How could Manchester Victoria be improved? (And does it need to be?)

[Purple Orange]

The Northern "hourly train from everywhere to everywhere" concept would, if done in full, probably reduce Vic to needing one platform in each direction, because it would become the "Manc-Bahn" I envisage for Castlefield instead. But it's a stupid idea to do it like that (to do it reliably you need to be able to pair all services from one Western branch with only one Eastern branch and keep the unit and crew diagrams wholly self-contained) and it ruins punctuality, and the services, like the Castlefield ones, are poorly balanced each side. And the question would remain what to do with TPE.

Sure, they could bin off the 397s and 68+Mk5 and order more 80x to give an identical fleet, then operate through services like Edinburgh-Manchester-Newcastle, but as a through service that's really quite useless (because you just wouldn't go that way for a through journey even if it was cheaper) and one which would interface with so many things that its punctuality would be appalling unless you had a 20 minute layover at Vic (see: Liverpool-Norwich or LNR Liverpool-Euston services), and if it's going to sit there for 20 minutes who cares if it's doing that mid journey or turning round and going back, the infrastructure need is the same, namely a platform to sit in for 20 minutes.



What would be even better would be a concourse which isn't freezing cold and has things to do and places to sit while waiting, rather than people having to sit in a specific, archaic waiting room. Picc is very good for this, which is one reason I gave it my "best station" accolade on the other thread. The whole concourse is a waiting room (which is one reason I bumped it above Paddington, which has a nice place to wait in the form of "The Lawn" but it's a bit bolted on the side rather than the whole concourse being like that). It's pleasant, airy, warm in winter and cool in summer, like Euston's Great Hall. That's what Victoria needs. As it is, it's too, er, Victorian.

As I see it, the work that was done was a complete waste of money because it spent a packet basically just putting a fancy roof over the trams, which are the bit of the station that are least in need of a fancy roof, because you never have to wait very long for one, and a fancy bridge to the Arena, which serves a fraction of the number of people that use the station each day and really clutters it up. Yet nothing was really done to solve any of the issues that plague using the station as a passenger.

I don’t feel as negative about Victoria as you do. To my mind the question is “of all the main stations, where do I prefer waiting for a train in Manchester and where do I hate waiting for a train in Manchester?”

In order of preference, it is:

1. Piccadilly (main concourse)
2. Oxford Road
3. Victoria
4. Stockport
5. Deansgate
6. Piccadilly P13 & P14
7. Salford Central
8. Salford Crescent

The trouble is that Victoria doesn’t know what to needs to be.

• Should it be a main central station on equivalence to Lime Street, Sheffield or Newcastle (due to passenger volumes and a broad range of destinations)?
• Or should it be more akin to a Cannon Street or Charing Cross, focussing more on commuter services extending no further than north west Lancashire, Merseyside, Cheshire & North Wales heading out west, or Yorkshire & eastern Lancashire heading out east?

 

[Bletchleyite]

The trouble is that Victoria doesn’t know what to needs to be.

• Should it be a main central station on equivalence to Lime Street, Sheffield or Newcastle (due to passenger volumes and a broad range of destinations)?
• Or should it be more akin to a Cannon Street or Charing Cross, focussing more on commuter services extending no further than north west Lancashire, Merseyside, Cheshire & North Wales heading out west, or Yorkshire & eastern Lancashire?

True, and the answer to that question is, to me, effectively dictated by the answer to the question "Are we going to build Piccadilly P15/16 and re-route all the long distance trains back there leaving Victoria back as a local commuter station[1], or are we going to leave them at Victoria and potentially move more there such as the North Wales and Glasgow/Edinburgh services to make 13/14 workable as they are as an above ground version of Merseyrail?"

If it's the former, it's probably fine as it is, even though I still don't like it very much and never really did (but please, let's rebuild the bogs, they literally stink). If the latter, then it needs to be a proper InterCity station like Piccadilly with the sort of facilities such a station should have.

[1] Given that Ordsall has been built, it would then just take something like a 2tph local service to Stalybridge/Huddersfield or whatever.

 

[tbtc]

A proper departures board either on, or clearly visible from, the platform side of the barriers. Anyone changing at Victoria now is limited to a single display on the train-side just showing destinations, plus the individual platform displays showing detail of the next train.

This gets my vote.

Simple, practical, cheap, could be delivered fairly quickly.

The other suggestions seem a little less essential... worrying about steam trains and the availability of real ale... providing some grandiose waiting facilities, when the majority of services from Victoria are relatively short distance and/or frequent so you done need the same kind of waiting facilities that Euston/ Paddington have.

