RingRail – the 1973 railway plan that paved the way for the London Overground

In 1973, a plan for a new RingRail around London was proposed, and although it was never built as planned, it sort of did get built much later, as the London Overground.

The RingRail was announced in March 1973, to address what was only then starting to be understood – that the motor car could not be the future of commuting in cities. As the report noted at the time, around 10% of the people who commuted to work by car took up 64% of the road space, compared to 1.3% occupied by buses, even though they carried 15% of the daily commuter traffic.

The car was inefficient but seen as the future, and at the time the report was published, the Greater London Council (GLC) was still planning to build the massive ring road network encircling London with motorways.

However at the same time, railways were in decline and there was a lot of underused rail capacity in London. The report said that to encourage people to switch from private vehicles to public transport, then public transport needed to be made more appealing.

And that’s where RingRail came in – a large ring railway around central London with new trains and lots of interchanges with existing railways heading in and out of central London. So far, it sounds very much like the London Overground.

Oh, and they planned to move Clapham Junction station.

What was put forward was a plan to reuse much of the existing railways that looped around London, just as the Overground has done, but with some key differences.

On the eastern side of London, where the London Overground reused part of the old Thames Tunnel at Rotherhithe to link the two sides of the river, the RingRail would have crossed the river further to the east.

Their preferred option was for a new tunnel that would have linked Stratford and West Ham on the north with Westcombe Park and Blackheath on the south. However, an alternative was included that mirrors how the DLR ended up — with a line via Bow, Canary Whaf, and Greenwich.

Quite possibly, the biggest part of the proposal was for southwest London, where they planned to build an entirely new Clapham Junction station a bit further to the north to better align with radial railways. The main benefit would be a purpose-built Clapham Junction station rather than one that’s grown in an adhock manner. It would be largely funded by selling off the land from the old station when that was eventually closed.

(In fact, moving the interchange station to Queenstown Road would be radical, but is still possible, leaving a smaller stopping station at Clapham Junction)

The clever part of the plan to move the station is that it would allow the RingRail to run underneath the new station. That would have solved the problem that still affects the London Overground today, which is that people need to change trains at Clapham Junction to continue their loop around southwest London.

On the north, the plans would have combined the three separate stations at West Hampstead into a mega-station, as has often been proposed, eliminating the need to walk along the crowded pavements to get between services.

The interchange stations that needed to be built around the RailRing were intended to be where housing development could follow afterwards. Long before this was possible, they also proposed a type of travelcard that would allow people to buy a single ticket for both RingRail, National Rail, and London Underground trips.

The proposal was costed at around £200 million at the time, compared to the expected £3 billion that the rival Ring Road network was expected to cost. The difference in cost was mainly land, as the new motorways would slice through already built-up land, requiring many houses to be bought and people displaced, whereas most of the railway land was already cleared.

The report also noted that half of Londoners didn’t drive, so investment in roads was not just more expensive, it benefitted fewer people. They memorably dismissed one planned new road project as “the shortest route between two traffic jams”.

All told, the report was the conclusion of two years of work by three independent analysts, GL Crowthers, PH Vickers and AD Piling.

Of course, RingRail wasn’t built, but neither was it totally ignored.

The following year, the Berren report looked at a range of rail upgrades for London. It included a somewhat simpler version of RingRail as an option, although mainly linking up North London Railway tracks. However that got pushback from British Rail as it wasn’t that interested in small branch-line type services at the time.

There were some modest upgrades to the ring railways around London in the subsequent decades, along with the unlamented Silverlink era, but eventually, something close to RingRail arrived – when the London Overground opened in 2007.

It only took 30 years to get there.