Rail passengers should see reduced congestion at Britain’s busiest railway station as the first stage of a £10m improvement project at Waterloo nears completion.
Commuters passing between Waterloo and Waterloo East stations will now be able to use four new escalators connected to a 220-metre balcony which runs almost the full width of the station.
This new access route between the two busy stations, which are used by a combined 300,000 passengers a day, ‘removes the previous bottleneck and forms part of a wider plan to provide more space for passengers at concourse level’, Network Rail said.
The scheme is also creating 20,000 sq ft of new retail space at first floor level, accessed by the balcony.
The balcony is part of Network Rail’s on-going programme of investment at stations to ‘boost capacity, improve passenger flow and providing better customer information by installing a new announcing system’.
Tim Shoveller, managing director of the Network Rail and South West Trains alliance, said:
“Waterloo is the busiest station in Britain with more than 90m passengers a year. As the number of people using the station continues to rise, we need a radical solution to provide the space and facilities that passengers need. The new balcony will help ease congestion and improve the journeys of millions of people each year.”
A team of 150 specialist builders are ‘working round the clock to complete the project on schedule’.
It’s the first step in the expansion of Waterloo to improve station capacity with future aspirations to integrate the former Eurostar platforms in order to utilise all existing space available at the station.
