Posts Tagged Rail transport
Designs for London’s Crossrail stations unveiled
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 18, 2010
The capital's mayor, Boris Johnson, unveils the new designs for eight stations on the £16bn, east-west mainline rail link
Crossrail goes with the flow as London’s mayor unveils designs for eight stations
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 18, 2010
British architects and engineers have shaped calm, elegant and free-flowing spaces for the capital's 2018 east-west rail link
Sudden demolitions. Unexpected views of central London opened up as if someone has taken a giant tin opener to the city's skyline. The disappearance of much loved venues, including the London Astoria on Charing Cross Road. Heated arguments over the compulsory purchase of properties along the route. A fear, even, that anthrax and bubonic plague might be released from mass 16th-century graves under Smithfield.
These urban dramas and revelations prove that, at long last, Crossrail – the £16bn mainline railway linking far-flung east and west London suburbs through four miles of tunnels between Paddington and Farringdon – is finally on its metalled march.
Today, Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, and Theresa Villiers, the transport minister, unveiled the designs of the eight new stations that will serve Crossrail and its 200 million future passengers each year from 2018, on a service that promises a 10-coach, air-conditioned train every two and a half minutes. As Crossrail was first announced in 1989, passengers will have waited just 29 years for their first train to arrive.
The mayor, the minister, Crossrail and its owner, Transport for London, are determined that this bold new venture will be nothing less than impressive. And efficient. "As Crossrail moves from the drawing board to reality," said Johnson today at the New London Architecture gallery, "we can see the breathtaking benefits it will bring to our city, and I'm thrilled Londoners can finally see the designs of the world-class stations we will construct. When complete, they will run east to west in a solid backbone of quality infrastructure and style."
The style of the stations, by British architects and engineers with a solid track record – among them Norman Foster, Allies and Morrison and John McAslan – appears to be sober, robust and calmly elegant. Whether in the booking offices, concourses or platforms of Paddington, Tottenham Court Road or Farringdon, every effort appears to have been made to shape generous and free-flowing spaces designed to cope with future demand. The lessons of the high-quality Jubilee line extension between Westminster and Stratford have been learned. Flow is all.
The simple finishes of the stations – concrete, aluminium, steel, glass, recessed and diffused lighting, a minimal palette of colours – reflect a belief that these structure are engineering-led and designed for optimum efficiency. The architecture of each – drawing daylight from streets above wherever possible – is free from fashion or whimsy. The sheer number of passengers passing through these spacious stations will provide more than enough noise, people and colour.
Crossrail's computer-generated images, however, show the eight central stations peopled by just a few relaxed, nattily dressed travellers who look as if they might be boarding the Orient Express rather than a commuter train to Heathrow, Shenfield, Abbey Wood or Maidenhead.
"London has a glorious railway design history," said Villiers, "that ranges from the Brunel-designed Paddington station, through Charles Holden's Tube stations of the 1920s and 30s to the revival of St Pancras International. Crossrail intends to build on this design legacy and create cost-effective stations fit for the 21st century while regenerating local communities."
After so very long, Londoners will expect trains to run on time, allowing only, perhaps, for the wrong sort of disease – bubonic plague – if not the wrong strand of design on the line.
Stolid Stuttgart’s citizens give the German city a whiff of Paris in 1968
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 8, 2010
Germany's middle classes are out in force to prevent the demolition of Stuttgart's venerable railway terminus
Sybille Adler, a pharmacist, heads for the north wing of Stuttgart station every Monday evening to join the protests against its demolition. Weather permitting, her 84-year-old mother will go along with her; she was born when the station was built. The natural stone building, and with it the park that borders the station's south wing, are Stuttgart's pride and joy.
"This is my native town," said an elegant white-haired woman. On the shoulder strap of her bag she has a "Stuttgart 21" sticker with a red cross, the badge worn by opponents to a project launched by the city's conservative mayor, Wolfgang Schuster. She too, makes a point of joining the protest every Monday, "I'm prepared to throw stones if necessary," she said. "It's an uprising," said another protester.
The protest is mobilising more and more people and has been gathering momentum in the past weeks. Stolid Stuttgart is acquiring the air of Paris in May 1968.
