John B wrote:

On 14 Mar, 15:42, "Paul Scott" wrote:

The ELL will be DC third rail - and I shall be very surprised if in due
course it isn't run by Southern, as contractors to TfL as the services will
have to be timetabled into the existing paths, indeed the extension of the
railway to Crystal Palace and Croydon will subsume certain existing
services.


Current bidders for London Overground (= NLL, ELLx, WLL, GOBLIN) are
MTR/Laing (Chiltern) and GoVia (Southern). AIUI the Southern franchise
deal allows for transferring certain services to ELLx when it opens,
so this side of things won't be a problem whoever wins.


Just to be clear on this, the MTR/Laing joint venture doesn't run the
Chiltern Railways franchise - that's owned directly by Laing. MTR is
Hong Kong's Mass Transit Railway company, who don't currently operate
any franchises in the UK rail market. I have read a number of comments
from people who think they would make an interesting choice - even if
only as one half of a joint venture - and might shake things up
somewhat.

I was interested to read what you said re the Southern franchise -
that the SRA / DfT had the foresight to ensure the agreement with
Govia was flexible enough to accommodate the forthcoming ELLX. It's a
pretty obvious move when one thinks about it - it's just that I
hadn't.


Network Rail is supposed to be able to resolve timetable conflicts
between different operators, and doesn't do a terrible job: for
example, although the South Central and South Eastern franchises have
been under the same control for much of privatisation (Connex and now
GoVia), the period when GoVia and SRA were running South Central and
South Eastern respectively was not a disaster.


Though the operations of the South Central (i.e. Southern) and South
Eastern franchises are surprisingly discrete - they quite literally
don't cross paths that often (at least not on the level).

First Capital Connect's Thameslink route however crosses both their
paths, especially on the run in to London Bridge, which is what the
Thameslink 4000 project is aimed at dealing with.


Also, the LO franchise is rather different from the South Central
franchise, in that it's far more tightly specced and responsible to
TfL - much of the strategic/planning work that GoVia does for Southern
will be done by TfL for LO.


TfL refer to the London Overground operator arrangements as a
concession, as opposed to a franchise, so the winning operator will be
the concessionaire.

I'm no expert on Merseyrail, but it is already run on this concession
basis - the Merseyside lines are run by a Serco/NetRail joint venture
for Merseytravel (the Merseyside Public Transport Executive). The
London Overground and Merseyrail concession arrangements look similar,
at least superficially - I've no idea comparable the two are when
looked at comprehensively though.


So overall, I don't think GoVia has the kind of advantage in bidding
that you're suggesting - although they might win by default if it
transpires that Laing's new owners don't have the same interest in
rail as the previous management.

--
John Band