Following on from Graham Greenhalgh’s successful Council Motion on Northern Rail and our train services, the Lib Dem team have now received a letter from Northern Rail’s Regional Director.

We’ll be fair to them: it sounds like a step in the right direction. On the other hand, we’ve heard lots of positive messages before and they turned out not to be true. So we want to see results, not just words, but at least Northern Rail are now talking to us and that has to be a good thing.

I have been forwarded your email by David Sidebottom at Transport Focus and before I go on I would like to apologise for the delay in responding. As I am sure you will appreciate, it has been a most challenging time for Northern in recent weeks and I have some correspondence backlog as a result.

Before I explain in a little more detail I would like to make it clear that the Northern have not made a ‘decision’ to remove services and I assure you that I am just as frustrated as you are about the fact that services previously operated not appear in the May timetable. At Northern we are committed to running more trains, not less, and in a couple of years we’ll be running 2,000 more each week than we were at the start of the franchise in 2016.

In April, Northern announced details of the new May timetable. The production of this timetable faced a number of challenges due to the delays encountered by the Bolton electrification project, which is being delivered by our colleagues at Network Rail (those delays are due to all sorts of difficulties they have faced such as bad weather and unexpected poor ground conditions). The result is a timetable that delivers only a small number of the improvements we had hoped to introduce but that falls short on others and in some circumstances actually offers a service that some passengers will consider to be a step backwards from the previous timetable (this is obviously the case for the airport line). This is clearly a great disappointment for Northern and our passengers who need, and deserve, these long awaited improvements but who will now have to wait for them.

When Northern bid for the May 2018 timetable back in Autumn 2017 we did include a far better spread of services on the line. However, in January, Network Rail announced that the Bolton electrification project would be delayed and would not be ready in time for the May timetable change. We received this notification in January which is incredibly late in the process given it takes 9-12 months to build a new timetable normally.

The Northern plan had been to cascade diesel units from a newly electrified Bolton line to help increase the number of services elsewhere across the North West but the delay to the project made that impossible. Such a fundamental change to the plan meant our May timetable was rendered completely redundant and we had to rebuild it almost from nothing. To make matters worse we had to rebuild our timetable around that of other operators that had already had their timetable agreed.

The planners worked solidly on the new timetable from January but were not able to build a new timetable that was as good, for you, as the pre-May timetable. In truth, there were very similar issues across other parts of South Manchester including Levenshulme, Heaton Chapel, Woodsmoor and Davenport. The big problem for South Manchester services is congestion at Piccadilly. The electrification of the Bolton corridor would have helped as it would have enabled Northern to run faster electric services from North to South Manchester using the Ordsall Chord and via platforms 13/14 but there is simply no space to run slower diesels around there. That means we have to use the other platforms at Piccadilly and that is difficult due to congestion. We have really had to squeeze some services in and that is why we have this timetable.

You may ask ‘what has changed from before May?’ and the answer there bound up with what I said above about having to rebuild our timetable around those that had been agreed with other operators. In a sense, they took some of the capacity at Piccadilly and when we needed it back due to the Bolton delays it was no longer available and there was no other space.

I hope the above explains some of the background and the issues we have faced in this most difficult timetable change, I am convinced that if the electrification of Bolton had been achieved on time, or if we had been notified of it not being delivered a few months earlier, then we would have had a better solution for Gatley and the rest of South Manchester. Indeed it was also the late notification of the project delay that prevented us from consulting the proposed changes as we were still building the timetable weeks before May 20th. In a normal timetable change we would always look to undertake a full consultation process.

The next timetable change will be in December and the rectification of timetable decrements in South Manchester is top of our list of issues that need to be resolved during the process, which the planners are already very deep into.

If you have any further questions that I can help with, please let me know.

Kind regards

Liam

Liam Sumpter
Regional Director

Manchester Victoria Railway Station, Todd Street
Manchester