Stations: a front door to success
If anyone knows about station refurbishment it’s LOROL, the company that has transformed the London Overground.Lorna Slade tracked the journey
I
n the past few years, LOROL working under a concession agreement for Transport for London (TfL) has invested more than £35 million refurbishing 44 London Overground (LO) managed stations inherited from previous national
rail operators.
Decades of neglect and under-investment had resulted in many of the stations becoming dingy, dirty and inefficient. Un- loved by their local communities, they were also under-used. Step forward Ken Livingston and his agenda to get more control over suburban railway around London so that it could complement London Underground’s operation. As part of that, TfL secured agreement with the DfT to carve out a bit of the old under-nourished Silverlink franchise, and let a concession itself for the operation of that network.
Five years on, and this intense metro operation has grown considerably, in fact it has flourished in every way, with new routes and stations and a sideboard full of awards. Latest Passenger Survey Results show it to be up there with the best of
Page 18 March 2013
the franchised or concession operations, with 93 per cent overall satisfaction, equal with c2c.
Mark Eaton, LOROL’s concessions director, attributes this partly to TfL being ‘very clear what it wants, with some very sharp performance regimes that help us focus on delivery of the contract’, and partly to just plain old good genes, inherited from LOROL’s shareholders. ‘MTR and Deutsche Bahn are both world-class operators, however our bidding process at the beginning took influence from MTR and Chiltern Railways, which historically has a reputation in the industry for being focussed on the customer and quality.’
‘I wouldn’t want to belittle the growth that most train operators have seen,’ continued Eaton pointing proudly to a PowerPoint presentation prepared for a visiting delegation of Japanese, ‘but ours is just so much sharper. Partly because we’ve opened a new rail route [the East London line in May 2010] but even if you strip that out, our North and West London lines have seen significant service expansion and passenger growth.
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