Copies of the Celia Drummond and Phil Sayer voiced automated announcements
Request ID: FOI-1338-2223 Date published: 22 September 2022
You asked
When you took over control of many of the Southern Rail stations in the South London area (eg, Anerley, Brockley, Clapham High Street, Crystal Palace, Forest Hill, Honour Oak Park, New Cross Gate, Norwood Junction, Penge West, Sydenham, Wandsworth Road, West Croydon, etc) which was around 2010/2011 i remember that your station platform announcements that were voiced by Celia Drummond and Phil Sayer continued in use for a couple of years until around 2013/2014 when you then finally replaced these station platform announcements with your standard Emma Hignett voiced ones that were already used elsewhere on your network. So you used the Celia Drummond and Phil Sayer announcements at some of your London Overground stations for a couple of years.
So under the Freedom Of Information Act 2000 i would like to request copies of all of the sound files of these old Celia Drummond and Phil Sayer announcements that were used at certain London Overground stations. I am aware you have released many of your announcements including the current London Overground station platform announcements so hopefully you should be able to release these old ones too.
Note that the announcements that i am requesting are from the Amey system which is the same provider who you use for the current London Overground station platform announcements voiced by Emma Hignett which i believe you have released to many other people who have made Freedom Of Information Act 2000 requests. So as these were provided by Amey who is the same provider as the current ones there should be no issue with releasing these old obsolete ones too.
We answered
TfL Ref: FOI-1338-2223
Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 1 September 2022.
Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act and our information access policy. I can confirm we hold the information you require.
You should have received an email separately that provides a link to the requested audio announcement. Please note that all of the audio announcements across the full TfL network that we are currently able to provide access to are accessible via this site. However, please be aware that many of the audio announcements that can be heard across the network are actually made up of smaller, fragmented recordings which are then combined for the purposes of public announcements so there will be some instances where full recordings of specific stop/station names, numbers or locations are not held.
We intend to update these files on a six monthly basis and so any newer recordings will be uploaded as part of this pre-determined schedule, rather than in response to specific future FOI requests. This is to ensure our resources can be managed effectively. Therefore, if you are aware of newer recordings that have been created that are not yet uploaded, we would appreciate your patience with this as requests for these recordings will be refused under section 22 of the FOI Act on the basis that there is a pre-existing intention to publish these in accordance with our publication schedule. We would therefore encourage you to wait for this upload rather than submit requests for recordings in this way. To confirm, these updates are expected to occur around January and July of each year.
If this is not the information you are looking for, or if you are unable to access it for some reason, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal as well as information on copyright and what to do if you would like to re-use any of the information we have disclosed.
Yours sincerely
Eva Hextall FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London
