KHOODEELAAR! HAD TOLD Tim O'Toole so! that Crossrail WAS Crass! We note O'Toole belatedly agrees with our diagnosis that Livingstone had LIED

0400 Hrs GMT
London Wednesday 29 April 2009


KHOODEELAAR! HAD TOLD Tim O'Toole so! that Crossrail WAS Crass! We note O'Toole belatedly agrees with our diagnosis that Livingstone had LIED for Big Business Crossrail because Livingstone had become politically bankrupt and was lost in a mire of immorality and careerism...


[To be continued]


FRom the web site of the London Financial Times, Wednesday 29 April 2009:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/df7b4018-3456-11de-9eea-00144feabdc0.html


Londoners warned of upgrade threat on Underground
By Robert Wright, Transport Correspondent
Published: April 29 2009 03:00 | Last updated: April 29 2009 03:00
The economic slowdown could threaten a programme to improve train speeds and frequencies across much of the London Underground, says the organisation's outgoing managing director.

Tim O'Toole said Londoners should "scream bloody murder" if plans for a new signalling system on the older, sub-surface lines were scaled back or postponed.

The availability of funding for resignalling of the Metropolitan, District, Circle and Hammersmith & City lines would be a barometer of politicians' general willingness to fund the system's upgrade, he said.

The sub-surface lines are the oldest parts of the Underground, built before the tunnelling techniques used on later deep-level Tube lines were developed.

Mr O'Toole has been managing director since 2003, when Transport for London, the London mayor's transport organisation, took over running the network. Richard Parry, currently the organisation's director of strategy and service development, will take over as interim managing director on Friday while a permanent replacement is sought.

At a farewell event at London Transport Museum, Mr O'Toole said the protection of funding for such upgrade work had been scrapped in 2007 in a deal that had agreed financing for the east-west Crossrail project across London. "Ever since the ring-fencing of financing was taken away from the Underground and put around Crossrail, we will always be at risk," he said.

The new signalling system, which could cost about £1bn, will increase the lines' capacity by 40 per cent. But the upgrade has been in question ever since Metronet Rail, the company meant to carry out work on two-thirds of the system, collapsed in July 2007 amid soaring costs.

Mr O'Toole said the upgrade programme had been complicated by the government's insistence on using a complex public-private partnership scheme.

"You have to make sure that this programme goes forward," he told his audience. "I'm going to tell you what to look for. If you see the sub-surface line resignalling programme put off, you should scream bloody murder."

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009