Stuttgart is the capital of Baden-Württemberg, a state that is home to companies such as Mercedes and Porsche, and represents the innovative, prosperous side of Germany, the side that wins contracts in China and the US. Here, engineers feel at home, work is a cardinal virtue, and protest a superfluous, imported product. So when the middle class teams up with ecologists and between 30,000 and 50,000 demonstrators take to the streets, it's a major event in Catholic, conservative southern Germany.
The Stuttgart 21 protest is not minor. For nearly 20 years, the town hall and Deutsche Bahn, the German rail operator, have wanted to convert the city's terminus into a through station to speed up international train lines, notably for the forthcoming Paris-Budapest route, as well as to improve airport access. The project was put to tender in 1997 and the jury selected a bid from Düsseldorf architect Christoph Ingenhoven out of the 190 submitted.
The advantage of this project for the city is that it can recover about 100 hectares of land in the historic centre, enough to build approximately 10,000 new homes and generate between 10,000 and 20,000 lasting jobs. However, it means the construction of 117km of new track and 63km of tunnels.
In July 1999, when the cost was estimated to be around $6.4bn, the then Deutsche Bahn boss put the project on hold. When it was resurrected under his successor, that estimate was revised to $5.8bn. But opponents are certain that it will cost at least twice that. Katharina Ungerer, a teacher, says: "Ten billion [euros]! When you think they can't even afford toilet paper in my kid's school."
Discussions are friendly at the gathering, even though some of those present actually support the project. "You were against the TV tower, against the new trade fair centre, you're just against everything," says one man, setting off a new round of rebuttals: Stuttgart 21 is too expensive, too opaque, will destroy too many trees, it's a major project requiring colossal work.
Opponents are planning the next stage. Since the destruction of the 280 trees in the neighbouring park would mark a defeat, they are organising to protect the trees. On the protest website, sympathisers are invited to choose between three levels of mobilisation. Green represents speaking against the project (19,000 people have committed to that). Orange means showing up whenever people's presence is needed (8,100 volunteers), while red is for those prepared to form a human chain around the trees (1,809 volunteers).
However, this mobilisation comes late in the day. "The European Parliament, the Bundestag, the Bundesrat, the regional parliament and the town hall have all approved this project in recent years." And each time they had a majority of around 75%, according to the mayor.
"Stuttgart 21 is legal but it is no longer democratic," was the answer of Boris Palmer, the Green mayor of nearby Tübingen, who is demanding a referendum.
As to the cost of the estimated outlay, $1.8bn will be paid for by Deutsche Bahn, $1.5bn by the German government and the European Union; $1bn by the state and $257m by the city, which is scarcely more than the share that will be paid by the airport authority.
But the mayor admits that he is having trouble convincing his citizens. According to a recent poll by the local daily paper, Stuttgarter Nachrichten, 63% of locals oppose the project. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) is now also divided on the issue. Just six months away from the regional elections that could mean another defeat for Angela Merkel's party, the SPD does not intend to leave much room for the Greens, who can already claim 20% of votes at national level.
Clearly this has not escaped the attention of the opponents to Stuttgart 21.
This article originally appeared in Le Monde
Futuristic Bellegarde is the shape of French rail stations to come
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 6, 2010
Bellegarde station is the prototype for a key French Rail project aiming to put stations back at the heart of communities
With a transparent dome made of plastic tubing, the circular building that welcomes travellers arriving in Bellegarde, in the foothills of the French Alps, resembles a moon base rather than a railway station. Combining advanced technology and bioclimatic architecture, the national rail operator SNCF's most recent creation reflects the publicly owned company's determination to boost the environmental awareness of its buildings and make its stations an emblematic feature of tomorrow's sustainable cities.
"Bellegarde is a prototype for what we plan to do with our biggest stations. Thermal and environmental performance are at the top of our list of target specifications," says Sophie Boissard, who heads Stations and Connections, the business unit set up by SNCF a year ago to operate and capitalise on its 3,000 stations.
Substantially larger than Bellegarde, the new TGV high-speed stations further north at Besançon and Belfort will go even further along the same lines, deploying solar panels, Canadian wells, geothermal energy and a hi-tech bioclimatic hothouse. Nor will this policy only affect new stations. The rail operator intends to enlarge and refurbish at least 100 destinations over the next 10 years, investing some $6bn.
