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Re:South Kensington station's escalator replacement project by noneeeed on Tuesday August 17, 2021 @08:55AM (#28209318)
Yes, you can do things like that, but that ends up with you having two different sets of stations that are not easy to get between. The normal pattern is express trains that stop a few times with stoppers that "fill-in" between, but there will be different patterns of stopping to try and optimise for different groups of travelers.

Scheduling/timetabling is a wickedly hard problem, especially in a system like a railway, it's the sort of thing people get Maths and CS PhDs in. The contstraints that you have to solve are complex and interconnected and are part of a bigger network, and you are also trying to please a lot of people with very different (often contradictory) needs.

Re:South Kensington station's escalator replacement project by adwww on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @07:13AM (#28219702)
Yeah I've previously worked on some constraint programming tasks and it was fun but mind-boggling.
Re:South Kensington station's escalator replacement project by noneeeed on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @08:36AM (#28220223)
It was one of my favourite course at uni, I'd love to get back into doing something like that at some point.
Re:South Kensington station's escalator replacement project by adwww on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @09:32AM (#28220711)
I didn't use them in the end, but the Google OR-Tools is a pretty amazing resource for this. I don't have a CS degree, so just seeing the names of the algorithms was helpful ha.

https://developers.google.com/optimization/routing