2tph Birmingham to Liverpool and Manchester may well not be too frequent in isolation but squeezing many trains into New Street, along the Stour, through Stoke, Crewe, Stockport and into Piccadilly and Lime Street could all be seen to be sources of unreliability.
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December 2022 Timetable Changes
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What is "wobbles" please?
Kite159
Veteran Member
Stafford - Stone - Stoke - Crewe.
Rather than the direct route between Stafford & Crewe.
These routes never had huge issues with capacity though. Busy, yes, but nothing like Castlefield. There are certainly other corridors that struggled a lot more, and for example the failed attempt to interlink Liverpool-Birmingham with Birmingham-London (amongst other patterns) which caused chaos.
Indeed. The big four track section between Stafford and Crewe sees to that
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
The performance impact of that timetable was worse than Castlefield. It was catastrophic. Good riddance and glad it won't be back - if people want to spend 5 hours going from Euston to Liverpool for a tenner, they will probably enjoy a walk round in Birmingham or Crewe for a change anyway. The idea of prioritising budget long distance travellers over bread and butter local passengers (which to some extent Chiltern also fail on, though not as badly) was one of the most stupid ideas the railway ever had.
The reasoning for the join-up wasn't catering to that tiny market, it was reducing platform occupancy at New Street and reducing the number of units and traincrew needed. Of course it predictably collapsed.
It isn't an inherently impossible proposal but it would need trains and crew diagrams to have much longer turnrounds and 'slack' (e.g. at New Street). The lack of that is what killed it.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
Also the interworking between branches, so an incident on one branch would knacker the lot with no prospect of recovery by way of cancelling a round trip. The proposed replacement (killed by COVID) involving a long layover at New St and the branches being self-contained (i.e. a unit/crew that did Euston-Rugeley would do that all day and not Euston-Liverpool) might have worked, but overall we're just better without. The proposal here, in the context of COVID, of a simple clockface service augmented with peak extras and 12-car running south of Northampton is a much better approach and is somewhat "back to the future" in being very similar to the first post-VHF timetable.
Running the trains isn't a source of unreliability. The sources of unreliability are things like infrastructure faults, incursions of people or animals, severe weather affecting structures or earthworks. The solution to unreliability is to deal with it at these causes, not just wantonly remove services from the timetable.
This isn't true though, this is just your pet thing. Deleting trains from routes where the critical mass is still a long way off doesn't make the service any more reliable. It will still be unreliable because the causes of the issues aren't really congestion, they're faults, or the weather, or various other things.
Obviously the Ordsall Chord created a critical mass in a specific area which meant that congestion alone was a source of unreliability, but this is very rare. It does not apply at places like Stoke-on-Trent or Crewe! Stockport is slightly different because it's still stuck in the dark ages with the boxes there. But the solution to that is resignalling not changing the timetable.
Yes, but again, the issue there was never actual congestion. It was inadequate turnaround time. Indeed a large part of the Northern issues were TransPennine Express' inadequate turnaround times, not congestion (though of course it was also congestion).
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LNW-GW Joint
Veteran Member
Plus the Norton Bridge flyover, and the 100mph slow lines (were 75).
This has created extra capacity which we are still apparently not able to fill.
Sometimes I think no-one bothers to check the benefits that were claimed when the funding authorised (like the Ordsall Chord).
Birmingham-Wolverhampton also benefitted by the removal of the VT Wolverhampton terminator (with the Birmingham-Scotland running through from Euston).
Plus platform 4c at New St (which won't work if the Liverpools are 8-car).
So it's not as congested as it used to be.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
How about let's not, and keep it for resilience?
You don't build tens of billions of pounds worth of infrastructure purely for redundancy. I don't get why you think this, because you wouldn't do it in the IT industry either, hence the success of services like Amazon Web Services, you would focus on the smarter use of your existing assets.
In any case, the main benefits of slow lines between Crewe and Stafford is actually for freight services.
The Planner
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It was substantially revenue driven.
The slow lines were never about capacity as the signalling is the same, Dec 22 (its structure anyway) will realise some of the Norton Bridge original aspirations.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
Go ask SBB that question.
Actually, yes, you do. You build infrastructure very specifically for redundancy, such as multiple data centre deployments, RAID arrays, failovers...
That's just outsourcing it so somebody else does it.
Which involves doing what? Oh yes, utilising it much more highly! Which is the way everything is going.
It wasn't a question. But SBB have been granted public resources that we in this country cannot dream of. So I'm not sure how it's useful.
SBB runs a much tighter ship than the British network. Journey times like Stafford to Birmingham wouldn't be 31 minutes, they would undertake drastic linespeed improvements (e.g. between Wolves and Brum) and if necessary close stations to ensure it was more like 25 minutes. There's just no comparison.
I'm sure they know the capacity benefits, this is about treasury cuts.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
In some ways it's a tighter ship, in some ways it's a looser one - they also have spare capacity and decent layovers at intermediate stations, and large stations so platform usage is low.
It's all resilience.
You sign an SLA, and enough redundancy is put in to meet that SLA on Amazon's side. Perhaps the railway should try that one day.
Production IT systems are not deployed without any redundancy other than by incompetents.
The easiest way is if LNWR went up to Preston. They could spilt the train. Half goes to Liverpool and the other half to Preston. The Glasgow express should stay the way it is Crewe doesn’t need every single service to stop there
CAF397
Member
Which was the plan all those years ago when Central Trains ran to Preston with a class 350 (was it as little as a solitary FO service one way and ECS back?). Preston would be an ideal extenstion for LNW, or to that extent Northern running via Warrington to Crewe.
Pinus contorta
Member
Yea the politics got in the way of the passenger benefit of those Preston extensions.
It would’ve been extremely useful if they did. It would’ve been extremely popular and would provide direct services from Windford and Hartford and most stations on the Trent Valley line
Greybeard33
Established Member
Could paths be found for this additional service, particularly on the 2-track section of the WCML between Winsford and Weaver Junction?
TheBigD
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It was a single service, 1650 Birmingham-Preston (I think), ecs back to Crewe. Was definitely Monday to Friday, not sure about Saturday, and definitely not Sundays. Central struggled to run services on a Sunday!
Was it express from Crewe to Preston or did it serve Wigan and Warrington?
TheBigD
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The latter. I think it also served Hartford but not 100% sure. It stopped running about 15 years ago so the memory may be a bit hazy!
splashoutradio
Member
Looking at a copy of the Winter 2005/6 NRT, it ran Mondays to Fridays only. Departing Birmingham New St. (16:51), Sandwell & Dudley (16:59), Wolverhampton (17:10), Penkridge (17:20), Stafford (17:27), Crewe (17:50), Warrington BQ (18:08), Wigan NW (18:18) and Preston (18:39)
The Planner
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Operationally ok to do in the down direction, not so much in the up as you would be sat in P5 for a good 8 or so minutes. What do you do with a late running portion, as you don't have a anywhere to hide it?
frodshamfella
Established Member
Its not too frequent, its about right. 1tph Liverpool-Birmingham will be overcrowded easily.
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