There are only four weeks to go before Crossrail finally gets Cross, with trains running through to Heathrow, Reading and Shenfield. With the timetable becoming ever clearer I thought I'd show you what the service pattern is going to look like from 6th November. Also, you may not like how late the trains start on Sundays, nor how early they finish.
This is what a typical off-peak hour will look like. i.e. 9.30am-4pm and 7pm-10pm on weekdays, after 9am on Saturdays and after 10.30am on Sundays
Expect 16 trains an hour through the central section. They'll alternate between trains from Shenfield and trains from Abbey Wood. The Shenfield trains will all terminate at Paddington, for now. The Abbey Wood trains will alternate between Heathrow and Maidenhead/Reading.
Get used to seeing this cyclic pattern on westbound display boards...
Paddington
Heathrow T5
Paddington
Reading
Paddington
Heathrow T4
Paddington
Maidenhead
Expect trains:
• every 3-4 minutes between Whitechapel and Paddington
• every 7-8 minutes on the two eastern branches
• every 7-8 minutes between Paddington and Hayes and Harlington
• every 15 minutes to Heathrow or through Slough
Heathrow trains will stop everywhere. All trains heading further west will skip Acton Main Line, West Ealing and Hanwell. Maidenhead trains will skip Taplow and Reading trains will skip Iver. During the peak, early mornings and late at night expect different stopping patterns.
And as for the first and last trains, well...
At Tottenham Court Road on weekdays and Saturdays the first trains will be just before 6am and the last trains will be just before 12.30am.
But on Sundays things are very different. There'll be no trains on the central section before 7am westbound and 7.45am eastbound, nor any trains after 11pm. Rest assured that trains will run outside these times on the outer branches, but all starting or terminating on the surface at Paddington or Liverpool Street.
I think this means that on Day 1 (i.e. Sunday 6th November), the first train through the Pudding Mill portal will be at 7.47am (the 7.11am from Shenfield) and the first train through Paddington will be at 8.02am (the 7.29am from Abbey Wood). It won't quite be possible to do both.
What's more, on the Reading branch no eastbound train will pass through Paddington until 9.47am and
no westbound train will pass through Paddington until 10.39am! The upstairs platforms at Paddington are still going to get plenty of use on Sunday mornings.
It's all going to be purply fantastic in four weeks time, with so many trains running through to so many stations. Just don't try getting up too early on a Sunday morning if you want to ride the central bit.
