The fact that a service is long-established does not make it immune to change. It's painful, but trade-offs are inevitable when rewriting a timetable; if you constrain yourself to matching all of the existing connectivity, you will just deliver a rehashed version of what stands.
I don’t think immunity is what’s required, but the inevitable trade-off seems to be between a rehashed version of what stands based on long-established constraints on service patterns, or an otherwise hashed up version not based on them which is then unfamiliar and breaks people’s existing journeys while providing little of the required improvement!
Yet funnily enough the likes of Flixton and Padgate, despite being much closer to Piccadilly, lack a direct service and have no prospect of gaining one. Distance to Piccadilly is hardly a factor in whether somewhere warrants a direct service.
If you ask me there needs to be some sort of rationalisation of stations on the CLC line east of Birchwood because too many have been opened too close together over successive decades making the all stops journey time on a 150/156 too long. The only one I can see certainly must remain is Irlam. The least important Man Utd platform has fortunately gone, with its limited role more than fulfilled by several stops on the Metrolink on multiple lines.
I also believe the southern route i.e. the CLC is the optimal alignment for Liverpool - Manchester. The ground over Chat Moss is too soft and this imposes a limit on the line speed and the L&Y Kirkby/Atherton was too hilly.
I agree that if a service is to run down the Castlefield corridor, terminating at Oxford Road makes no sense and if anything, is likely to cause more delays and disruption than continuing through the corridor.
But I don't think a Southport service justifies a valuable Castlefield path in the first place, and accordingly services should run to Victoria and beyond instead.
But this applies to all services terminating at Oxford Road, not just Southport. The only thing worse than terminating at Oxford Road would be terminating in P13/14 at Piccadilly and reversing. Oxford Road station genuinely has to be one of the worst pieces of design on the entire railway. The 2nd bay P6 is already abandoned and P1 isn’t far behind.
Whoever decided for them not to be provided as
centre turnbacks must have been utterly delusional. The layout of Wigan Wallgate would have been more appropriate, although capacity would still be insufficient without 4 tracks throughout.
I see no reason to believe a Southport service which also (although not exclusively) serves large Greater Manchester population centres of Wigan and Bolton shouldn’t justify a through Castlefield service though.
The opportunity cost means the alternative services which could otherwise run - the MRTF consultation outcome was clear that the eastern side of the CLC is losing its second stopper, and having stops added to "fast" trains, because of the Southport service going to Oxford Rd.
It also refers to the unreliability and reduction in 'slack' which the presence of an additional train will cause; MRTF should have involved an increase in the headway and/or platform reoccupation values, as they are presently deficient and are a major contributing factor to the general unreliability of the corridor. But with the number of trains still running and their relative stops and timings, this is impossible. So the next best thing is taking out services; here it's the CLC which (quite avoidably) loses out.
I don’t agree with anything terminating at Warrington Central or the CLC being anything other than a through line. Has nothing been learnt from the mistakes at Kirkby? I also don’t attribute the lack of a CLC stopper to the continued presence of a Southport, but more to the excessive journey time caused by the number of non-original stations so close together on the CLC, which negatively impact performance. Castlefield Junction is also a sub-optimal arrangement (but aren’t all junctions in Manchester and Salford)
I think a more regular semi-fast approach is better than the one train that misses out too many stations to be useful and too many trains that run all stops, making the end to end journey time unbearable, even compared to the Chat Moss all stops. If the TPE and the EMR provide a half hourly Warrington Central - Sheffield via Castlefield and both serve stations including e.g. Hunts Cross, Birchwood and Irlam and a couple of others each but not all the same ones as each other then I can see the pattern working.
Ideally you would increase the headway through Castlefield but Manchester is simply far enough inland that there are too many important places to the west not to serve and following the closure of Manchester Central no terminal capacity from the west, even with ad hoc termini like at Rochdale, Stalybridge, Hazel Grove and Alderley Edge.
You can forget about the Burscough Curves. As for direct trains to Skipton, those wouldn't happen even if the Curves existed today. This is probably the greatest influence OPSTA will ever wield. Funny how they are happy for Preston to be let down as long as Southport is OK!