One priority is to improve conditions in buildings that tend to be freezing in winter and baking hot in summer. But there is no question of turning them into air-conditioned coolers all year round. "It isn't financially possible for us and it makes no sense in environmental terms," says Boissard.
Etienne Tricaud, the deputy-head of Arep, SNCF's design subsidiary, says: "What is at stake here is making travellers comfortable without it costing the earth." This is where the bioclimatic systems experimented with at Bellegarde will come into play. The dome is made of ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE), a tough, lightweight polymer derived from Teflon, which is cost-effective and recyclable. It forms a hothouse above the wooden cupola that covers the station. In winter, low-speed fans pump hot air from this cavity into the hall below, maintaining a temperature of 16°C without consuming additional energy. In summer the hothouse produces a chimney effect, drawing off the heat which is replaced by cool air at 10°C rising from a Provençal (or Canadian) well. "This system alone results in 40% energy savings," says Tricaud.
Such "ecologically correct" comfort is all the more important because, according to SNCF's long-term strategy, tomorrow's stations should become "a pivotal point in the sustainable town". On top of being hubs for all forms of public and private transport (main and regional rail links, trams, buses, cars, bicycles), they are set to become mini-town centres, combining offices, business centres and shops, healthcare, childminding and collection services.
"This is definitely the model I want to promote: it is a response to the need for greater density, multiple functions and easy mobility," says Boissard, adding: "This approach makes sense, particularly for our 40 regional [mainline] stations."
Another advantage of such diversification is that it is highly profitable, contributing to the modernisation of railway infrastructure. Without the 10,000 square metres of retail space grafted on to the original project, it would have been difficult to find the means to renovate Gare St Lazare in Paris, due for completion next year. In many towns, the area round the railway station, long abandoned by all but sex shops and shady hotels, is now the focus of a new urban and economic dynamic. "The decline of stations and surrounding neighbourhood was due to the dominance of private cars. The drive to bring business back into town centres and the resulting upturn has reversed this trend," says Boissard.
A similar pattern is apparent elsewhere. In Japan, where transit operators are also property developers, stations are an essential component of town centres, uniting retail and business services. And in Switzerland the federal rail operator SBB decides which businesses can be located near stations to achieve the right urban mix.
This article originally appeared in Le Monde
Battersea power station fires up for London stock market listing
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 23, 2010
• Irish owners refinance and want to list the project on Aim
• See our gallery of previous redevelopment plans
The troubled owners of Battersea power station have unveiled plans to float the building on the stock exchange in the latest in a string of attempts to redevelop the derelict London landmark.
Despite numerous plans for the 40-acre site, it has stood empty for more than a quarter of a century while the rest of the Thames waterfront around it has undergone huge change.
Now Irish property group Real Estate Opportunities (REO), which bought the Battersea site in 2006 for £400m, wants to spin it off and possibly float it on London's Alternative Investment Market (Aim). It is also looking for a partner to take a 50% stake in the project and provide the financial firepower.
REO has been hit hard by the Irish property slump. It reported an underlying loss before tax of nearly £1bn for the 14 months to 28 February, reflecting an £811m drop in the valuation of its property portfolio.
The firm has drawn up a shortlist of possible investors after being approached by a number of international real estate groups, private equity firms and sovereign wealth funds from around the world, including the Middle East.
REO hopes to get permission to redevelop the site in September after submitting the largest ever planning application made in central London, in terms of financial value, last autumn. If it gets the go-ahead, the site's value is expected to soar from the current valuation of £388m.
"It's an opportunity to turn the power station into a cultural icon for London," said Robert Tincknell, who runs REO's parent firm, Treasury Holdings. "A year ago, people were saying 'it's not going to happen'. That's changed enormously over the last 12 months, with the planning permission having gone in and the support we have [from the London mayor, Boris Johnson, English Heritage and Wandsworth Council]." The Conservatives launched their election manifesto at the power station in April.
Treasury Holdings was forced to tear up its plans for the imposing building, one of London's most recognisable landmarks, and start again after Johnson decided that a proposed tower would ruin the view from Waterloo Bridge to the Palace of Westminster. The original plan, drawn up by the New York-based architect Rafael Viñoly, included a futuristic 300m glass funnel and atrium, rising from an enormous transparent dome.
