CROSSRAIL planners have ruled out relieving congestion at Shenfield station by developing more subways.

When the scheme is completed Shenfield railway station will become the major eastern interchange between the Southend and mainland services from Chelmsford and beyond.

The station already suffers serious passenger congestion in its tunnels and staircases at rush-hour times.

And the number of passengers entering, exiting and changing platforms at the station is expected to increase significantly when Crossrail goes live in 2017.

An extra platform will be built at the station, but despite this there are no plans to improve accessibility other than by upgrading the ticketing gates and installing a new bike rack.

One idea to increase the capacity is to extend the current subway all the way through to provide an additional entrance and exit on the other side of the station.

Alan Ormston, a regular commuter, believes money needs to be invested now to avoid congestion trouble later at a station that has remained virtually unchanged since 1933.

He said: "We need another subway.

"Since Crossrail is intended to serve, among other destinations, Heathrow, it can be assumed that many passengers will have luggage and need to cross from main line platforms to the Crossrail service.

"At present gaining access to platforms one and two during rush hour morning traffic is difficult when passengers are trying to exit from the mainline platforms either to join other services or exit the station.

"With the advent of Crossrail this will become a scrum.

"What we don't want is a major upheaval two years down the line after Crossrail has opened because they got it wrong in the first place."

Passenger numbers have increased steadily at the station and the latest figures for 2008/2009 showed a total of slightly more than 3 million people travelled to and from the station, on Hutton Road.

Crossrail itself will add an extra ten per cent to the train capacity.

A Crossrail spokesman said the company had no plans to install a new subway at the station.

He added: "At Shenfield, an additional platform will be constructed and improvement work to the existing sidings will be undertaken to allow Shenfield to be the eastern terminus for Crossrail services.

"These works will take around one year to complete but will not affect the operation of the station.

"Network Rail is at an early stage of planning the improvement works that will be required and further detail will be available during 2012."

A Network Rail spokesman said: "The work we will be carrying out at Shenfield will pave the way for more seats, better stations and a more frequent and reliable service for passengers."