Commuter agony after Twickenham to Barnes trains hit by late engineering works (From This Is Local London)

We've been having some battles with Network Rail and their contractors causing misery for many residents near the railway during the station platform lengthening works, in itself a welcome step to improve the overcrowding by increasing the Reading line capacity to ten cars from 8. Sadly they are not keeping to all the agreements to limit the noise through agreed measures made at two recent residents meetings which NR and contractors have attended which I brought about to help manage these issues, and have been extremely well supported by Richmond Council's Road Networks officers before and at the last meeting as well as Environmental Health on extremely intrusive noise well above agreed levels and not protected as agreed.

So this is why the residents of Twickenham are pushing back extremely hard to be able to use their houses to sleep in rather than being up all night as if living next door to a scrap.metal/builders yard open 24 hours.

This over-run will have affected tens of thousands of residents who rely on this link to get to work, and not just an hour or so, virtually for a whole day.

Something must have gone very wrong and it would be good to know what.

The challenge by residents of Twickenham through the Judicial Review of the Planning Permission has been given permission to go ahead and comes to the High Court in December this year. If the disruptions are so bad now, just imagine what it would be like for all residents and commuters between now and 2015 possibly 2016 if at all with a massive concrete plinth 40 metres deep being mounted across the entire tracks and all the huge pile holes at least 100 feet deep which will need to be bored and all of the rest of the work all in a domestic-scale environment where NR and Kier Joint Venture are trying to sling 9 story high rise flats over this massive slab, leaving just a letterbox of a station entrance just like going into the underground in central London.

The intrusion will be horrendous and for a totally out of scale and out of keeping building which dominates and over-bears the sky-line and residents two and three storey Victorian cottages and houses.

Today was bad enough but consider that the developers of Twickenham station have stated that:

1.4 An overall objective during the construction works at Twickenham Station will be to
minimise the use of the station, and encourage passengers to use Richmond, Whitton
and Hounslow stations, both for normal days and event days.

If the Solum station development goes ahead there will be many night and weekend station closures.

This will not only inconvenience weekend station users, but also many thousands of commuters if any of the night or weekend works overrun as they did today.

The reason for so many closures is because Solum have decided to build a massive podium structure right across the railway tracks, in order to maximise residential development above. The podium alone will cost £4million and take a year to construct (because the work has to be done when the station is closed).

TRAG's Plan B improves access to the platforms (including lifts), provides greater capacity for rugby fans and provides better links to Twickenham stadium.
Plan B is also smaller, lower, less imposing and quicker to build than Solum's monster - which is now unlikely to be finished in time for the Rugby World Cup in 2015.

I have to say that I don't find the two items above totally related. One is about overruning engineering work, and I to would like to know how it could overrun by so much and not do something about it before hand.

The other is about improvement works to a railway line that have been there since 1848!! And therefore way before most of twickenham was even built!.

Twickenham station does need improving along with may of the others along this line, clapham junction and Putney for a start.

At the end of the day if you buy a house in the facility of a rail station, railway line, motorway, airport, expect noise.