Viñoly and Treasury Holdings came up with a new blueprint a year ago that is capped at a height of 60m, as stipulated by the mayor. It includes 3,700 homes, office space, shops, restaurants and leisure facilities, at a cost of £4.5bn. Treasury Holdings also hopes to co-fund an extension of London Underground's Northern Line to the site.
The high cost means the company needs a partner – "someone who can bring big financial strength to it to make sure it happens," said Tincknell. Building work could start at the end of 2011.
When the power station was decommissioned in 1983, its then owners, the Central Electricity Generating Board, wanted to tear down the building and replace it with housing, but it had been given a Grade II listing in 1980. For developers, the real prize is the land around it; most have little interest in its heritage status.
REO said today it had negotiated new lending terms for Battersea with Lloyds Banking Group and Nama – Ireland's "bad bank" – which means its existing bank facility will be extended and all outstanding breaches waived.
Jonathan Glancey on campaign to restore arch outside London’s Euston station
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 16, 2010
Jonathan Glancey on campaign to restore arch outside London's Euston station
Raise the Euston Arch – and get railway architecture back on track
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 15, 2010
Plans to redevelop the London station could include the resurrection of its much-missed Doric gateway. Let's hope so
Could it happen? Might the wondrous Euston Arch, so wrongfully demolished in 1962, return to front the new "super-terminus" planned to send a future generation of 250mph trains scything from London to Birmingham in 49 minutes – and beyond to Merseyside, Manchester and Glasgow? It is just possible.
A magnificent Greek Revival propylaeum, or monumental gateway, the Euston Arch was designed by Philip Hardwick, architect of Birmingham's Curzon Street Station, Euston's twin, and erected in 1838. Its wilful demolition was probably the greatest single act of civic and cultural barbarism in Britain between the end of the second world war and the Beatles' first LP.
The Conservative government had decided that Britain should be seen as a country finally emerging from the eras of steam, smokestack industry, Victorian values and austerity. In came the M1, high-rise council flats, fin-tailed family Morrises, pop groups and Midland Red express coaches from Birmingham to London. Out went the Euston Arch.
The 72-ft-high Doric gateway had been a brilliant conceit. It fronted the equally impressive Great Hall of the London terminus, built originally for Britain's first long-distance – or trunk – railway, the London and Birmingham. Such early railways saw themselves as the industrial-age inheritors of ancient Greek and Roman values, although they were determined to outstrip these lauded cultures in sheer daring, grandeur and engineering prowess. The London and Birmingham would be the successor to the famous Roman roads; and what better way to nod respectfully to the ancients than to have trains running from a neo-classical terminus?
By a quirk of history, permission to demolish the Euston Arch was given by Harold Macmillan, the Tory prime minister who had been quite the classical scholar in his youth. While wounded and waiting for a stretcher to rescue him from a trench during the first world war, he passed the time reading Aeschylus in the original Greek. Neo-Greek architecture, however, clearly meant nothing to him, except in representing the age of steam that had to go as Britain tried its comic worst to become a modern nation.
How attitudes have changed. Today, Dan Cruickshank, founder of the Euston Arch Trust, says: "What better way to mark High Speed 2 [the proposed London to Birmingham line] than restoring this spectacular monument as a landmark gateway to the new Euston. The architectural drama of the arch would be the perfect match for the excitement of the 250mph trains."
"The perfect match": the very latest in 21st-century railway technology married to the classical poetry of 19th-century Greek revival architecture. This match would have seemed illogical and wrong to Macmillan's generation of out-with-the-old, in-with-the-new modernisers. Today, though, the successful and hugely popular renovation of St Pancras station, just down the road from Euston, has proved how well the worlds of magnanimous and dreamlike Victorian architecture work with the age of the super-fast train.
With luck, the arch will soon be fronting a brand new Euston station, replacing the dreary, communist Europe-style steel box that weaseled its way here to coincide with the arrival of the latest (and excellent) blue-and-white electric InterCity expresses of the mid-1960s. Few, I feel, will mourn the passing of this glum, air-terminal design, one in which trains themselves are invisible and there is nowhere to sit to wait for them.
