I thought one of the raison d'etres for XC was to enable middle aged and elderly folk living in southern counties to make VFR journeys to northern areas and vice versa. Your suggestions of enforcing a change in Birmingham (or London) instead of a through journey or the relatively convenient Wolverhampton change would most likely see the end of this all year round market.
This is the problem.
Should XC be focussed around the need to provide Doris with a direct train from her house near Bristol Temple Meads to visit her grandkids once a year in their house near Manchester Piccadilly? (I’m assuming the locations, since, if having to change at New Street will put her off making the journey then presumably she won’t want to change at Temple Meads or Piccadilly?)
Or should XC (as the TOC providing 99% of services between two of the three biggest conurbations in the country) be focussing on moving large numbers of people from the West Midlands to Greater Manchester on a regular basis (and if that includes people making annual trips to see their family hundreds of miles away then that’s an added bonus)?
Personally, I think that heavy rail does best when it focusses on bulk journeys, like the large numbers moving from city to city. If we want to cater to obscure journeys between places hundreds of miles apart then that’s a market that National Express might be better suited to
BR had some quirky/ irregular services that were suited to the kind of “visiting friends and relations” market that you refer to – like the 158 from Glasgow to Portsmouth that reversed in Liverpool to tick as many boxes as possible. But BR had a nice empty railway (e.g. only hourly from London to Manchester), so much more space to accommodate trains catering to the “granny” market.
It’d be nice to have a couple of services a day from Brighton/ Gatwick to Birmingham/ “the north” nowadays but the lines through Sussex are full with twelve coach trains at clockface intervals that are busy all year round – there’s no space for a Voyager to run a handful of times a day.
Same applies to other lines – it’d be nice to give everywhere a direct service to everywhere but the railway works much better when focussing on regular/ simple/ bulk flows.
Trouble is, enthusiasts and politicians both over-egg the long distance services – hence Wales & Borders being hamstrung by the need to provide Holyhead with a bi-hourly service to Cardiff, hence providing everywhere in northern England with an hourly service to Manchester Airport (which causes all sorts of problems on the Castelefield corridor).
A lot of through services only really exist because it’s easier than terminating everything in an intermediate city. There's not much actual demand to get from Manchester to Bournemouth, in the way that there's not much actual demand to get from Stanmore to Stratford or from Altrincham to Bury or from Milngavie to Larkhall - it's just convenient linking of separate services together that is probably more about operational convenience than significant passenger flows.
Trouble is, one "Doris" seems to be more important than passengers who make lots of regular journeys (e.g. Stoke to Birmingham), the dog is wagging the tail.
Part of the problem with Cross Country's Birmingham to Stansted Airport route is the fact is not only that 2 cars are used when they need to be a minimum of 3 cars but also because of the Leicester stoppers.
Because they only go as far as Leicester, you get people for Leicester also filling up the Stansted services as it's a half hourly service between Leicester and Birmingham meaning these who travel further often struggle for seats.
The easiest solution in lieu of more 170s is simply to extend the Leicester stoppers to Stansted thus spreading the load equally and therefore least giving people the chance of a seat especially these who travel pass Leicester.
Even if these stoppers only got extended to Peterborough as you now have platforms 6 and 7, it should be possible to extend the service there especially as Birmingham only has a 10 to 15 minute turnaround so no reason why Peterborough can't do it especially as they already have a catering base at Peterborough.
It's over two hours from Leicester to Stansted, so you'd need five additional DMUs to provide that kind of improved service.
Given the need to improve services from Birmingham to Leicester (two large places with only short DMUs running between them), I wonder whether we should consider removing the Stansted bit of the service, since the platform restrictions at the terminal station are throttling the opportunity to increase capacity on the (busier) western section.
Didn’t Liverpool to Birmingham used to be part of the Stansted service. As there are 2tph between Liverpool and Birmingham and 2tph between Birmingham and Leicester and one to Stansted, was there 2tph between Liverpool and Stansted via Birmingham.
It was an hourly DMU from Liverpool to Stansted, with the remaining service from Liverpool to Birmingham being a combination of irregular XC services and some local "stoppers". The XC service was never better than bi-hourly (for a while XC provided 3tp2h to Manchester and 1tp2h to Liverpool).
Drafted out a possible future timetable for the proposed future franchise.
- 1tph from Liverpool-Stansted
- 1tph from Manchester-Bournemouth
- 1tph from Plymouth-Edinburgh (every two hours to Glasgow)
- 1tph from Cardiff-Nottingham
- 1tph from Bristol-Manchester (possibly starting at Cardiff)
- 1tph from Reading-Newcastle
- 1tph from Birmingham-Peterborough
The idea is to eliminate as many terminating services at Birmingham on the CrossCountry franchise (except Birmingham-Peterborough).
Penzance and Aberdeen would no longer run. Bath-Bristol would stop completely. Guildford would cease and Birmingham Nottingham service to WMR.
Stock:
Could Class 222's or a purchase of Class 802's be the answer to Long Distance services (including Liverpool-Stansted services). Maybe a transfer of ex-WMR Class 170's would allow a Birmingham-Peterborough service.
The more I think about New Street, the more I am convinced that the "solution" would be to turn it into two separate/parallel stations, like Clapham Junction (with the Southern/ SWT sides).
I'd then try to simplify the through services - e.g. everything from the Telford corridor running through to the Nuneaton corridor (e.g. Aberystwyth - Leicester and Shrewsbury - Stanstead). Minimise terminating services. But then you get into arguments about Welsh control etc. It'd never work.
