Commuting and business travel in the north seems to be extremely subdued. In the last week I've observed station car parks. Their use may offer a better guide to likely regular revenue than anecdotal reports of numbers on specific trains.
At Chesterfield station parking is expensive, and there are other parks nearby, but on weekdays the 283 spaces might be almost full pre-Covid. This week I'd not put it over 25% of normal numbers.
Dronfield has a nominal 50 spaces although almost half is currently cordoned off. Many rail users would park free on surrounding roads to avoid the £2 charge, but the 8 I counted on Thursday was less than half normal numbers.
Dore & Totley's free car park takes 129 and pre-Covid possibly 100 more parked nearby. It may look fairly full but only about 30-40 are parking for trains. Customers at the neighbouring restaurant and beauty salon businesses are capitalising on the empty space!
At Disley rail users' cars used to spill over into the Rams Head pay and display car park next door, the 25 station free spaces not being enough. The new free P&R 25 space car park was empty yesterday with only 9 in the old 25 spaces.
Prestbury is a small station but the car park is said to take 40. I counted one on Monday!
Adlington, Cheshire station approach road seems to hold about 15, but there were only 4 on Monday.
I couldn't judge other station car parks very well as we passed on this week's journeys but none looked anywhere near capacity.
Two TPE trains I've used previously between Dore and Piccadilly used to be very busy, standing and doing contortions to get in, but that was in 2019 when run with 3 coaches. On Wednesday they both had 6. The 8.15 towards Manchester was very lightly loaded and the 17.18 return was much the same.
On Friday EMR's 15.51 Liverpool - Norwich had standing room only after leaving Dore - but it had 2 coaches instead of 4. That one was always busy on a Friday. Cancellations and short forms distort perceptions of traffic.
The point is that big numbers of commuters are not returning, in reality hardly anyone has returned for months. Fewer shop workers are returning to work, or shoppers to visit those that are left.
A very small crumb of local cheer. I'd say slightly more Sheffield bound commuters are returning than those to Manchester - but we had twice as many going 40 miles as we had going the 4 into our own city centre! That won't significantly help rail finances.
Until the all clear sounds for a full return to unmasked work and travel the railways can do very little to get business back. A government that wanted to get us out of cars and onto public transport has been working overtime to achieve the opposite - very successfully. Resources need be rebalanced and that will mean some very unpalatable choices being faced.