Councillor Hall lives in Forest Hill and attended the meeting organised by the Sydenham Society and the Sydenham Ward Assembly regarding improvements and cuts to rail services. He should be in no doubt about the strength of feeling amongst local people regardless of political allegiance.
The motion before council on Thursday is proposed by a Green councillor and I continue to hope that it will have the support of all political parties and not be used as a political game whilst passengers suffer.
I have a theory why Southern Trains are cutting all our services ? as of 20th Sep 2009, they have lost a huge chunk of revenue stream after all the stations between Norwood Junction and London Bridge were handed over to TFL/London Overground (LO)
If I recall (though do correct me as I?m going by memory) ? 80% of ticket sales at a station (daily, weekly, monthly, annual) goes to the train company that operates that station. The remaining is split between the other train companies.
Considering how many commuters there are on this line (as mentioned by previous surveys that FH Station is one of the busiest in London), that?s a huge amount of revenue to loose from your bottom line.
I am not surprised that Southern Trains have thrown a strop. I fully understand why they are providing the minimum service that they are obliged to, that they are not fighting too hard on our behalf for direct trains to Charing Cross and other peak and off-peak services. What incentive is there for Southern Trains to provide anything bar what they are legally obliged to, now that they getting less revenue? I can imagine the lawyers poring over the DfT contracts to see what else they can stop paying for?.
This all occurred to me this morning at FH Station. I read a LO poster informing people who are renewing their season tickets that they would have hand over their full details as LO cannot get it from Southern Trains (data protection act).
So, thank you TFL, Ken Livingston and Boris Johnson. While you indulge in your empire building because you feel a bit inadequate when you look at a London Underground map and see no coverage of SE London ? you felt as though you had to do something about it. To the detriment of us commuters.
Nice to have 8 trains an hour to Hoxton, but I?m not young, bold and beautiful enough to hang out with the New Media Web 2.0 people.
Am I correct in assuming that if I use the ELL to get to central London (by which I mean the West End, as opposed to Shoreditch) it will be more expensive as I will need to buy a ticket to use the underground system to complete my journey?
Which is why I don't quite understand how it works as surely that would mean that people would buy Travelcards as opposed to Train Season Tickets and I would've thought that more money from Train Season Tickets go into Southern's pocket so shouldn't they fight harder?
More 'good news' from Mayor's Transport Questions in City Hall:
Val Shawcross (Lab):
When the East London Line service commences I understand that Shoreditch station is to be rezoned from 2 to 1 to reduce the loss of potential income to TfL. However passengers passing through the station to continue on to Highbury, which is zone 2 will effectively be paying for a zone 1 ticket for getting off at a zone 2 station. Can you please make sure that the zone one fare only applies to passengers alighting at Shoreditch?
Boris Johnson (Con):
I am afraid this will not be possible. The general rule applied by the Travelcard and PAYG is that the fare due always reflects the zones travelled through. This applies for example to customers travelling on the Tube today from say Camden Town to Whitechapel.
He is of course correct that the East London Line will be a great improvement to our services. But with TfL expecting 30% increase in passenger numbers to quickly fill these trains, as well as the existing trains, we have to acknowledge the bad news for commuters to London Bridge and Charing Cross and on the Northern Line, or bus connections from London Bridge.
London Travel Watch have confirmed that there was no good reason for the 'perverse' removal of our evening services.
And there is no logic to running 6 trains per hour in the morning peak and not in the evening peak. I am still waiting for somebody to explain this.
I went past the station yesterday and noticed staff were wearing London Overground uniforms and for the first time, I saw staff at the platform 2 gates at Perry Vale.
For those of you who've bought tickets since Monday, have they changed the paper tickets to include the TfL roundel logo?
Incidentally I went past East Dulwich station and the ticket machine now has an Oyster reader. The irony that a Southern station has one, but our publically owned station doesn't have basic oyster facilities!
From Alan Hall's letter to The Mercury "....and put us on the famous London Underground map...."
I've never had an inferiority complex when explaining to people that I live in the part of London that is not on the underground map. I then get asked, "How do you get about if there's no tube, then?" and I patiently tell them about trains and buses.
I do recall a brochure from TFL a few years back explaining the benefit of extending the London Underground to Forest Hill/Sydenham. One justification was that house prices increase in value if they are on a tube line. If TFL had to appeal to our personal greed to get approval, I was not impressed.
Who knows, being on the "famous London Underground map" may do wonders round here. Forest Hill might transform into Richmond/Kew Bridge overnight (in your face, East Dulwich!). Then again we might turn into the squalid bedsit-land that is Tooting to cater for the influx of people new to London who think that you can only get about by tube.
Does Southern and South Eastern have the same parant company? It would make sense that South Eastern would now be a far bigger revenue earner and could go some way to explain both the proposed cuts in Southern services and the transfer of Charing Cross slots to South Eastern routes.
I heard there are 2 new betting shops going up in forest hill to deal with the influx on bets being taken to determine the date when the new footbridge will be completed from the time they had ripped out the staircase from the old one and done nothing else since then. I estimate 7 months.
Couldnt they have just left the footbridge for now, and started building the new bridge somewhere else along the huge platform?
I am mulling over the idea to stage a sit-in on the last ever Caterham bound train out of Charing X. Or perhaps I should just become a train driver and start running my own little independently operated one-carriage, 5 services-a-day train company between HOP and the West End. Anyway...
Does anyone know when the newly overground branded HOP station might start to sell and validate oystercards? Not PAYG, but weekly/monthly passes? Getting my monthly one in London Bridge at the moment as HOP gates happily reads it, but I can't buy/load it at the station.
Talking of re-branding, did I imagine it or did I read somewhere that all the station signage was supposed to change from Southern to LO branded last weekend?
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