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New plan to shut Liverpool Street
FOR the third holiday since the start of the year, Liverpool Street station will close for engineering work.
The station will be closed for two days from Sunday, May 4, while engineers roll an 800-tonne bridge into place.
This follows closures over the Christmas and New Year break when the station reopened a day later than scheduled, causing chaos to many of the 120,000 commuters who use the station every day.
It also saw Network Rail, which is in charge of the infrastructure, fined £14 million.
At Easter there were severe delays to services because of a signalling fault, prompting Iain Coucher, chief executive of Network Rail, to go to Liverpool Street to apologise directly to angry passengers.
The closure means that passengers for the National Express service to Enfield Town will have to start and end their journeys at Hackney Downs.
The decision to close is not likely to be a popular one.
One commuter said: "I'm willing to bet the £3,000 a year that it costs me to commute on this line that there'll be problems again on the Tuesday."
The bridge is part of Transport for London's (TfL) London Overground project, and will be ready for when the new East London lines are built to take them over the main lines coming out of Liverpool Street station.
TfL's London Overground infrastructure development manager Peter Richards said: "We recognise that closing Liverpool Street will cause disruption to passengers.
"We are keeping this to a minimum by doing the work during the second half of the Bank Holiday weekend when fewer people are travelling."
A spokesman for Network Rail said: "Following the problems we had at New Year, we have listened to passengers and those who represent them and now our planning and preparation is more robust than ever.
"We will be working closely with TfL on its big May Bank holiday project to install a new bridge, and with other train operating companies to provide information on travel arrangements for passengers.
"We have a lot of work to do to improve the railway but we are absolutely determined to deliver a safe and reliable railway back to passengers and freight users at the promised time."
8:40am Friday 25th April 2008
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