Reducing TPE core service to improve reliability and overcrowding

[Bletchleyite]

Going for the extra leg room doesn't get the extra seats in overall though. It isn't going to be long before the complaints about overcrowding in TPE new stock starts.

In which case, the "silly little DMU" argument extends to small LHCS formations and they need to get in an order for 1 or 2 additional coaches per set.

 

[sjpowermac]

In which case, the "silly little DMU" argument extends to small LHCS formations and they need to get in an order for 1 or 2 additional coaches per set.

As has been mentioned many times before on another thread, the infrastructure means that it’s hard to increase further the lengths of the trains.

 

[Bletchleyite]

As has been mentioned many times before on the thread, the infrastructure means that it’s hard to increase further the lengths of the trains.

I'm not going to continue this line of discussion as it's heading into the "naysaying" territory which is prevalent on here - almost everything that has been "naysayed" in this way usually comes true anyway if there's enough need or will for it.

 

[61653 HTAFC]

As has been mentioned many times before on the thread, the infrastructure means that it’s hard to increase further the lengths of the trains.

Irritatingly, in several years the infrastructure issues at many stations will have been solved (Huddersfield for example), by which time extending the Nova3 sets almost certainly won't be possible.

 

[keith1879]

In which case, the "silly little DMU" argument extends to small LHCS formations and they need to get in an order for 1 or 2 additional coaches per set.

At a time when TPE have committed themselves to a step change in capacity provision I really doubt that a speculative order for an additional 20% capacity per train would make any commercial sense. It's highly likely that outside of the peak they will have to resort to some aggressive pricing to try and fill all the extra seats as it is.

 

[modernrail]

At a time when TPE have committed themselves to a step change in capacity provision I really doubt that a speculative order for an additional 20% capacity per train would make any commercial sense. It's highly likely that outside of the peak they will have to resort to some aggressive pricing to try and fill all the extra seats as it is.

Really? I can't think of a single TPE service I have caught at any time of the day that has had any empty seats at any time of the day for years now.

Are you sure you are not referring to the huge amount of trains down south carting around fresh air except at peak times

I was at Wigan the other day. Midday ish. TPE service northbound and southbound - rammed. 3 car 331 Northern service to Blackpool - rammed. Virgin 11 car to Euston (my train) - very busy.

I can pretty much guarantee that at least half of the seats on any train I catch down south outside the peaks are empty.

 

[modernrail]

My personal preference for northern TPE would be to drop out one service per hour across the core and lengthen everything to 6 carriages. Same for anglo-Scottish in terms of another carriage. There is bags of demand at all times of the day and that may well build further. However, the unreliability of the infrastructure is not changing anytime soon and Manchester is a mess. The current number of diagrams per hour can't be sustained and this is before the other Manchester mess, the airport station, needs to turn around longer trains.

 

[61653 HTAFC]

My personal preference for northern TPE would be to drop out one service per hour across the core and lengthen everything to 6 carriages. Same for anglo-Scottish in terms of another carriage. There is bags of demand at all times of the day and that may well build further. However, the unreliability of the infrastructure is not changing anytime soon and Manchester is a mess. The current number of diagrams per hour can't be sustained and this is before the other Manchester mess, the airport station, needs to turn around longer trains.

I agree with the suggestion of dropping 1tph through the core... however we all know that the train TPE would drop would be the stopper(s), which means Northern need to find a few extra fast-accelerating DMUs to fill in. 195s would probably be fine for this, but would Northern have enough to go round?

 

[Bletchleyite]

I agree with the suggestion of dropping 1tph through the core... however we all know that the train TPE would drop would be the stopper(s), which means Northern need to find a few extra fast-accelerating DMUs to fill in. 195s would probably be fine for this, but would Northern have enough to go round?

I would agree (as I do generally) - but not the stopper, one of the expresses. Removing a TPE just to give it to Northern isn't going to improve anything - for improved reliability you need to create spare paths.

One way to achieve this would be to portion-work two destinations using doubled Class 185s.

 

[BeHereNow]

Or to run only one Newcastle train per hour.

 

[61653 HTAFC]

I would agree (as I do generally) - but not the stopper, one of the expresses. Removing a TPE just to give it to Northern isn't going to improve anything - for improved reliability you need to create spare paths.

One way to achieve this would be to portion-work two destinations using doubled Class 185s.

But we all know that TPE would drop the stopper if they could... and at least if Northern still ran it it would be resourced locally rather than from Manchester or York at present (I'm specifically meaning the Eastern half from HUD-LDS) and wouldn't end up with so many cancellations due to the crew being stuck on a delayed express.

 

[yorkie]

One way to achieve this would be to portion-work two destinations using doubled Class 185s.