I suppose you could spend huge sums of money on bay platforms for services that terminate from the west or maybe just dump them in nearby Newton Heath for a layover (and PNB)? We've got Stalybridge and Rochdale too, if you want to terminate them at a proper station?

But, like the perennial arguments about Castlefield/ 15/16, most heavy rail problems around Manchester could be solved by a combination of (a) diverting some services onto Metrolink and (b) finally sorting out the mess of hourly services that strangles capacity in the region.

Based on the timetable pre-Covid there are/were twelve services per hour in each direction.

To the east you have...

• 6x Rochdale (two stoppers that terminate there, one towards Burnley and three towards Leeds
• 6x Stalybridge (two stoppers that terminate there, four towards Huddersfield)

To the west you have...

• 2x Manchester Airport (via Castlefield)
• 1x Chester
• 2x Liverpool
• 3x Atherton
• 2x Preston
• 2x Blackburn

With four through platforms, you've got twice the capacity of the Thameslink core and only half the frequency - six trains per hour per platform. Not ideal for terminating services with long layovers, sure, but with twelve trains per hour in each direction there don't need to be any terminating services. The issue isn't that the frequencies aren't sufficient, it's that the trains aren't long enough and that the individual hourly services are a muddle (meaning that some places might have two trains per hour but badly balanced, or one from Pic and the other from Vic).

What would help would be if you swapped a couple of services with Piccadilly to provide a simpler network (e.g. if all Southport services were from Victoria whilst all Blackpool services were from Piccadilly then departures could be more like a clock face half hourly... run the TfW Llandudno service to Victoria so that one other Bolton service goes to Piccadilly) and then paired up services each side of Victoria to make virtually everything through Victoria half hourly e.g....

• a half hourly Rochdale - Blackburn service
• a half hourly Calder Valley - Atherton service
• a half hourly Huddersfield - Liverpool service
• a half hourly Huddersfield - Manchester Airport service
• a half hourly Burnley/Brighouse - Southport service
• a half hourly Stalybridge - Chester service

...that way you can keep things simple for passengers (this idea that everywhere needs a direct Piccadilly service is a luxury - there are frequent Pic-Vic trams as well as half hourly trains, and it's not as if Piccadilly is in the beating heart of the city - it's as far from the centre of the city as Victoria is) - you can solve most of the capacity problems by running better balanced frequencies and spending your money on additional carriages rather than fancy plans for a canapé bar above the platforms.

Or, run some more trams, free up some of the local trains from Victoria!

 

[Purple Orange]

True, and the answer to that question is, to me, effectively dictated by the answer to the question "Are we going to build Piccadilly P15/16 and re-route all the long distance trains back there leaving Victoria back as a local commuter station[1], or are we going to leave them at Victoria and potentially move more there such as the North Wales and Glasgow/Edinburgh services to make 13/14 workable as they are as an above ground version of Merseyrail?"

If it's the former, it's probably fine as it is, even though I still don't like it very much and never really did (but please, let's rebuild the bogs, they literally stink). If the latter, then it needs to be a proper InterCity station like Piccadilly with the sort of facilities such a station should have.

[1] Given that Ordsall has been built, it would then just take something like a 2tph local service to Stalybridge/Huddersfield or whatever.

Even with P15 & 16 at Piccadilly, that whole route to Victoria should be an overground metro, like Merseyrail, calling at all five stations on the way. To be honest, I’d have all intercity trains focussed on Piccadilly. What city has Intercity services calling at 2 or more stations in it’s centre?

 

[Bletchleyite]

I think @yorksrob might shout at you cutting Atherton to half hourly there, unless you're suggesting the Southports would go that way and it's actually an increase to 4tph.

A question would be do the paths match up to make those clean half hourly/quarter hourly clockface services, or would it be a mess?

You've also got that 29 minutes, if you just miss one, is a fairly long time to wait in the cold. It's not, to most destinations, Merseyrail, and some e.g. Kirkby are and would remain hourly.

Even with P15 & 16 at Piccadilly, that whole route to Victoria should be an overground metro, like Merseyrail, calling at all five stations on the way. To be honest, I’d have all intercity trains focussed on Piccadilly. What city has Intercity services calling at 2 or more stations in it’s centre?

Hamburg is one (the Altonaer Verbindungsbahn is very much a slightly more grown up, slightly longer, 4-track Castlefield). Hamburg, however, has a very large city centre, more like London than Manchester where it's quite compact. Of course, neither is TPE a proper InterCity service, other than the Scottish services which probably are it's more of a regional express. If TPE (North) was really IC, it'd probably just call at Liverpool, Manchester Vic/Picc, Leeds, York, Darlington, Durham and Newcastle, say. And TPE (South) is even less IC, that would probably terminate at Sheffield and be done with it.

