In my experience, the answer to the question is no.
The two main gripes seem to be overcrowding and old trains. Whilst I don't dispute there are places in the north where it's possible to experience heavy peak overcrowding, with exceptions I still don't think it's as bad as in the London area. Yes the 17XX out of a major city may be filled to bursting point for the first couple of stops, or maybe a little further on somewhere like the Bolton corridor, but I'd still say people are standing for much shorter distances than in the London area. "Rush hour" in the north is still roughly 1700-1800, whereas in the south east we're now talking about 1530-1930, with many trains still crowded either side of that. Same in the morning, where in the London area it's now quite easy to find full trains as early as 0600.
What I'd say is worse in the north is off-peak overcrowding, especially that associated with events. This is less of an issue in the London area as there is more stock available from the peaks to provide longer off-peak trains across the board, plus the generally longer lengths can absorb fluctuations in demand that little bit better. It's still possible to find heavily overcrowded off-peak trains in the London area at times though.
As for the age of rolling stock, I confess to getting a little tired of hearing about this. My local line in the London area still has trains dating from the mid 1970s, and until recently all the rolling stock dated from BR days. As long as stock is reliable and well maintained I really don't see the issue. I do agree however that some of Northern's rolling stock could and should be presented better.
On balance, given the constraints of financial viability, I feel the north's rail service isn't bad at all. Not perfect by any means, but not nearly as bad as some make out.
This post probably sums up the whole thing.
Agreed -
bramling makes some good points, and didn't need to search for extreme examples to try to highlight a bigger point (unlike a few of the comments on this thread!).
Heavy rail isn't the solution for linking every village, it won't be "perfect", it's better suited to core flows with the most bums on seats - given the subsidies required and the unavoidable topography, I think that what we have at the moment is okay. Could be better but could be a lot worse too.
Yes there are a few ancient trains on routes around London but the point is they are not Railbuses where you may have to spend a 2 hour journey on them, and most are down for replacement in the next few years.
How many
normal people actually spend two hour journeys on Pacers?
Yes, there are examples where it may be possible to spend two hours on one, but (out of the millions of journeys in "the north") how many people are sitting on a Pacer all the way from Scunthorpe to Lincoln? Or from Carlisle round the coast to Lancaster (rather than taking VT/TPE via Penrith)?
Using these extreme examples doesn't help the case. You could similarly complain that London Underground's Piccadilly Line isn't suitable for the hour and a half it takes to get from Cockfosters to Heathrow, but the number of people doing that journey direct will be fairly insignificant.
EMT doesn't have a large fleet of Pacers to deal with yes it has some 153's which will have to be dealt with ...
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... it always strikes me that EMT is kind of luxury compared to Northern yes they have capacity issues like Northern, but most of their Sprinter fleet is much better condition internally than Northern, and their 158's have had a proper refurb unlike Northern 158's.
EMT's "Provincial" fleet has had the same treatment as the equivalent "Provincial" fleet of FGW/ LM, plus all of W&B/ Northern.
All are stuck with Sprinters (and Pacers in the case of FGW and W&B), but the problems at EMT, LM and FGW tend to remain under the radar because the "London" fleets disguise things.
That and the fact that "the north" and "Wales" tend to have much noisier local political representation.
I think "focussed on London" is more the driving factor than "Radial." The media have reinforced the propaganda that most tax is collected from the financial services sector, so serving the City of London predominates in the Whitehall mind. Never mind that "the City" took the rest of the country's pensions funds to the casino and lost most of them.
You need to stop the "chip on shoulder" political agenda stuff before concentrating on the railway.
HS3 was always just a buzzword for politicians to throw about, nobody with any sense or understanding of the region thought for even a second that some kind of HS line will emerge either side of the Pennines. Trans-Pennine Main Upgrade would have been a better, and more realistic name for the project as it doesn't have some people in a flap about some bespoke high speed connection where other projects are being shelved, but calls it what it is
I think that calling it "HS3" was a reasonably clever move, in that it tied this investment into acceptance of HS2 (i.e. if you support HS2 then that scheme will have done the groundwork for infrastructure investment that HS3 can piggy-back upon).
It's also an easy shorthand for getting everyday members of the public to understand that's suitably vague/ nebulous (i.e. it could mean places like Sheffield or it could be just the main "TPE" corridor... it could extend to Liverpool and Hull or it could be just the core bit from Manchester to Liverpool).
Plus it then encourages the idea that High Speed lines will become a network, rather than just stopping at "2".