But would that actually make the service more reliable? It will reduce congestion through the core, yes. But portion working can be problematical for other reasons.

 

[61653 HTAFC]

If portion-working was introduced with just the Hull and Middlesbrough services sharing a path between Leeds and Stalybridge, that would possibly help. Any other services would be awkward to split and join, for example a Scarborough service can only use certain platforms at York so couldn't easily be split from a service heading down the ECML.

 

[Bletchleyite]

But we all know that TPE would drop the stopper if they could... and at least if Northern still ran it it would be resourced locally rather than from Manchester or York at present (I'm specifically meaning the Eastern half from HUD-LDS) and wouldn't end up with so many cancellations due to the crew being stuck on a delayed express.

I'd agree the stopper makes more sense to be with Northern. However, that releases a couple of 185s but doesn't do anything for resilience - for that you need spare paths.

 

[61653 HTAFC]

I'd agree the stopper makes more sense to be with Northern. However, that releases a couple of 185s but doesn't do anything for resilience - for that you need spare paths.

Except it does, because often there's a 185 in P6 at Huddersfield with folk waiting to board but missing a driver or guard who is supposed to be arriving on an Express from Manchester. Northern have a train crew depot at Huddersfield, so the local service wouldn't be reliant on things working smoothly 40 miles away.

There's enough paths for everything to run, but the issues with the Leeds to Huddersfield stopper are largely down to it being forced on TPE so they could have their headline-grabbing 6 trains per hour.

When things go wrong the stopper is the easiest one to drop because quite often the crew is late anyway as a result of the problems elsewhere.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Except it does, because often there's a 185 in P6 at Huddersfield with folk waiting to board but missing a driver or guard who is supposed to be arriving on an Express from Manchester. Northern have a train crew depot at Huddersfield, so the local service wouldn't be reliant on things working smoothly 40 miles away.

But to solve that doesn't require it to move from TPE to Northern - no doubt Northern would have the guard coming from Ormskirk and the driver from Southport or something similarly ludicrous having worked out there that morning. (I'm talking figuratively).

What it requires is TPE, like Northern and LNR, to simplify their diagrams so crew don't move around as much. If it's one unit that goes back and forth all day, other than swapping out for breaks a couple of times in the day it should be one crew too.

 

[61653 HTAFC]

But to solve that doesn't require it to move from TPE to Northern - no doubt Northern would have the guard coming from Ormskirk and the driver from Southport or something similarly ludicrous having worked out there that morning. (I'm talking figuratively).

What it requires is TPE, like Northern and LNR, to simplify their diagrams so crew don't move around as much. If it's one unit that goes back and forth all day, other than swapping out for breaks a couple of times in the day it should be one crew too.

Northern's Huddersfield depot now has more instances of crews having to travel out to Leeds than pre-2018. If they had the stoppers back, this wouldn't be the case. It isn't only crews, it's also the units themselves. If one of the two units allocated to the (Leeds) stopper sits down at the moment, the nearest spare is in York or Manchester. For Northern it would be Leeds, sometimes even Huddersfield sidings.

The point about a Northern crew probably having to travel in from Wigan is amusing, but lest we forget that one of the big issues at Northern is that the west and east sides are still not harmonised after well over a decade!

 

[Greybeard33]

My personal preference for northern TPE would be to drop out one service per hour across the core and lengthen everything to 6 carriages. Same for anglo-Scottish in terms of another carriage. There is bags of demand at all times of the day and that may well build further. However, the unreliability of the infrastructure is not changing anytime soon and Manchester is a mess. The current number of diagrams per hour can't be sustained and this is before the other Manchester mess, the airport station, needs to turn around longer trains.

Performance through the core has been poor ever since the 5th TPE train (Liverpool - Newcastle) was introduced (in 2014 IIRC?). The May 2018 timetable (6th TPE train instead of the Northern stoppers, skip stopping, Scarborough - Liverpool rerouted via Victoria, Airport trains rerouted via Ordsall Chord) was supposed to improve punctuality, but made things much worse. The subsequent timetable changes (including the forthcoming Dec 2019 timetable) have just been "sticking plaster" tweaks (longer turnarounds, split stopper, stopping pattern changes, increased pathing allowances). I believe the longer term plan is to link the two stoppers into a 6th through train again - back to the future!

TPE and DfT/TftN need to recognise they are in a hole and stop digging! This timetable is never going to work reliably over the current infrastructure, and the new, longer trains with end doors may well make punctuality worse. IMO the core service should be cut back to 4tph, plus the stopper, pending the TRU enhancements.

