TFL to take over suburban rail routes in London

This has been around for a while.

They have already taken over the overground route between Stratford and Shenfield in the east and have been running it for about 7-8 months.
 
This is good news. Successive train companies left the Liverpool Street to Cheshunt line to rot. Since TfL have taken it over, there's more staff about and new rolling stock has been ordered. Some stations might even see lifts installed now. I assume that we'll see the same pattern with the south London routes.

It would be great if TfL could split the London Overground network into separate lines though. Currently, I get an alert when any part of the London Overground is experiencing delays when I really only care about one part of it.
 
Good step forward. As TfL starts to change as an organisation this can only a be a good thing. There are a lot of lifers at TfL, but there is also a new movement of forward thinking people within it and I think it will continue to get better as a service.

It will take time though. I remain optimistic.
 
Good news I think, train services don't benefit from privatisation and TfL do a good job of running the capital's public transport (at lease better than the train companies do), so hopefully we'll see some improvements.
 
Em3bbs said:
Why?
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Indeed,

Trains running every 15 minutes will mean (At a minimum) that any level crossing will be closed to road traffic for 20 minutes out of every hour!

There are plenty of places where trains every 30 minutes already cause massive gridlock.

Trains every 15 minutes will effectively close down large sections of the urban road network!
 
The public transport system should never have been privatised in the first place. Admittedly BR was bloat but at least it was nationalised bloat over privatised profit and ever-poorer services. My only concern would be the potential for a unionised workforce holding London and large swathes of the home counties to ransom if pay and conditions blew in the wrong direction.
 
Given that TFL had around 31% of its total funding from government last year, my concern is where the extra funding is going to come from, and my assumption is that it's likely to be joe taxpayer funnelling yet more money into London.

So no I'm not exactly jumping for joy about it.
 
darkgen said:
The public transport system should never have been privatised in the first place. Admittedly BR was bloat but at least it was nationalised bloat over privatised profit and ever-poorer services.
Click to expand...

How old are you and where do you live out of interest? I'm in my 40s, travel in from the West (FGW) every day, and used to use BR regularly back in the day to college. I would say that commuting by train is much better now from both a punctuality and comfort level. The only delays I seem to experience are when national rail (nationalised?) have over running works or their infrastructure fails.
 
Orionaut said:
Indeed,

Trains running every 15 minutes will mean (At a minimum) that any level crossing will be closed to road traffic for 20 minutes out of every hour!

There are plenty of places where trains every 30 minutes already cause massive gridlock.

Trains every 15 minutes will effectively close down large sections of the urban road network!
Click to expand...

How many level crossings are there within the boundaries of this new proposal?
 
BR cost significantly less to run than the current mess we have now. It should never have been split up. Yes it could have done with a curb here and there.

Prime example is the east coast line, no one wanted it and went to public run service. Ended up turning up a profit with nice times/trains.

Suddenly a franchise takes it over, pre-book tickets down, less trains etc etc.

Conservative ideology failing again apart from the top 5%.
 
Em3bbs said:
How old are you and where do you live out of interest? I'm in my 40s, travel in from the West (FGW) every day, and used to use BR regularly back in the day to college. I would say that commuting by train is much better now from both a punctuality and comfort level. The only delays I seem to experience are when national rail (nationalised?) have over running works or their infrastructure fails.
Click to expand...

One of the biggest, if not the biggest drivers in 'punctuality' improvement, has been the constantly increased stated journey times between A and B.
 
If there's sufficient investment in the infrastructure and rolling stock to improve the reliability and comfort then it could be good but the devil will be in the detail. At the moment my journey to work involves getting a Southern service which is frequently delayed and/or overcrowded - it's difficult to see how TfL could do a worse job but it is just about possible that Southern are struggling with issues beyond their control leading to a poor service.
 
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