Maybe the idea is to keep the (relatively) better "east side" in private hands and dump the (relatively) troublesome "west side" into the underfunded public sector, to allow the local stakeholders (eugh) to stump up the funds for the infrastructure that needs investment or just accept running the service down? That might keep Burnham/ Rothrham quiet? Not central Government's problem any more, so send all of your ire to the Labour Mayors who dared to ask for improvements and more powers - be careful what you wish for etc etc?
(^^ just my suggestion of how the Government might be thinking - not say I wholly agree, mind ^^)
It says in the article the government are unwilling to commit to funding infrastructure improvements. So what is the point? With no infrastructure improvements it is only going to get worse. Absolute joke.
I'm guessing that (if this happens) it'd be a combination of:
- Allowing the Government to get away without doing the infrastructure commitments that they'd promised to do as part of the franchise (i.e. they aren't going to get sued by Arriva for not delivering the planned infrastructure
- Neutralising a key Labour obsession - it's one of the Labour policies that was a lot more popular than the Labour party overall, so might look good for the Tories to take the wind out of their sales (especially if they can show that taking some services back into public ownership isn't the magic bullet that some on the left clamour for)
- Even if it doesn't happen, it's a nice cheap soundbite that gives the impression that the Government care and are on the side of "hard working commuters", so they get a lot of nice free publicity from it at a time of year when (a) papers have very little serious news and (b) takes some of the heat out of the annual fare rise (which otherwise generates lots of negativity)
Where would the boundary be drawn ? There are plenty of services which cross the pennines eg: Leeds - Blackpool north.
There was some overlap. RRNE had TPE and also had that service, RRNW had Manchester, Liverpool and West Lancashire locals and NorthWest Express (Blackpool, Barrow, Windermere). The split was more based on which depots operated which service.
There were a few quirks. RRNW ran the whole Huddersfield to Wakefield service (an extension of the Manchester - Marsden - Huddersfield stopper) but RRNE ran pretty much the whole service from Sheffield to Dore (since they did the Hope Valley stopper). Generally, if it crossed the Pennines it was RRNE (Newcastle to Carlisle, S&C, Bentham, all Calder Valley including to Blackpool, all of the "fast" Huddersfield to Manchester/ Manchester Airport/ Liverpool services, all of the "fast" Sheffield - Manchester services that weren't part of Central Trains), but there were obviously some that RRNW did (mainly just the stoppers through Marsden and the Hope Valley).
But that was when services were a lot neater and we didn't have these complicated combinations of services (Leeds - Wigan/ Chester) - it'd be much harder to split things up now.
TP North was in RRNE but TP South wasn't, nor was Airport-Blackpool/Cumbria/Scotland. Not that it matters
I could've sworn that the Arriva Trains Northern timetables I have had the South TPE (Manchester-Sheffield-Cleethorpes) line in them.
Yeah, RRNE/ Northern Spirit/ Arriva Trains Northern included the Cleethorpes service - it wasn't part of the same timetable booklet as the "north" one (which included destinations like Sunderland at the time) but it was still part of the same franchise
The TPE services were formally part of the FNW and ATN franchises. They were split off into a separate TPE franchise when FNW & ATN became one franchise.
<pedantic mode> Only RRNE/ NS/ ATN services were branded as Trans Pennine. The bits of RRNE/ FNW that were split off into the new TPE franchise (Manchester Airport - Blackpool/ Barrow/ Windermere) were never branded as trans-pennine - which makes sense given that they didn't cross the pennines. So "TP" was wholly a RRNE/ NS/ATN branding/ livery/ operation - it's just that some of the longer distance "west side" services got merged into that franchise.
