair of TravelWatch and the representative for London on the Board of Passenger Focus; Gail Engert, chair of the Transport Services Committee of TravelWatch; and David Barry, chair of the Consumer Affairs Committee of TravelWatch. The panel held a public meeting in Watford on 14 June 2012.
The main exponent of the scheme is Hertfordshire County Council, although it has the active support of Transport for London (TfL), the public body which owns the current Watford branch. The proposed route was featured in a Transport for London network map for 2016. The proposed rail link route is also shown in the Transport for London Indicative 2025 Transport Map; in this map the current Watford tube station does not feature.
When the Croxley Rail Link is built, direct services into Watford Junction from Amersham would also be possible, thus linking the commercial centre of Watford to the new developments in Aylesbury, as well as providing the Chilterns with transport connections, via the Junction, to the North and other destinations.
The Croxley Rail Link was approved by the Government on 14 December 2011. Construction work is expected to start in June 2014 and be finished by January 2016.
Beginning April 2012, London Overground services have been suspended at the weekends to allow for the removal of the old track by rail and to bring in wagons containing new ballast which is being re-laid on the trackbed, and widen it at the same time. Although the site entrance to the current activity is at the Watford High Street Station end, the points south-west have not yet been replaced.
Read more about Croxley Rail Link: History, Funding, Route and Proposed Services, Redevelopment, Gallery
Famous quotes containing the words rail and/or link:
“For this is the mark of a wise and upright man, not to rail against the gods in misfortune.”
—Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.)
“All successful men have agreed in one thing,—they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)