Horwich Parkway Station taken over by TfGM

[WatcherZero]

TfGM's plan for stations was to take over as landlord from Network Rail and make them community hubs, lease out the vacant/semi derelict building space a lot of stations have as meeting space and community cafes and finance it by using some of the unused land around stations for housing and more commercial car parks the way Network Rails been taking advantage of overbuild. Government pledged to review the proposal and a couple of pilot stations were run but pretty much dismissed it before it was received after the political winds changed and the Northern focused Osborne faction was shunted out by the Southern focused May faction.

TfGM are now pushing to be the citywide station manager rather than owning the stations outright through devolution.

 

[pdeaves]

Staffing.
In principle, TfGM can run the station but staff remain with the TOC. That's pretty much how Network Rail major stations work - the booking offices have TOC people and many platform staff are TOC. That could work for any other staffed station, too. As noted above, for Horwich the staff moved, either to TfGM or to somewhere else in Northern. In the event that TfGM takes over most stations in their area, Northern will run out of alternative posts for existing station staff (and TfGM may not be able to recruit enough fast enough) meaning that staff have to transfer. Or, could the bodies on the ground remain under Northern's pay roll?

 

[Djgr]

Staffing.
In principle, TfGM can run the station but staff remain with the TOC. That's pretty much how Network Rail major stations work - the booking offices have TOC people and many platform staff are TOC. That could work for any other staffed station, too. As noted above, for Horwich the staff moved, either to TfGM or to somewhere else in Northern. In the event that TfGM takes over most stations in their area, Northern will run out of alternative posts for existing station staff (and TfGM may not be able to recruit enough fast enough) meaning that staff have to transfer. Or, could the bodies on the ground remain under Northern's pay roll?

I think that if the TOC is seen as the problem then you probably want to make a clean break.

I can remember that Liverpool Lime Street appeared to improve vastly when it was transferred away from First (sic) North Western to Network Rail (or was it the SRA?) but the booking office staff (at least) remained with the TOC.