Recent articles looking at the TfL Board and Financial papers have focused on the Underground, and we will return to that subject shortly. It is worth taking a brief break, however, to highlight one other element they cover – the imminent award of the new Overground franchise. Trading Places Since November 2007, London Overground services have been operated by London Overground Rail Operations Ltd (LOROL), a joint venture between Arriva UK Trains and MTR Corporation. This was initially ...

It is not often that rail consultations are greeted with unabashed excitement. In this the reaction to today’s announcement that Transport for London (TfL) and the Department for Transport (DfT) are to jointly consult on shared governance and standards for London’s rail network is a strange thing indeed. That a simple statement of intent could provoke such a passionate response speaks volumes about the current state of commuter services within the Capital. Among regular travellers there is a ...

The topics of rail devolution and London Overground are closely entwined. Without devolution the former Silverlink services in North London would never have become TfL’s London Overground. The success of the Overground has, in turn, led to further devolution and calls for even more of it. Those calls got even louder today with the publication of Devolving rail services to London, a report by the London Assembly’s Transport Committee, which advocates the devolution of huge swathes of South ...

This weekend saw the addition of 28 new stations to TfL’s hugely successful Overground network. Rail services running from Liverpool Street to Enfield Town, Cheshunt and Chingford in North East London, as well as the rail link between Romford and Upminster are now all under the jurisdiction of TfL. The takeover marks a major step forward for TfL in their campaign to take over more of the Capital’s railway network. They built their case on the back of their creation of the London Overground ...

At the end of the month London Overground will take over more of north-east London’s railways. It seems timely, therefore, to take a look at the history of the railways in the area. For though you might not think it, the lines in the inner parts of what was Essex, the old London County Council area and parts of Hertfordshire are as complex as almost anywhere in the country. With that in mind, an understanding of how they got to be that way, if not essential, will certainly help those looking ...

On 22nd September TfL launched a new consultation on the possibility of adding one or more stations to the London Overground in west London at Old Oak Common. With at least two other OOC rail consultations already on-going and a third due later this year on a potential Crossrail link to the West Coast Main Line (WCML), it finally seems that a new west London rail hub is moving closer to reality. In 2013, London Reconnections covered the nascent plans for Old Oak Common in some detail. We refer ...

We wrote recently about how Crossrail would operate and now we know who – it was announced this morning that MTR have been selected as the successful bidder for the £1.4bn, eight year (extendable to ten) contract. Tendering for the Crossrail concession began in 2013, with the shortlist of bidders announced in June. That list comprised Arriva Crossrail Limited, Keolis/Go Ahead, MTR Corporation (Crossrail) Limited and National Express Group PLC. Of those bidders, Arriva and MTR were always ...

Whilst attention has begun to switch to TfL’s plans for West Anglia (a topic which we will cover in more detail later in the month) it is worth remembering that taking over control of that line and associated stations is not the only project currently underway on the London Overground. The London Overground Capacity Improvement Programme (LOCIP) aims to address the increasing capacity gap to be found on the existing Overground lines (something we wrote about back in 2011 in The Future of ...

Last weekend presented a rare opportunity to actually get inside Marc Brunel’s Thames Tunnel. A temporary closure to facilitate works elsewhere on the East London Line allowed TfL to open it up to a limited number of visitors in order to help the Brunel Museum raise funds for some construction work. Perhaps unsurprisingly, LR were there – and thus below are a selection of photos showing the current state of the Tunnel. You can find out more about the Tunnel and its construction here. ...

On the 2nd of March 1825 the Thames Tunnel Company began construction of what they hoped would be the first tunnel beneath the Thames. On the banks of the river at Rotherhithe, bricklayers and labourers began their work as the curious watched on. The project had been garnering a certain amount of attention ever since it had been granted royal Assent the year before, and its goal was an ambitious one – the construction of a tunnel beneath the river large enough for both people and horse-drawn ...

Back in September 2013, following on from the announcement that TfL would take over the West Anglia Franchise, we announced that TfL had also agreed to take on the Romford – Upminster Line as part of the negotiations. Yesterday, alongside details of a new rolling stock order for the Overground, this transfer was finally officially confirmed in a TfL press release. Today Jonathan Fox, Director of TfL London Rail, was kind enough to provide further information about the takeover: During our ...

After a much longer wait than is typical, this morning the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, announced the fares levels that will apply to TfL services and National Rail services within the TfL zonal area from 2 January 2014. Full details of TfL fare and season ticket prices are in the Mayoral Decision document. On average TfL fares will increase by 3.1% which is equivalent to the RPI value for July 2013. To arrive at the RPI level of increase, however, there are a mix of increases and no changes ...

At 0300 this morning, a freight train running from Lawley Street to Felixstowe derailed just west of Camden Road station on the North London Line. Although the full extent and cause of the accident remains to be seen, the damage appears significant, although no injuries were sustained.

Think of Old Oak Common (OOC) as the Canary Wharf of west London. That's the Vision: bold and challenging. But will a 'super hub' emerge? While the grand plan for OOC may depend on decisions further up the metaphorical line, to a certain extent OOC leapfrogs the institutional black hole of rail strategy and drives deeper changes in strategic planning for London as a whole.

In Part 1, we introduced the many components that need to be integrated into the grand plan at Old Oak Common (OOC), for a new interchange with HS2, Crossrail, the Great Western Mainline (GWML) and Overground services. Here in Part 2 we take a step back to look at the implications and explore some nagging questions, which we’ll conclude in Part 3 along with a tentative stab at how the decision-making might unfold in the near future. OOC has grown into a very large project indeed. The ...