Of the eastern destinations, Scarborough seems to be the most vulnerable to delays and cancellations, so I would suggest it gets an hourly shuttle to York in place of the through service to Liverpool. At the western end, the Castlefield corridor is the main problem, so one of the Airport services should be culled. This would leave 1tph to the Airport via Victoria and the Chord (from Redcar?), 2tph to Liverpool via Victoria and Chat Moss (from Newcastle and Edinburgh?) and 2tph to Piccadilly via Guide Bridge (from Hull plus the stopper?)

This reduction in frequency would probably mean continued overcrowding through the core, even with all services 5/6-car. So TPE should explore options for lengthening the 802s and Mk5A sets.

 

[Glenn1969]

How about portion working on the Airport train? 6 car at least York- Piccadilly with three cars from Middlesbrough and three cars from Newcastle. Feasible or not?

 

[Greybeard33]

Portion working would not increase capacity through the core and increases performance risk. If either portion arrived late at York, or there was a coupling problem, there would be a knock-on delay through the core. When splitting, one or both portions would be delayed if a crew member was late arriving off another service.

 

[Bletchleyite]

How about portion working on the Airport train? 6 car at least York- Piccadilly with three cars from Middlesbrough and three cars from Newcastle. Feasible or not?

Definitely feasible. Southern do it on their far busier and far more crowded network day-in day-out, though they have reduced it a bit as it was a bit overcomplicated.

However, for it to work TPE would have to simplify their crew and unit diagrams to obviate the reliability issue it might cause by making sure the crews ARE all in the right place. A number of TOCs are not very good at this as they prefer to cut costs by running excessively tight and/or complex crew diagrams, TPE it seems are one such TOC.

 

[tbtc]

If TPE were *just* a shuttle from central Manchester to central Leeds (or even York) then I'd agree that reducing the frequency from six/hour to five or even four/hour would be sensible.

But it isn't. And removing one train an hour won't be a simple case of going down from every ten minutes to every twelve minutes (which doesn't sound like a hardship) - it'd be more like a 10/10/10/20/10 frequency, where the first train after the twenty minute gap would be horribly overcrowded - so the other trains are still running close to each other but the one train per hour will attract double the regular number of passengers (which will probably lead to increased dwell times as passengers who are currently used to turning up and getting a train without needing to consult a timetable will struggle to get on the first train for twenty minutes).

I could agree with cutting back on the Newcastle services (north of York) to free up some resources - the service used to be hourly and it's the shortest service on the ECML so wouldn't be terribly missed.

I'm tempted to cut back the Manchester/Leeds - Scarborough service to bi-hourly but supplemented by shuttles from York to provide a train every forty minutes - this wouldn't save resources (the frequency increase east of Scarborough would require more stock) but having two thirds of the Scarborough services just running to/from York would make the services much more reliable (rather than a small problem at Liverpool turning into missing its slot through Manchester, causing a delay at Leeds that means a big delay by York meaning the train has to be cut short at Malton to ensure it makes its westbound path back to Manchester).

 

[LittleAH]

As much as people care to speculate, the fact is when it comes to public transport, people like fast and frequent. I'd much rather have 5 x 5 car trains an hour than 3 x 8 car and most studies show this.

If the current government had actually invested in sorting out Man Pic's 15&16 and redone Oxford Rd, plus gone ahead with TRU on time, then we'd not be where we are now.

It's not going to change anytime soon either, especially as many of the stipulations are implemented by the franchise agreement.

 

[Bletchleyite]

As much as people care to speculate, the fact is when it comes to public transport, people like fast and frequent. I'd much rather have 5 x 5 car trains an hour than 3 x 8 car and most studies show this.

I would, but only if it is punctual. If 5x5 can't be operated punctually, I'd rather have 3x8.

Yes, 15/16 and the Oxford Road work need doing, but the fact is they have not been done and the timetable needs to be planned to be workable within the infrastructure we have, not some we might theoretically have a few years down the line.

 

[Greybeard33]

If TPE were *just* a shuttle from central Manchester to central Leeds (or even York) then I'd agree that reducing the frequency from six/hour to five or even four/hour would be sensible.

But it isn't. And removing one train an hour won't be a simple case of going down from every ten minutes to every twelve minutes (which doesn't sound like a hardship) - it'd be more like a 10/10/10/20/10 frequency, where the first train after the twenty minute gap would be horribly overcrowded - so the other trains are still running close to each other but the one train per hour will attract double the regular number of passengers (which will probably lead to increased dwell times as passengers who are currently used to turning up and getting a train without needing to consult a timetable will struggle to get on the first train for twenty minutes).

