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?
London Underground does close access to platforms when they are 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.
My understanding is that the crush risk at Euston is entirely an operational issue of Network Rail's making (NR being the station facility owner), by deliberately not announcing platforms until the last moment, causing passengers to run to the platform en masse. If platforms were announced earlier, the crush risk would be seriously mitigated.
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.
They do close the station entrance at Euston with some regularity when trains are not running (which happens annoyingly often because of the parlous state of the railways).
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.
Both solutions would take months/years to implement.
"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.
London bridge tracks untangled is so much better for throughput - I remember so many long waits as a Brighton train blocked the whole station crossing the tracks.
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.
There were plans to expand Euston, then the Tories cancelled those plans and sold off the land that was acquired to accommodate said plans to make sure it wouldn't ever happen in the future (by this point they were already collapsing in popularity and clearly going to lose the election).
