Or how about for once holding the DfT & Minister to account for not delivering on promises made, instead of trying to scale down rail transport in the North and drive customers back onto the roads? Especially as those "thirty somethings" are likely to, and indeed are growing year on year? The more people argue to scale back operations, the more you play into the Minister's hands. I'm sure the future Chancellor would be delighted to end any commitment to improving the infrastructure in Manchester to help bolster the post-Brexit coffers, or more likely tax cuts for the highest paid!
That message would go down a treat in Whitehall, not so much elsewhere...
You don't need to make petty political points about tax cuts to win the argument.
But the current infrastructure around Manchester isn't being used efficiently.
I'm not talking about "scaling down" rail capacity around Manchester, just using the lines that we have to provide much better capacity than we currently have.
Why are we running so many short DMUs from the west into central Manchester, when we could be using the recent electrification expenses to insist that everything on the Preston - Manchester corridor is at least 150m long (say doubled up EMUs for a half hourly Blackpool - Manchester service as capacity busters, enabling some of the current Wigan/ Blackburn services to terminate at Bolton, given the frequent EMUs we'd have from Bolton to Manchester).
Sending trains to the airport, especially in the absence of any meaningful capacity in Manchester to terminate trains from the west, actually reduces conflicts around Slade Lane etc., though? I know it causes other problems, but it seems far preferable to trying to send most/all trains through 13/14 somewhere else instead.
That's still no reason to run the Cleethorpes service through to the Airport every hour - when the service is lengthened later this year that'll be at least six coaches tied up (the current arrival at Piccadilly is seventy eight minutes before the same DMU departs Piccadilly back towards Cleethorpes). That's part of the problem that I have with the Airport - it's not "a convenient place to terminate trains" (as some people try to justify the lightly loaded services), it takes over an hour for some services to do the round trip and depart Piccadilly again.
Two questions:
If trains coming through the Castlefield Corridor don't terminate at Manchester Airport, where do they terminate?
If trains coming into Manchester don't use the Castlefield Corridor, where do they go?
- Manchester Oxford Road only has a finite amount of services that can use the bay (4ph max), and that's going to go soon.
- Manchester Piccadilly doesn't have the terminating platform capacity. Trains already get stacked up under the shed, which is a sign of the stress that it is under as a very congested point on the network.
- The throat just south of Piccadilly doesn't have the capacity to send trains shunting across all 6 tracks to continue along the TransPennine routes, or indeed any others via Reddish North or to Hadfield etc.
- Victoria hardly has the platform capacity to deal with more trains.
- Terminating trains at platform 13 is going to make the situation worse
That leaves continuing down to Manchester Airport, or continuing down to Stockport. The latter now happens, and there are only so many Buxton/Macclesfield/Crewe services that one can use before one has no more Northern services which run via Stockport.
The easy answer is that we should be running fewer trains (longer trains, but fewer trains). There's little benefit to putting a two coach DMU on a Manchester - Blackburn service if it gets overloaded by short distance Bolton passengers so that the Blackburn passengers struggle to get on board.
Eight coach trains on the Preston - Manchester corridor should be able to soak up large numbers of passengers, instead of all of the thirty/forty metre long services we currently have arriving into Manchester.
But why not run some services into Newton Heath to terminate (like currently happens at Mayfield sidings)? It's less than ten minutes beyond Victoria, you could do the staff swaps there, there's surely PNB facilities etc.
Same goes on the Stockport corridor btw - instead of running so many short services over the viaduct we should be looking at how to use the scarce paths best.
You can somewhat reduce the layover issues by slowing down trains to the airport by making every train stop every station to the airport.
Then these trains which are currently just moving vast quantities of air around would actually serve a purpose in providing bulk passenger transport
Gets my vote.
If the whole argument in favour of the plethora of Airport services is that "passengers prefer direct trains" then adding on a couple of minutes to provide the local stations on the branch with a reasonable level of service is a small price to pay. There's certainly spare seats on the Airport services (spare carriages at some times of the day!), the current local stations would get a better level of service if the line wasn't crowded with non-stop Airport services - I'd be happier if the services stopped at all of the local stations.
Depends on how inconvenient they are to the greater good. With Class 185s at a premium, sending any of those to the airport is a waste of units.
The one that gets me flummoxed is that 15/16 is proposed as a means of upping services through the corridor even more. What happened to resilience?
Agreed on both points. I'd rather that we terminated the Cleethorpes services at Piccadilly - it'd be annoying for people on their once-a-year-holiday but of genuine benefit to large numbers of daily commuters if the spared resources were used to increase the length of peak Sheffield - Manchester services.
Services around Manchester seem locked in a spiral of "asking for additional infrastructure to cope with an existing messy service pattern" and "using the capacity generated to throw even more short trains into the mix, thus making the timetable even less resilient".
If we built 15/16 then, once Bradford got its Airport service (the tenth on that corridor) there'd then be demands for Southport to get its one back, then Windermere and Barrow to each get a more regular one... nobody seems to want to tackle the actual root cause, just create even messier networks.
Seriously though I've been over this. Manchester Airport is heavily owned by GM councils, generates jobs, drives the economy, they (as in all stakeholders) are investing over £1billion to expand capacity by 40%, do I really need to spell it out?
Good for them - they can pay for the necessary infrastructure improvements if they want their Airport to keep getting its three hundred-ish passengers per hour spread out over nine services per hour.
(I mean, surely all train services are going to help generate jobs and drive the economy)
the Airport is tiny compared with the rest of the city. And yet the tail continues to wag the dog to the detriment of the whole city's appalling local rail service. It is absolutely outrageous
IMHO Liverpool has a much better local rail network, because Liverpool has a much simpler set of timetables - nobody is trying to force through direct Ormskirk/Kirkby services to John Lennon Airport - the infrastructure is therefore used much more efficiently.
It's no good complaining about the over-dominance of London, if you then want to insist on Manchester doing the same to anywhere outside of the M25.
Agreed.
One of the themes in these threads is that people seem to want to complain about London dominating the rest of the UK but then come up with "solutions" that mean Manchester dominates the entire north instead.
I could understand the "everywhere must have a direct Manchester Airport link" if we closed all of the other airports in northern England (and central belt Scotland), but otherwise it just seems to be "we don't want London dominating us, but it's okay for Manchester to have all of the northern investment".