According to [1] nineteen national rail trains will depart from Euston in the next hour. And according to [2] Euston has 16 platforms.
Can a station platform really only dispatch 1.2 trains per hour? Fifty minutes per train? Seems kinda low to me.
I guess they need time to clean the trains, and space for trains that arrive well before their scheduled departure time. But still, it seems like a lot of platforms for the number of trains.
For a full long distance train pausing between two multi-hour trips it's reasonable.
5 Minutes for disembarking, 10 minutes cleaning, 10 minutes for boarding and you have 25 minutes platform occupancy. But on top of that the tracks will be blocked by the train going in and out for a few extra minutes, you need to find a slot on the line itself, and you need to allow for disruption.
It's all very inefficient in terms of occupying scarce and inelastic inner-city track capacity, so modern practice is to build through stations if at all possible and send trains off to sidings to be cleaned, but that wasn't practical 100 years ago.
Platforms != distinct rail lines. Now, if only there were plans to run a new national, let's say high speed, rail link from the North of England into Euston which would improve this capacity ...
The capacity limit is the number of tracks. There are 4 AC and 2 DC tracks on the line out of Euston and they are also used for freight trains as well as the Bakerloo line.
According to [1] nineteen national rail trains will depart from Euston in the next hour. And according to [2] Euston has 16 platforms.
Can a station platform really only dispatch 1.2 trains per hour? Fifty minutes per train? Seems kinda low to me.
I guess they need time to clean the trains, and space for trains that arrive well before their scheduled departure time. But still, it seems like a lot of platforms for the number of trains.
[1] https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/live-trains/departures/london... [2] https://www.networkrail.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Eus...