Recent content by markydh

One of the reasons all the Northern services will terminate at Newcastle from all directions is to assist with reliability. Any sort of delay can screw hours worth of services up. Services round the coast pick up delays on a regular basis and it’s becoming more frequent for Boro to Hexham trains...

It is, and most people who are aware of it are completely against it as it reduces links across the north. We in Newcastle absolutely do not need a 3 tph service to London and definitely not at the expense of one of our Leeds-bound services. The cuts that will occur at Northumberland stations...

Bringing the other island back into use is very much an aim, though it relies on a substantial increase to the budget of the LA7 Mayoralty. Some sort of rebuild is going to occur at the north end of the station after the south end rebuild to is complete.

I’m guessing the trial run didn’t go well as the booked TPE services into platform 11 have all been going round the ‘back way’ and using platform 1 since the timetable change…

https://www.nexus.org.uk/news/item/metro-get-security-teams-majority-evening-train-services With the closed thread about ASB fresh in the memory, this will no doubt be welcomed...

Bare in mind that through running is to be abandoned when the ECML rewrite is eventually introduced. All three local northern routes will terminate at Newcastle.

Typing as a leisure user of the WCML between Carlisle and Lancaster, I can say that I very rarely arrive on time at Lancaster in the southbound direction even if the train left Carlisle on time *at any time of the year.* It’s usually worse in the northbound direction. It’s a very rare event...

The latter, given that’s what actually matters.

Not really. It’s just every other service being cancelled, given the normal frequency is every 12 minutes. They ran to the same frequency and timetable throughout the first lockdown.

The Newcastle - Berlin route hasn’t operated since April 2019, so that’s moot in any case!

Let’s be honest, even from Monday, many routes in the north of England are barely operating at 50%. Avanti are still only operating hourly north of Preston. TPE are only operating every 2 hours (plus the odd Liverpool) on the Airport - Scotland route. LNER are still operating roughly 3 trains...

It's actually this coming December that will see a shakeup, with longer distance services being chopped into constituent parts to deal with reliability issues.

The basic Morecambe to Lancaster timetable has barely changed since those enforced by VHF. Even before that, it’s been a similar muddled mess of a timetable since I was a kid, when BR was very much still a thing.

Newcastle to Liverpool is being stepped up to hourly from Monday 18th.

I don’t see why not. After all, heavy and light rail share the line to Sunderland.