It's hard to see how tram trains are going to be a magical solution to the castlefield corridor, given that most of the ones proposed are either based on Victoria, or the terminal platforms at Piccadilly and therefore don't go anywhere near the corridor.
The only ones which do at present are the Warrington stoppers which currently use the bay platform at Oxford Road, and I've already said why this route needs to retain heavy rail.
I'm afraid the only ways to sort out the Castlefield corridor issue are either:
1) don't try and send so many expresses that way or;
2) knuckle down and build the extra platforms and loops.
Genuine question, but which trains do you divert away (assuming no magic bullet, no platforms 15/16, no "smarter timetabling" etc etc)?
That's why I started a thread about it (
https://www.railforums.co.uk/thread...-branch-castlefield-corridor-problems.173536/) because everyone wants a Piccadilly service (e.g. the moans when Southport lost its daytime Piccadilly trains), everywhere wants a direct Airport service, people want lots of longer distance links to be kept (e.g. keeping Liverpool connected with places hundreds of miles away)... I don't think that there are solutions without a lot of pain/argument.
Surely the problem around Manchester is that too shorter trains are running more frequently than needed on some routes. Tram trains will have less capacity and run more frequently. What Manchester needs is existing trains being longer and better quality not adding more frequency unless lines are grade separated at pinch points and I can't see that happening.
Also the mixture of service patterns - you could run more trains on the existing infrastructure (or, more importantly, make the existing frequencies more reliable) if you chopped the various through services because of the apparent need to link various places on different sides of Manchester.
e.g. if all Huddersfield services ran to Liverpool, all Airport services ran through Castlefield, all Calder Valley services ran through to unelectrified places beyond Salford (Blackburn, Southport)... you'd have a much more reliable timetable.
Instead, the timetables are set up with a messy set of through routes, for the sake of providing direct links like Stockport to Bolton, meaning some big gaps in timetables (due to services joining from various different lines) and meaning that services go belly-up when there's a problem on any one route (other than the Glossop and Marple services, there are very few self contained routes that are resilient to disruption).
I notice that among the various projects listed there is absolutely no mention of the largest town in Greater Manchester unconnected to either rail or Metrolink:
Leigh pop 43,000.
They spent £15 m on a busway following part of the old rail track from the A580 at Ellenbrook through Tyldesley and into Leigh. But despite all the segregated bus lanes and the new V1 route, it still takes 60 mins to do 12 miles into Manchester.
The train from Leigh to Manchester Exchange used to take 32 mins, and 45 mins to Liverpool Lime St., joining the Chat Moss line at Kenyon Jc, the first railway junction in the world (1832 I think). Closed in 1969 in order to avoid spending £500,000 on a bridge at Monton for the new M602.
Yet they propose duplicating the train service from Stalybridge with a Metrotram as well. I'm not against it, but it seems that "To those who have shall be given more, from those who have not, even what little they have shall be taken away from them."
If GMCA would just think outside the box a little, they could reopen a station at Glazebury & Bury Lane where the Chat Moss line crosses the A574, as Leigh and Culcheth Parkway. It would take a considerable amount of commuter car traffic off the A580 and M602 western approaches to Manchester city centre. Glazebury into Victoria or Deansgate would probably be about 15 mins.
In fact, with more reopenings, you could run an hourly service from Preston calling Leyland, Euxton, Coppull (reopened, pop 8.000)), Standish (reopened, pop 13,000), Wigan NW, Golborne (reopened pop 24,000), Leigh and Culcheth Parkway (43,000 + 11,500), Patricroft, Eccles and Manchester. Total population given a decent new service into Manchester, 99,500.
Would need the slow line re-instating from Euxton Balshaw Lane Jc down to Standish Jc. And the problem that the old Glazebury station site is now just within the Cheshire boundary.
a. you're being a bit unfair on the buses (Leigh to Albert Square is forty five minutes - the additional time for the cross-city extension to the Royal Infirmary is neither here nor there for the purpose of this argument since the train never ran all the way out to the Hospital - the fact that the bus route provides this cross-city link is a positive rathe than something to bash the total journey time with
b. There are no spare heavy rail paths into Manchester (if anything, we are already cramming too many services onto existing lines through central Manchester), so any Leigh train line would have to come at the expense of another route. Do you reduce the frequency from Bolton? Fewer Liverpool trains? Because if there aren't spare paths through Manchester then there's no point in pretending that Leigh trains would zip into central Manchester
In some respects you can see their logic, Metrolink seems to be considerably more reliable than Northern rail and allows them to have a larger, integrated Manchester system under local control. Tram-train would likely leave the opportunity for both to run, especially due to the metrolink using standard platform height.
Agreed.
If I were Mancunian then I'd be wanting more Metrolink, more local control over infrastructure, more local control over service frequencies, more local control over the type of rolling stock (whilst running more services that require no operational subsidy).
If they are reluctant to fund more heavy rail services (where Manchester has no control over frequencies, where any new rolling stock purchased will spend large chunks of its life beyond the city boundaries in Cheshire/ Merseyside/ Lancashire, where there's a good chance of strikes, where you are dependent upon inflexible national government to fund infrastructure improvements, where the expensive operation means significant operational subsidies required).
Manchester suffers from its railway lines being used to benefit other places and their long distance links - it doesn't have the kind of local control that Liverpool has (since Liverpool is effectively a dead-end, so not at the mercy of through services). I can see why Manchester wants to focus attentions on things that benefit Manchester - I'd feel the same if I were them.
As an example, look at how Metrolink can guarantee five or ten trams an hour (with a certain standard of operation, a certain quality of vehicle etc), whereas stations on the heavy rail line to the Airport get a terrible frequency of service because the line is chock-full of long distance Airport services for the benefit of Cumbria/ Cleethorpes/ Cleveland (i.e. no scope for five/ten services per hour at Burnage).