London Overground restoring night services in time for Christmas

The Night Overground is to resume services next month, just in time for the Christmas party season.

TfL has announced that from Friday 17th December, there will be Night Overground services between Highbury & Islington and New Cross Gate running every 15 minutes throughout the night on Fridays and Saturdays.

These services will complement the returning Night Tube, providing an interchange with the Victoria line at Highbury & Islington. This, along with easy access to Night Tube on the Central line, via a walk between Shoreditch High Street and Liverpool Street stations, will open up large parts of London and the city centre for all-night rail travel.

The London Underground will be resuming the night tube service on the Victoria and Central lines later this month, from Friday 26th November. The other Night Tube lines – the Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly lines – will return to service as soon as practicable.

As London has begun to emerge from the pandemic, off-peak leisure travel has been recovering more quickly than other types of journeys, indicating that there is strong demand for services that run later into the night at the weekend. Ridership on London Overground is around 71 per cent, with weekends reaching even higher.

The Tube network on weekdays now regularly sees more than 60 per cent of journeys compared to before the pandemic, but this has reached as high as 80 per cent at weekends, while ridership on buses is regularly at 75 per cent of pre-pandemic levels.

Rory O’Neill, TfL’s General Manager of London Overground, said: “I’m pleased that the Night Overground will closely follow the return of the Night Tube and deliver a huge boost to the night-time economy and help our customers get around during the busy pre-Christmas period.”