Waverley47.
Thank you for the useful answer. At the moment I am only thinking about the Express trains rather than commuter trains. I don't live in Bolton any more, but in Wigan for the past 27 years, so this is not a personal whinge because the service is letting me down personally.
Can I ask if this is the official line or how you see it? The trains also stop at Lancaster (smaller than Bolton) and Lockerbie (barely relevant) so if speed is the answer, and it seems speed (at the expense of passenger convenience) is very important, why not miss those out too? How many minutes are saved by slowing down at Bolton and stopping for 2 minutes? When the service ran via Wigan before the upgrade, the trains always stopped there. I knew I was losing a service (I regularly did Wigan to Inverness for holidays and Avanti is far more expensive) but thought that at least our loss would be Bolton's gain seeing as despite note having the title of city, it has double the population of Wigan.
I realise that places like Sunderland had/have a far worse service (and there's another topic to discuss) but like Bolton is very close to a well served hub, so from the comfort of a desk in a distant place it probably looks like walking distance.
. I still stand by it being ONE of the worst served (per head of population) prior to the upgrade which takes care of most of the past 50 years, with only local services, predominantly on pacers and other poor trains. Not great when you have to faff around in Manchester or Preston to get anywhere distant, and when I was younger, even having to walk across Manchester. Now as a wheelchair user, I notice those changes even more.
No problem.
You make some very interesting points here. In regards to official or otherwise, the reasons for many of the timetabling quirks across this country are a combination of you can't to x until you've done y. We have a problem, which limits a decision; you can't make the perfect decision to serve everyone, so you have to serve the people who are already there.*
The problem with the Bolton line is that it's a two track line with lots of stations, a selection of termini, and really poor capacity to send trains into Manchester. The problem is eating to send more trains, but you can't do that until you build more capacity in Manchester, so in the meantime you have to serve everyone you can. The best way to serve Bolton is to give it fast trains every ten minutes to Manchester Piccadilly, where you could get to everywhere you wanted with a single change.
The issue of Lancaster and Lockerbie is difficult. Lockerbie is served because TPE and Avanti are the only services that could serve it, and TPE is a better fit for a smallish town in the borders. Lancaster serves a huge hinterland, and again, is served for connectivity.
There is an argument to be made that if either of those are served, then Bolton should be, but that would just clog up Scotland fast trains with Bolton commuters. Noone has ever managed to figure that one out, apart from the famous Reading case under BR. Furthermore, given the connectivity you gain by calling at Wigan instead of Bolton, and the fact that Bolton has a nice frequent service connecting onto northbound trains at Preston, it makes sense to serve Wigan.
The issue of connectivity in Bolton is strange. It has frequent services on new trains, and although I can see the argument for better links further afield, we return to the first big problem; to serve it properly you'd need to gut out all the lines in Manchester and start again. To serve Bolton, somewhere else has to lose, and the places that would lose out have a far worse service already than Bolton does.
Bolton does allright for its size. It can never be perfect, but it's done nicely out of the north west sparks, and certainly better than somewhere like Rochdale.
* I personally did a lot of work on reopening and timetabling of new lines, but the Bolton line isn't one of mine. While these issues exist, every single person in the industry would argue there is a different "first problem" that opens up all sorts of possibilities if it were to be solved.
None of the issues or solutions raised on this forum are official policy unless otherwise stated, however collectively there is an enormous amount of experience contained in these threads. While you should take everything with a pinch of salt, generally the reasons explained on here are part of the problem. I can't for example give you the exact reasons for why the Bolton timetable is the way it is, I can explain why those reasons are important. I hope I have done so here.