The service is not every 10 minutes now. From December the four fasts between Leeds and Victoria will be on a 15 minute clockface timetable, departing on the quarter hours from each end. The Hull - Piccadilly semi-fast and the stopper will be squeezed into two of the quarter hour gaps. But gaps between the 3tph Leeds departures from Piccadilly will be 37/1/22 minutes!

Even on a clockface timetable, loadings will vary between services, because many passengers want Piccadilly not Victoria and many passengers travel through Leeds or Manchester to the various destinations either side.

 

[61653 HTAFC]

Scarborough to York is already getting a second (Northern this time) train per hour at some point, and despite calls for this to be an extension of the Blackpool service, a standalone shuttle makes more sense: there's already enough complaints about the current long-distance service so introducing a second wouldn't be smart. A shuttle can operate from the Scarborough bay rather than being squeezed into the only two through platforms with access to the Scarborough line.

Portion-working the Airport services wouldn't go down too well, as you'd be reducing frequency from West Yorkshire and beyond to the Airport by half, and causing one of the services each hour to have more issues with luggage as a result.

I can think of a few ways of easing the problems:

• Keep the stoppers split, transfer to Northern who can operate them with 195s which should be nippy enough to keep out of the way.
• Cap fast services at 5tph until the route upgrade is completed. 2tph (TPE) for Stalybridge and Dewsbury as current.
• Extend the Northern Huddersfield to Castleford service to York, as this will provide an alternative route and take some of the pressure off TPE.
• Once the route upgrade is done, the Huddersfield to Leeds local goes electric and runs every 30mins.
• If there's a business case for it, TPE can then have their precious 6tph without the skip-stopping fudge, with the 6th service being a second Hull run rather than terminating at Leeds.

 

[keith1879]

Really? I can't think of a single TPE service I have caught at any time of the day that has had any empty seats at any time of the day for years now.

Are you sure you are not referring to the huge amount of trains down south carting around fresh air except at peak times

I was at Wigan the other day. Midday ish. TPE service northbound and southbound - rammed. 3 car 331 Northern service to Blackpool - rammed. Virgin 11 car to Euston (my train) - very busy.

I can pretty much guarantee that at least half of the seats on any train I catch down south outside the peaks are empty.

I don't use the Manchester to Scotland services so you may be correct there ....however I can pretty much guarantee to find seats on most TPE trains between Manchester and Leeds outside of the peak ....and even in the peak you can normally sit in the Manchester to Huddersfield section.

 

[Greybeard33]

I can think of a few ways of easing the problems:

• Keep the stoppers split, transfer to Northern who can operate them with 195s which should be nippy enough to keep out of the way.
• Cap fast services at 5tph until the route upgrade is completed. 2tph (TPE) for Stalybridge and Dewsbury as current.
• Extend the Northern Huddersfield to Castleford service to York, as this will provide an alternative route and take some of the pressure off TPE.
• Once the route upgrade is done, the Huddersfield to Leeds local goes electric and runs every 30mins.
• If there's a business case for it, TPE can then have their precious 6tph without the skip-stopping fudge, with the 6th service being a second Hull run rather than terminating at Leeds.

This proposal is essentially to maintain the current failed timetable through the core until TRU. 195s would be no more "nippy" on the stoppers than 185s (195 engines only 390kW versus 185s' 560kW). Anyway Northern does not have diesel stock or traincrew to spare to take over the stoppers.

 

[61653 HTAFC]

This proposal is essentially to maintain the current failed timetable through the core until TRU. 195s would be no more "nippy" on the stoppers than 185s (195 engines only 390kW versus 185s' 560kW). Anyway Northern does not have diesel stock or traincrew to spare to take over the stoppers.

The 195s are less thirsty and lighter than 185s, so cheaper to run... and don't have around 20% of the accommodation given over to a first class compartment which nobody is going to use for their 10 minute hop to Mirfield.

If Northern were given the stoppers back, it isn't beyond the realms of possibility that their subsidy profile would be adjusted to allow them to lease a couple of extra units. Nothing is set in stone, remember.

 

[Revaulx]

• Extend the Northern Huddersfield to Castleford service to York, as this will provide an alternative route and take some of the pressure off TPE.

This should be looked into regardless, paths into York permitting. I’d be very interested to see a comparison of passenger numbers pre- and post- running through to Cas rather than reversing up to Westgate. I’m by no means a regular user, but the trains seem quite a bit busier since the change, and a good many people travelling eastbound seem to be staying on at Kirkgate.

• Once the route upgrade is done, the Huddersfield to Leeds local goes electric and runs every 30mins.

• Get the Manchester-Hudds up to half hourly as well please. I’m sure full 4-tracking all the way to Diggle Junction wouldn’t be needed to achieve this, given that Stalybridge is apparently going to have something done to it that actually helps capacity.