The DfT has approved Transport for London plans to take over commuter services that run from Liverpool Street to Enfield Town, Cheshunt via Seven Sisters and Chingford.
This Includes 25 stations. TfL will become responsible for 23, while two larger stations, Liverpool Street and Cheshunt, will remain the responsibility of Network Rail and Greater Anglia.
Says Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, ‘You only have to look at the success of London Overground to see how TfL taking over this commuter service will transform the journey for passengers. It will also open up the North-East of London and drive jobs and growth in Tottenham and beyond.’
TfL promises better reliability and smarter, cleaner, stations. No date has been fixed for the transfer, although TfL hopes that it will be during 2015. As with London Overground, TfL will appoint a private sector operator to run these services on its behalf.
Says TfL’s Managing Director for London Rail Mike Brown, ‘We are pleased that the Department for Transport has agreed to devolve rail services to TfL so that we can make improvements for the thousands of passengers using Liverpool Street to Enfield Town, Cheshunt via Seven Sisters, and Chingford services. We will make these services more reliable, upgrade facilities at 23 stations along the routes and ensure we are fully accountable to our passengers.
‘There is much work to be done to ensure a transition of responsibilities in 2015 and also to establish a close working relationship with Greater Anglia so that where we share tracks, we are able to operate efficiently.’
What happens to staff working at Liverpool Station; e.g. Dispatchers, Cleaners working on the trains, will they be moved to the newly appointed contractors (of TfL) or remain with Greater Anglia?
Anyone who believes Tfl is competent to run anything should look at their track record: fares tripled, Jubilee Line upgrade fiasco, Kings Cross upgraded but with no new escalators or wider platforms, sweatbox trains with zero ventilation, hundreds of mostly empty buses, 3,000 new traffic light systems, hundreds of key streets cut from two lanes to one – causing long tailbacks, Oxford St now Europe’s biggest bus park, 100s of pedallos blocking traffic at 3mph, thousands of London’s road junctions dangerously narrowed – ‘Ken Livingstone’s notorious bicycle-killer junctions’ – mass traffic jams at key pinch points, eg Hyde Park Corner, no new Blackwall Tunnel, the UK’s most urgent transport need, and an Olympics only achieved by closing down the city centre for six weeks, plus central pavement barriers installed – that destroy the last of London’s great boulevards, eg Pall Mall, Piccadilly, etc.. In the Saturday before the Olympics Tfl chose to change the pedestrian lights in the Finchley Rd – during the day – causing huge jams..
Trust me – Tfl is run by incompetents of the worst kind..