We could have a much more intense service through Castlefield - look at how Thameslink manages dozens of services an hour on a two track line - look at the proposed frequencies for Crossrail - but these lines through London are kept simple through the "core" section. And, importantly, no freight through Thameslink/ Crossrail!
Whereas Manchester (or rather, the towns near Manchester) seem more focussed on lots of direct links (everywhere to Castlefield, everywhere to the Airport, various cross-Manchester services like the Stockport line to the Bolton line, plus the long distance Liverpool - Norwich service)
13/14 are messier than stations in the Crossrail core will be because they have a range of people wanting a range of trains (e.g. you may have a service to Glasgow/ Southport/ Middlesbrough/ Llandudno within a short space of time, so lots of different types of people all cramming onto the platform whilst they wait rather than being able to board the first train that arrives)
We don't need electrification to improve the number of services that can run reliably through Castlefield, we just need someone to take a tough decision and upset various places by removing their Castlefield link
For example, if you wanted a simple twelve trains per hour you'd need to accept everything stopping at all of the stations between Piccadilly/ Oxford Road/ Deansgate/ Salford Crescent/ Victoria that they serve, since the kind of "metro" frequencies require "metro" stopping patterns - we're not going to be able to arrange a uniform frequency when trains have different stopping patterns, so every Castlefield service stops at all stations it passes in central Manchester (and Salford). Ideally I'd suggest that everything that goes to the Airport serves all stops on the Airport line too, to keep things uniform.
I guess as a simple starting point (to use as a baseline to argue against) you could have six on the Bolton corridor and six on the Ordsall Chord to Victoria - but then that leaves Liverpool without a service to Piccadilly (and four trains per hour using the flat crossing into the terminal platform at Oxford Road will eat into capacity for services to Piccadilly)
You want to add in some Liverpool trains to maintain the Piccadilly link? Okay, but there's not going to be six CLC services per hour (the line struggles to cope with four), so does that mean four on the CLC, four to Bolton and four round the Chord to Victoria?
But now with three different destinations, things are getting a bit messier, a uniform five minute service pattern is going to be a lot harder to arrange (look at the badly spaced services on the Airport branch to see what happens when you try to cram lots of long distance trains from a diverse number of starting points down a two track corridor)
You can't abandon the Ordsall Chord (however much people regret it, it'd be political suicide to spend best part of a hundred million pounds and then leave it unused), so does the Bolton line miss out? That'd be cutting the Windsor Link and meaning no service from north of Manchester to south of Manchester (other than the TPE services from Leeds to the Airport)
And what about the eastern side of Castlefield? Twelve per hour to the Airport would be overkill (services only had an average of thirtysomething passengers per service pre-Covid, so increasing the number of trains will be spreading those passengers even thinner, assuming that flights go back to the demand they had). But crossing several services per hour onto the Stockport lines is going to create a lot of conflicts given the flat junctions.
It'd be politically unacceptable to remove another long distance service from Liverpool (given local 'concerns'), but then it'd be politically unacceptable to add an extra ten/ fifteen minutes onto the Sheffield - central Manchester journey times by diverting services north east from Stockport towards Ashton, so I think that you have to accept a Sheffield - Castlefield - Liverpool service (I'd be fine with all Sheffield services terminating in the main shed - I think that the through service is of more benefit to Liverpool than to Sheffield - but the two half hourly services tie together pretty well in terms of stock/frequency/ unelectrified lines, so I can see logic in a half hourly service)
So, with that in mind, the only thing that keeps things fairly "simple" through Castlefield and maintains a space for freight as well as not removing a long distance service from Liverpool would be ten passenger trains per hour, eight of which run all stops from the Airport to Deansgate and two of which are from Sheffield to Liverpool:
- 4x Airport - Deansgate - Bolton corridor (Blackpool etc)
- 4x Airport - Deansgate - Ordsall Chord (TPE to Leeds etc)
- 2x Sheffield - Deansgate - Liverpool (starting at Nottingham, Cleethorpes etc)
- 2x Oxford Road - Liverpool stoppers
- Matching electrified routes to electrified routes to minimise the number of DMUs under the wires
- Try to simplify other service patterns through Manchester and avoid conflicts, e.g. the Atherton services come through Salford Central and into the northern (high numbered) platforms at Victoria so should continue on the northern side towards Rochdale whereas services from Chat Moss would be using the southern (low numbered) platforms at Victoria and therefore continue on the southern side towards Stalybridge (or terminating at Newton Heath) - avoid conflict where possible - you can get a lot more services along a particular stretch of track when you minimise the number of conflicting movements
The main benefits being:
- An easy to understand map of services through central Manchester
- A "turn up and go" frequency where possible (eight trains per hour from the Airport to Deansgate is pretty much Metrolink frequency)
- Lots of connections per hour at Victoria/ Salford for other lines wanting a Castlefield/ Airport service
- Liverpool gets to keep long distance services
It'd annoy a few people in far flung places, it's far from perfect, but it seems the only way to achieve a Castlefield service that is as simple and frequent and reliable as it can be given the diverse range of potential destinations. Put it this way, there's a reason why Crossrail is going to be a fairly simple/ boring "metro" line, rather than having platforms in central London trying to cope with a combination of hourly services, e.g. Cardiff to Norwich followed by a Heathrow to Cambridge followed by an Oxford to Kent service... that'd be a nightmare of different routes/ passengers - bound to become unreliable and see crowds of different people all trying to use the same platform for a huge number of far flung destinations. Keep It Simple, Stupid.
(obviously all of this would change if we found hundreds of millions of pounds to electrify various lines/ build grade separated junctions/ add in two more island platforms at Piccadilly etc, but I'm trying to focus in terms of what's possible with what we have rather than getting the crayons out!)