I can’t forget about the Burscough Curves. I am reminded of their jarring absence every time I need to travel to Ormskirk or Preston and every time I go between Burscough Bridge and Parbold. I don’t understand why it isn’t done when they would constitute a
MUCH easier and cheaper win than any prospective Castlefield improvements which would likely involve a Picc-Vic tunnel and blanket electrification to truly sort things out. By my calculations, the whole scheme could be fully funded with only a one off £100 contribution from each successive regular passenger, which is small enough to be taken out of fare revenue over 20 journeys with tickets priced at £5 or 1 month’s commuting.
If anything, the improvements associated with the Burscough Curves also benefit Preston more than Southport, with direct services to Aughton, Maghull and Aintree as well as access to Southport. I also believe the City of Preston represents the strongest political force in favour of the curves and that it very much desires their reopening in full to be delivered in time for the next Preston Guild.
The direct services from the Burscough Curves onto the Colne - Skipton line are a bit of a fantasy but there wouldn’t be much in the way of them running if both were reopened.
It was always going to be unsatisfactory and disappoint people - that's the reality of the current infrastructure. As I say, minor changes might be made e.g. when electrification is completed, but it is going to stay unchanged unless and until investment is forthcoming for Castlefield.
That really sums it up. As you say, unsatisfactory and deficient infrastructure can simply only yield an unsatisfactory and deficient timetable which doesn’t work for passengers, which is why Castlefield, Manchester and the North in general cannot afford to be devoid of investment.
Once fully open, Crossrail will impact probably as many people as travel through Castlefield each day, if not more. London's transport system has its own issues (particularly overcrowding, which has only slightly lessened thanks to a reduction in passenger volumes) and again, it's not a competition for who's worse off. Crossrail 2 and other London projects have been kicked into touch and TfL is suffering vicious cutbacks.
The government's overall attitude to transport investment is disappointing, regardless of which part of the country you look at.
Is this only because passengers through Castlefield are suppressed by the aforementioned constraints on capacity though. Delays through Castlefield also radiate across the whole north of England and even into Scotland. I doubt that even if the whole Elizabeth Line service completely collapsed even after full integration, that anyone using other services on the GWML or GEML would notice, let alone anywhere else in London.
I used to say that there shouldn’t be another penny spent on transport infrastructure in London until it has been brought up to the same standard in the rest of the country. Then I visited London. You do only have to visit London once to appreciate that if a single train is cancelled on the Underground, even on a 2 minute frequency that overcrowding in the station suddenly becomes dangerous and measures have to be taken to mitigate this. It’s nothing like anywhere else in the country owing to its population density.
Such a policy of cuts to TfL represent little more than an attack on the disabled, with no more step free access to tube stations or level boarding able to be funded, so the only option we really have is to increase transport spending to levels at or exceeding those seen in Western Europe as a bare minimum. Places like Preston or Leeds which only really have long distance rail access and no local or light rail provision really are a problem.
London basically just copes with a new line once in a generation. They had the Victoria, Jubilee, JLE and now they will get Crossrail. Next will probably be the BLE before Crossrail 2 in about 40-50 years. Castlefield still won’t have been touched by then even by 10 different governments.
Err,
yes it is. 7½ start to stop, add on ½ min dwell and you are looking at 8 minutes, i.e. a 10 minute planning headway.
I was aware of the journey time from Southport to Burscough Bridge but not Meols Cop. Southport - Meols Cop line speed improvements would cut journey times to Burscough Bridge by about 33%, closer to what they were when they ran via Blowick, so I don’t know why they don’t do that.
It's Absolute Block until Wigan Wallgate, yes. See
this signalling diagram (yes, it's a simulation but it's pretty accurate).
That really is barren. I have noticed the semaphores in the Parbold area but didn’t realise how little there was. Why hasn’t the line even received TCB? Liverpool - Southport/Ormskirk got it in 1994. Owing to the timing privatisation might have something to do with it…
