I'm surprised that Northern aren't joining the two Northwich line stoppers onto the two CLC Liverpool line stoppers. Apart from freeing up platforms in the main station at Piccadilly it would also get rid of the bottleneck at Oxford Road of trains crossing from platform 5 over to the down line towards Deansgate.
The platform 5 issue at Oxford Road seems to be the one big bottleneck still unresolved in this area, so why not run them through to Piccadilly and then on towards Stockport and Northwich? The two services seem the best to join together, given that running towards Guide Bridge would mean crossing the Piccadilly throat and running to Buxton would limit the traction availability to just Sprinters (because of 142s not fitting with the tunnel dimensions).
For exactly the same reason that there won't be a hourly Bolton to London service, the Castlefield corridor will be full to capacity with 12tph from May 18. If there are any spare paths in future, Northern's priority is to run a Blackburn to Manchester Airport service via the Todmorden Curve, as described in the franchise specification.
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