Greybeard33
Established Member
The Northern Hub proposals envisaged a second hourly path through Piccadilly for Trafford Park container trains.Please bear in mind that besides the normal train services that use the Styal line, plus those that you also refer to in the part of your posting that I have emboldened above, there are paths that are also used by the existing container freight trains that use the Styal line to save them having to pass through Stockport station. Can someone say what the daily service pattern are for these and the time period when such container trains will continue to be scheduled alongst this line?
The most frequent freight services on the Mid-Cheshire, in reality rather than booked paths, are the "binliners" to the Runcorn incinerator from the Greater Manchester Waste terminals at Northenden, Bredbury and Brindle Heath. Arguably what this particular railway line does best is keeping these bulk freight flows of the congested roads - if the line were closed to freight the only realistic alternative would be to replace each train by 20+ heavy container lorries. Would this be a good trade for enhancing the passenger service on a line where the demand is currently insufficient to fill an hourly two-car DMU except in the peaks?I'm having trouble working out what those trains are, but there are only 26 trains - 7 are listed as cancelled and another seven are 'unactivated'.
So 12 trains, I have to assume this is a typical working day.
Several of the others are not actually required to route over the WCML if they take alternate routes - for instance one appears to be going from Guide Bridge to Runcorn, could that not be routed via Manchester Victoria for example? Although that would require several reversals its not as if freight is massively time concious.
So it seems like you would only have to cancel a handful of freight trains a day to be able to turn the entire route over to Metrolink operation and drastically reduce its operating costs.
As it connects to nothing else if you just accept this you can also close the Stockport-Altrincham section and convert that to an orbital Metrolink section if you want.
I think it is one of those things about the 'modern' railway that we have become so obsesed with the idea that we should have freight running on all lines that it strangles any attempt to improve what the railway does best - moving large numbers of passengers cheaply.
Although the paths are less frequently used, the Mid-Cheshire is also very useful in enabling long-distance freight to avoid central Manchester and/or avoid the double track sections of WCML between Stockport and Sandbach and between Winsford and Hartford. This enables more passenger paths on lines that do move large numbers of passengers.