Nym
Established Member
A Southport - Sheffield service? That may work well, given the lack of seaside services from Sheffield (our Blackpool services were taken many years ago, meaning a choice of either Cleethorpes or Scarborough nowadays). There's probably some Stockport - Wigan trade too, linking two sides of greater Manchester.
The important thing would be to tidy the muddle of routes around Manchester, so that there passengers could turn up without worrying too much about a timetable, rather than the random assortment of routes that overlap with each other at the moment.
I've no problem with Pacers at Manchester Airport though; most places in "the North" have Pacers, we're all in it together after all...
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It'll be interesting to see whether more Sheffield services get pushed through Marple, once the TPE North services free up paths through Ashburys.
I take your point about small services being a "waste" of a path over the Stockport bottleneck, but the same could be said of the Chester service or the three coach EMUs on the Wilmslow service.
Theres 1tph to Bridlington and Scarbrough from Sheffeild...
The difference with the Chester service is that there isn't any other way to send it, short of closing the Metrolink network and sending it via Sale (not that I want that at all, but it would be nice)
And theres plenty of other wastes over the stockport viaduct, but they don't really have alternative, 2 coach DMUs to Cardiff, 4 coach DMUs to Bristol etc.