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Palmers Green is one of a long list of railway stations where money for improvements is being made available from Govia Thameslink Railway's passenger benefit fund, which has been set up to provide some sort of compensation to people whose journeys were severely disrupted by the chaotic introduction of new timetables in May 2018.  Palmers Green station is in Tier 1 and £80,000 is being allocated. 

But are GTR yet capable of delivering the most important passenger benefit - a reliable train service?  If not, is it high time that the Moorgate services were transferred to Transport for London?

"Tangible benefits"

The passenger benefit fund, totalling £15 million, has been set up at the behest of the secretary of state for transport and is to be used to produce "tangible benefits" for users of Great Northern, Thameslink and Southern services (all operated by GTR) who were affected by last year's travel disruption.  Decisions on how to spend the money at each affected station will be made based on proposals made by "passenger groups and other stakeholders".  More information about how the scheme will work and how much particular benefits might cost can be found at www.passengerbenefitfund.co.uk/the-fund.

Cancellations are still a daily occurrence

The scheme rather implies that the travel disruption was in the past - there's no hint that cancellations, often at the last minute, are still a daily occurrence on the Great Northern routes.  For clear signs of growing passenger anger and frustration you only have to follow the @GNRailUK feed on Twitter.  As usual, there were a huge number of cancellations throughout the recent school holiday week and they continued into the following Monday morning.  Here are some more polite tweets from frustrated passengers:

Govia has recently been stating that it has enough drivers and more are being trained.  But it is getting on for four years since they took over the Great Northern services and throughout that period there have been frequent cancellations due to staff unavailability, especially during school holidays and on Sundays (Sunday services rely entirely on voluntary restday working).  (It must be pointed out, however, that problems last weekend and this week have been mainly caused by signalling failures, for which Govia bears to responsibility.)

Light at the end of the tunnel?

The good news is that it seems that the secretary of state for transport, Chris Grayling, may eventually relent on his refusal heretofore to to devolve Great Northern Metro services into the hands of a Labour mayor (ie to Transport for London).  And, of course, major ministerial changes will come about this summer and we may have a new secretary of state anyway.  Under pressure from Enfield & Haringey assembly member Joanne McCartney, who sits on the GLA transport committee, TfL Commissioner Mike Brown says his team is "beavering away" on a bid to take over the Moorgate services.  He is more optimistic that agreement can be reached - it's no longer "like pulling teeth" (see the report on page 6 of the June Enfield Dispatch).

If you'd like to help hurry this process along a bit, there's an online petition calling for a TfL or LNER takeover - though so far it's only garnered a few votes (maybe people aren't aware of it).

So as we wait to find out whether that really is light at the end of the tunnel that we are seeing, let's have a think about how best to spend the £80,000...