Architects have yet to be chosen for the new terminus, although the property developer British Land, hoping for the gig, has been working with Foreign Office Architects (recently disbanded) and Allies and Morrison on the project. Illustrations revealed a couple of years ago showed a station looking like a cross between Heathrow Terminal 5 and London's Westfield shopping centre. A railway station, however, should be a railway station, and hopefully the architectural ambition of the future terminus will live up to both the drama of the £30bn 250mph High Speed 2 [High Speed 1 runs from St Pancras to the Channel Tunnel] and that of the Euston Arch itself.
Meanwhile, the architect Terry Farrell, recently appointed architectural advisor to the mayor of London, has been drawing up a compelling plan to transform London's seedy and dismal Euston Road into a handsome avenue worthy of the new Euston and the revived St Pancras stations.
As for the arch: this is to be rebuilt, at an estimated cost of £10m, with rooms in its ample attic and basement to be fashioned into bars and galleries. Lifts secreted into the end walls will carry visitors up and down Hardwick's Doric tour-de-force.
I have no idea where Gordon Brown or David Cameron stand on architecture, ancient or modern, but I hope they will give every encouragement to a project that might just be one of the finest adventures in urban planning, design, engineering and conservation – all working together – that Britain has witnessed since Macmillan and his ruthless fellow modernisers condemned the much-missed arch nearly 50 years ago.
Air travel is no privilege for the poor | Owen Hatherley
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 22, 2011
Travelling from Luton airport is a teeth-grindingly laborious process compared with the grandeur of St Pancras International
If you're in any doubt that the class war is raging in the field of transport design, try travelling in the same week from London St Pancras International on the Eurostar, and then from Luton airport on a low-cost airline. Bear this contrast in mind when it is claimed – and it often is, implicitly or otherwise, most obviously in the forthcoming budget's trailed inducements to air and road travel – that holidays via air are the innocent privilege of the poor and the "squeezed middle", which green or lefty killjoys want to take away from them.
St Pancras International is marketed as "high design", combining the aesthetics of the industrial revolution – in the form of William Barlow's majestic iron and glass canopy and George Gilbert Scott's grandiloquent hotel frontage – along with the modern: sleek, grey-steel new terminuses, chic typography and, where beer barrels imported from the East Midlands once sat, a luxury shopping mall. Here, as you wait, you can fill yourself with all the organic coffee you can drink, stock up on improving literature in Foyles and enjoy the "world's longest champagne bar". Drink enough there and you might even find value in the station's statues of John Betjeman and snogging backpackers. To take a train into Europe is reserved for the elite, then, an elegant experience, "reassuringly expensive".
London Luton – aside from the hubris in its very name, with a city of more than 200,000 demoted to a terminus for the capital – also has a shopping mall, and also caters largely to travel in Europe, but that's where the similarity ends. The notion that the plane might be quicker and easier than the train is now absurd, if you're travelling from Luton or the many airports like it. To travel out of London from St Pancras is simple, even for non-Londoners, as the station is a major terminus. To travel to "London Luton" is teeth-grindingly laborious, on the disintegrating Thameslink train followed by a bus winding vaguely around the General Motors works. When you finally arrive at the airport, you're at a nasty little shed into which retail is stuffed as if at random. The design makes Lidl look like Le Corbusier, an overlit, cramped horror.
That's before you've even made your way into the floating cattle car that will be shepherding you to your destination, via your chosen low-cost airline – in my case it's usually the Hungarian couriers to "new Europe" Wizzair, the subject of the Wizzair Sucks website. Then you'll arrive somewhere more humane, for a week or so. It's a miserable way to travel, for both of its main groups of clients – Gastarbeiter from east-central Europe and working-class holidaymakers on their way to Spain. And never mind arriving at Luton, when accusatory signs about "ASYLUM" and the "UK BORDER" provide a warm welcome.
This experience, making the very act of getting in and out of the country a grim struggle, is what the government will trumpet as empowering the ordinary holidaymaker, while they themselves – perhaps even the currently ascendant Clarkson tendency in the coalition, best represented by Philip Hammond – would surely opt every time for the Eurostar. They are, in the fine tradition of British Conservatism, serving up something they know, as Gerald Ratner once so pithily put it, is "crap" – then telling us we should be thankful.
So even before we bring in other factors – the price and quantity of oil, or its hardly benign environmental effect – it is clear that we are being sold a pup. The "freedom" of the skies or of the motorway is a risible myth.
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