Nothing went wrong overnight. It's been a build up of issues over decades. Standard first generation 3 car units replaced by 2, many of them Pacers, was possibly the right decision on traffic trends at that time. Around the late 1970s to early 1980s the growth of university education took off. Someone in rail marketing spotted the market and the student railcard was born. The coach equivalent never caught on as well. Catch 'em young. And they did, and generations brought up on Thomas the Tank Engine turned to rail. The young people who went to uni away from home and got the sort of jobs that required travel.
You may laugh, but it's one of the untold stories of the industry.
Arriva North got carried away with their excessive optimism and promises. Alex Hynes gave some tremendously upbeat speaches and presentations based on what his team must have told him. They sounded too good to be true and many who heard them won't have been surprised that they haven't come as quickly as suggested.
Those who passed on those optimistic projections to the public must now be feeling a little embarrassed. However, a lot hasn't been Northern's fault entirely. They didn't handle the Bolton electrification and DOO issues well, but Network Rail and the DfT are responsible for a lot of that.
Northern are the last to get paths allocated as all long distance operators get first dip, and freight operators have ancestral rights to to many they may rarely use. Delayed cascading, late new trains, rand refurbishing 30 year old rusty coaches hasn't helped either.
The momentum of improvement is slow but it does seem to be picking up. It's well behind schedule so you don't need to know much about cashflow management to realise the overdraft won't be coming down very fast, and might still be going up.
What concerns me is that the trains are often so full that revenue is missed by being unable to check or issue tickets. On my line in particular we have 3 operators and Northern often have the cheapest through fares. No ticket barriers until Piccadilly + trains so full the guard can barely get in the train. Most do pay before boarding. Not a few do not because even when the train isn't full the guard is quite likely to stay in the back cab.
Annual passenger statistics for 2018/19 must be down due to the Saturday strikes and stand in guards not checking or issuing tickets. In reality passenger numbers across most of the region have held up remarkably well. Despite it all some stations may have recorded increases. The finances should be on the way back up.
And yet, higher staffing costs, higher train hire and maintenance costs, higher fuel costs, and higher track access costs will need a lot more passengers to make the balance sheet come out right. It must be a nightmare for the accountants.