Out of interest, what would the right resolution have been to reduce the risk of a crush due to overcrowding? Close the station entrance when at capacity?
The station itself is probably running the maximum number of trains possible. The plan for increasing throughput northwards is HS2, which the previous government put on hold.
The obvious next question is whether platforms _can_ be announced earlier - to which the answer is, as I understand it, yes. The platforms are known about much further in advance and the reason for the delay appears to be a combination of intransigence by Euston management and a lack of sufficient ticket gateline staff by the train operators.
"More trains" mean they need to radically improve service/repairs and/or purchase of new trains.
"Expand the station" would mean that they would have to shut down all-of or large-parts of it while works take place. I remember being impacted of the London Bridge train station de-spaghetti-fying the tracks. I moved out of the area I was living so eventually I was impacted for only 4-5 months.
I will not touch the matter of costs.
One surprising good thing the gov did at that time was insist on the rebuild of the station itself, it was particularly grim, and just a mess.
I've lived nearby the whole time and the new station is a nice space, generally efficient with good throughput for the trains.
I'm pessimistic, but really hoping they don't stick with plans to build a too small terminus in London for HS1, not too optimistic as we have Rachael Reeves as a continuity austerity Chancellor - lets see.
You're talking about HS2 and Old Oak Common, right? Yeah that's a peculiar choice of terminus
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...
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.