The reality is that they are chopping services on a daily basis. Many reports state that on some lines they have been chopping the same services on the same days of the week for months
IF there's no way of running a reliable hourly service on a line (due to lack of stock, lack of staff, delays impacted from other routes etc) then I'd rather we were allowed to trim the timetable down to a reliable bi-hourly service, rather than keep up the pretence that we are running an hourly service that is generally delayed, with trains missing (so that passengers may end up waiting at a cold station for sixty minutes, never to return to the railway after that horrible experience).
But Northern can't make this decision unilaterally, so their hands are tied.
We've been over this argument so many times, but the fact remains that these airport services are popular. Just yesterday both airport services either side of the Liverpool I was on were rammed, but the Liverpool was lightly loaded. All three were 185s. You need to reassess your views on the TPE airport service loadings, because they are becoming an integral part of that franchise, and as such will not be let go.
And besides is tipping out even more punters at Victoria a good idea? Because with longer units, Piccadilly is becoming less of an option for terminating TPEs.
Perhaps as suggested elsewhere it is other cross Manchester services that need to be reappraised. There are some paths of operational convenience within the Northern network that need closer inspection
Something needs to be done with the cross-Manchester routes.
At the moment there are too many timetabled services running through Castlefield at irregular intervals - you could run a cross-city metro service every five minutes if you had suitable uniform stock (e.g. Merseyrail, Thameslink, Crossrail, Snow Hill to Moor Street, Central and Queen Street Undergrounds) but you can't run an assortment of random length trains with different door positions with gaps of three to nine minutes, where the huge number of different destinations means that in the even of any delay you'll get several trains worth of passengers crowding around the platforms (e.g. on a "Metro" timetable, if everything is ten minutes late then nothing is ten minutes late, but if everything at 13/14 is ten minutes late then you'll have the Newcastle passengers and the Llandudno passengers and the Blackpool passengers all getting in each others way on a platform not built to take such volumes of people).
So my suggestions generally revolve around a combination of thinning out the number of cross-city services, simplifying the route pattern, trying to keep like with like etc.
The biggest problem seems to be the Stalybridge - Airport services, since these are the ones that have to either reverse at Piccadilly or do the full circuitous loop of the city centre to get round Ordsall. There's obvious *some* demand for such services, but at what opportunity cost? The average passenger loading of services at Manchester Airport is only in the thirties (i.e. quite empty given that a 185 is 3x23m and an 802 is 5x26m long) - presumably quite a few of the Airport passengers are only travelling to/from Manchester City Centre (in which case it matters little if the ultimate destination is Rochdale or Redcar).
There are peaks and troughs in Airport demand. It's not surprising that a service was busy in the days running up to Christmas, when lots of people fly off. It's not surprising if services are busy early in the morning, given that a lot of flights are scheduled for those kind of times. But we are tying up lots of other services because of this half hourly service from Stalybridge to the Airport, so it doesn't seem unreasonable IMHO to question the need for so many of them.
Building 15/16 (as many keep suggesting) will just mean even more services through Castlefield (e.g. Bradford to the Airport), rather than dealing with the root causes (e.g. too many hourly services to a disparate combination of destinations with an irregular gap between them).
Plus, if building the Chord means we then have to spend huge sums on 15/16 then 15/16 will only mean that we then have to spend huge sums on more platform capacity at Manchester Airport (if you want to run 5x26m 802s every half hour, and you want to give them forty minute layovers, then there's not going to be a lot of room for other services to terminate there, given that services from Glasgow/ Cleethorpes etc will all need a reasonable length of layover too - and that's before you've crammed in even more Airport services like the proposed Bradford one).
Could the OLR not use it as an opportunity to amalgamate the east side of Northern into the East Coast franchise, in the same way GWR and EMR run both Intercity and local services. Then Northern (Eastern side) would not be seen so much as a basket case franchise and may go someway to being break even with the long distance operations subsidising the local ones in the way they do at GWR and EMR.
A dedicated West side based management team could then tackle the problems (which are mainly on the West side) and a smaller franchise may be more manageable. If the East side model is successful then the West side could possibly be amalgamated with the West Coast (Avanti) franchise in the future.
None of this would solve the infrastructure problems but could work to solve the operational difficulties.
Personally, I like the idea of combining local and longer distance services in one franchise - these things seem to go in cycles (with the initial privatisation including very local TOCs like Valley Lines/ Thames Trains, then things getting merged together like GWR/ TSGN, then talk of local franchises for the West Country etc) - but I'm wary of the idea of trying to hide Northern's losses inside LNER (without addressing the reason for those losses)
I don't know if there's an optimal size for a franchise (defined by number of staff, number of carriages, number of services run per day, revenue?), after which it becomes too unwieldy and the economies of scale are no longer enough to justify the unfocussed TOC that is not responsive enough to local needs. Maybe one for another thread, I guess.
That isn't as a result of it's size, that is because of how badly the two earlier franchises were merged. Splitting the franchise along the Pennines won't work, at least for those in the east because Northern is not equally split. Ops in the west are far bigger than in the east. And services across the Pennines are heavily interlinked, and there is not one simple flow of passengers. So the North needs a franchise that can serve it's inter city and local much more seamlessly.
There's even more interlinkage nowadays - Calder Valley services running through to Chester and Wigan (was Southport), with plans for the Nottingham - Bradford - Manchester Airport diagrams that were surely designed by a committee - but how do we split these kind of routes up if there's no capacity at (e.g) Manchester Victoria to accommodate all terminating services?