Turning South London Orange report

Simply having TfL take over the services will not sudddenly lead to a doubling of frequencies. What will change is the attitude - the operator will be accountable to ratepayers (users) rather than shareholders. And inner suburban services will not be required to pay third fiddle to the operators' favoured long-distance clients

Actually I'm not sure that's quite correct. TfL has not brought any main line service it "runs" in house. They're all contracted to private businesses that have a legal duty to their shareholders. TfL's management style is different, the contract incentives are differently weighted and the risk allocation is different. You're right that a TfL takeover is not a "magic wand" that guarantees improvements - we just need to look at West Anglia to see that where LOROL still appears to be struggling with fleet issues.

The report does say that you don't get large scale improvement just through a TfL takeover although some immediate benefits are considered to result. Beyond that significant investment would be needed for at least a decade. There is also an acknowledgement that hiving off suburban from long distance services may create issues in terms of service consistency, being able to maximise the gain from, for example, new signalling and control systems or improved fleet / crew / platform utilisation. Everything has to be lifted up to the same standard. Hence why there is the concept of merging all long distance services from London to Surrey, E/W Sussex and Kent into a single TOC. That would reduce the number of interfaces at multiple termini. It's not clear that applies for Waterloo but they may be assuming CR2 creates a necessary split of SWML services. That doesn't deal with longer services to Reading / Alton via Camberley.

You could call this TOC "Southern Railway", "Southern Region" or perhaps even "Network South East". Just a thought.

Oh for goodness sake. There is no evidence whatsoever that TfL taking on the Overground has resulted in a single ticket office closure. It has generally meant more people and ticket offices open for longer and an extension of Oyster retailing via ticket offices. Point me to some evidence that a TfL takeover has worsened ticket selling on the Overground.

The former Silverlink stations were transferred to LU and yes they are subject to Mayoral policy hence the move to close them following the statutory consultation. TfL has no power to go round and independently close ticket offices on the NR network because the SoS has the ultimate responsibility not the Mayor.

On the subject of rolling stock then we must ask a question - do we want trains with more space in them and longer formations so people stand a chance of getting on or do we want to stick with old trains and shorter formations so some people get a seat and many more are left on platforms for 20-30 minutes waiting to find a square centimetre in which to squash into? To carry on with the old way of doing things in the face of never ending rising demand is frankly ridiculous. No one likes standing and we all know some people hate sideways seats but the railways main job is to get people to and from work not to guarantee seats. If we think things are bad here then people should see the volumes that are handled in Japan. We're nowhere close to what they have to do to try to cope with their demand levels. Oh and I don't need a treatise about the Shenfield line and how in former times more trains ran than today. Let's see how things go with the new Crossrail trains.

The cheaper solution, if possible, is to add two tracks and one island platform at every station and dedicate that all to TfL short-haul commuter services, so the present longer-haul operators aren't penalised for serving the millions who can no longer afford to live anywhere near London.

Still not cheap per se, but unless you can suddenly create 500,000+ jobs outside the SE Suburban lines, you are unlikely to deter every man, let alone his dog, from working in London. Especially when the whole thing is driven by the promises of more and more jobs in the financial sector, which is likelier to remain based in Canary Wharf, rather than Crayford Marshes.

Bit of a ticklish problem to solve. Purely on the rail front.

Bulleid's was designed to fit within the existing loading gauge - it wasn't a huge sucess.

Seems there is also a DfT report on the issue - not read yet but looks to have the detail.

www.gov.uk/government/consultations/rail-passenger-services-in-london-and-the-south-east-a-new-approach

www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/493754/dft-tfl-rail-prospectus.pdf

Interesting that it is a consultation with a range of questions on key topics.

Well, everything new was non-standard when it was launched! (The first 4EPB was unable to interwork with anything else when it was first introduced - by 1982 it could inter-work with everything on the Southern Region. The 4DDs remained non-standard because the experiment was not a success. The interleaved compartments were the best that could be achieved within the limited loading gauge.

In terms of the Chinese alleged-proverb-that's-actually-a-curse, interesting is indeed the mot juste for this.

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