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The tube drivers’ colleagues who run stations and signalling equipment yesterday called for a pounds 500 shift bonus for working New Year’s Eve night and New Year’s Day.The demand by their union, the RMT, follows news that pounds 24,000-a-year engineers working on the Northern Line have been offered pounds 500 on top of their normal wages if they volunteer for work over the holiday. London Underground management now face prolonged negotiations with the unions after which they will have to decide whether to close the system or incur massive extra expenditure. Bob Crow, assistant general secretary of the RMT, said his union would be seeking to match the engineers’ bonus in talks with management for additional payments on other lines.Mr Crow said that management was planning to run a service throughout New Year’s Eve night and New Year’s Day. It wanted to run a train every two minutes through central London.

“Our principal concern is safety for our members working over the millennium bank holiday,” he said. “The pubs will be open all the time and we will want to ensure they will have adequate police protection.”The crowds could be far heavier than a normal rush-hour and it is going to be no fun for staff on the ticket barriers at the main stations that night Secondly, we want only volunteers to work. After that we want a proper level of pay for those who do work while the rest of London is enjoying itself.” A spokesman for London Underground said that decisions on whether to run a tube service all night and the levels of pay had yet to be made.. JOHN PRESCOTT is to take tough new powers to force Railtrack to invest more in rail improvements after the privatised company yesterday announced a pre-tax profit of pounds 428m for the past year. The Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions is expected to win a cabinet battle with the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, who is wary of intervention in Railtrack, but Mr Prescott has told colleagues the level of profits made by Railtrack underlines the need for more direct powers to force it to invest more in the rail system.
Mr Prescott is preparing to change his draft legislation to give the new Strategic Rail Authority powers to pay the pounds 1bn taxpayers’ subsidy direct to Railtrack, with powers to direct the investment.Railtrack fears that Mr Prescott’s intervention could further hit its share price, and Bernard Jenkin, the Tory spokesman on transport, attacked it as “nationalisation by the back door”. Railtrack’s chief executive, Gerald Corbett, warned: “Enforcement regulations will raise our cost of capital and not get the railway rebuilt.”Defending the profit figures, Mr Corbett said: “Today’s profit is tomorrow’s investment. I am unashamed about it because that is the key to getting the investment in.”However, Railtrack admitted that it was failing to meet its targets.

Rail users groups said the profits amounting to 50p for each of the 850 million journeys taken a year by train passengers proved passengers were being “ripped off”.The Independent has learned that the rail regulator, Chris Bolt, has recently reported to Mr Prescott after a consultation period that it would be feasible to pay the subsidy directly to Railtrack, ending the system inherited from the Tories under which the subsidy is paid by the Government to the train-operating companies to pay to Railtrack in return for service improvements.Mr Prescott believes the system contains no financial incentives for Railtrack to invest at the level he wants. Railtrack anticipated his move by announcing plans for pounds 27bn in investment, but that has failed to impress the Secretary of State, who estimates that pounds 16bn is earmarked for maintenance, not enhancement.His priority will be to force Railtrack to invest more in East Coast capacity, and commuter routes in the South-east through signalling and longer stations to enable extended trains to carry more passengers as part of his drive to get people out of cars and onto public transport.He told BBC Radio 4’s PM programme that he wanted Railtrack to make a “definite commitment” to an investment programme “and to have it delivered as certainly as we have seen the profits in the last couple of years”.He said that at present Railtrack did not have to guarantee levels of investment: “You can be sure I am going change the basis so that we get a guarantee of investment which we have not had up until now,” he added. He wants the amended Bill on the Statute Book in the Spring, next year, and it could be introduced before the summer.. SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC became the first head of state to be formally indicted as a war criminal yesterday, in a move that may set back diplomatic efforts to end the Kosovo war. Judge Louise Arbour, the chief prosecutor of the International Tribunal for War Crimes in former Yugoslavia, read out the historic document in The Hague.