 

[adamedwards]

How much are the west bays going to cost v extending the wires east? How close to Newton Heath depot could you get? That seems the choice given the mAjor constraint is electric west v diesel east. If the Great Extension Lead had been wires as planned, we'd have electrics trains turning round there. Over to the engineers reading this for a quote.

 

[Dr Hoo]

I can hardly believe that people are assuming that Manchester Victoria will function as a 'great frontier' between electrified and diesel lines in the decades to come, especially in the era of bi-modes. (I get that there are elements of that at the moment.) I can see that some lines radiating from places like Norwich or Lancaster might be a bit further down the wiring list but surely relatively frequent urban and inter-urban services around Manchester and Leeds are going to be early candidates.

You could spend a fortune and take years re-configuring the west end for new bays only to discover that the trains can now whizz through to Rochdale or Huddersfield (or even just Newton Heath).

 

[43096]

Hamburg is one (the Altonaer Verbindungsbahn is very much a slightly more grown up, slightly longer, 4-track Castlefield). Hamburg, however, has a very large city centre, more like London than Manchester where it's quite compact.

Berlin is another: Hbf and Ostbahnhof.

 

[Senex]

Berlin is another: Hbf and Ostbahnhof.

Though that's just an example of the Stadtbahn still doing just what it was built to do.

There's Brussels too, isn't there, where most trains make more than one stop on the connecting line.

And in Scotland there's Edinburgh, with pretty well everything to and from the west serving both Waverley and Haymarket. (That's the closest parallel I can think of the the Piccadilly / Oxford Road pattern in Manchester.)

 

[Purple Orange]

So a few examples there, but the question would be is it needed? The more I’ve read through the comments, I’m more of the belief that Piccadilly should be the focus for all long distance services and Vic should only see a minimum of 6-car commuter stock.

 

[tbtc]

I think @yorksrob might shout at you cutting Atherton to half hourly there, unless you're suggesting the Southports would go that way and it's actually an increase to 4tph.

I'm sure @yorksrob would be mortified if we were ever on the same side of any debate

Seriously though, Wigan to Manchester is a messy situation for what should be a relatively short distance everyday journey - some services are for Piccadilly, some are for Victoria, there are some for Wallgate and some for North Western - that must make things unnecessarily confusing for passengers doing what ought to be a fairly standard journey that ought to have a pretty simple "turn up and go" frequency IMHO.

Two per hour from Victoria to Wallgate via Bolton, two per hour from Victoria to Wallgate via Atherton (all trains at appropriate lengths, rather than cramming more short trains over busy junctions - some extended to Southport/Kirkby) - keep it simple - much easier to recover the service in the event of a delay - no need for all the fancy hourly service patterns that are prone to going wrong.

Of course, neither is TPE a proper InterCity service, other than the Scottish services which probably are it's more of a regional express. If TPE (North) was really IC, it'd probably just call at Liverpool, Manchester Vic/Picc, Leeds, York, Darlington, Durham and Newcastle, say. And TPE (South) is even less IC, that would probably terminate at Sheffield and be done with it.

I don't think that other people are as obsessed about the difference between "proper InterCity" and "regional express" - train services are just train services - sometimes people use long distance services to do short distance journeys - it's really not as binary as you make out.

So a few examples there, but the question would be is it needed? The more I’ve read through the comments, I’m more of the belief that Piccadilly should be the focus for all long distance services and Vic should only see a minimum of 6-car commuter stock.

That would presumably mean sending the fast Liverpool services through Castlefield to Piccadilly? And Liverpool to Leeds services crossing the entire throat at Piccadilly? Would the Calder Valley services qualify as "long distance" and therefore have to be extended to Piccadilly too?

I agree with the idea of focussing services at particular stations (e.g. all Preston services use Piccadilly but all Wigan services use Victoria, so that passengers have a more reliable service) but I don't think that the map of Manchester would make it easy to relegate Victoria to a kind of Mancunian "Snow Hill - Moor Street" or "Glasgow Central Low Level" kind of arrangement.

 

[Philip]

I think to give Victoria an intercity service, it could work well to start the Edinburgh and Glasgow WCML services from there, rather than the Airport. The market for direct Airport or Piccadilly services from Glasgow, Edinburgh, Carlisle and Penrith is unlikely to be that strong, and from Lancaster south people can use the Northern Airport service.
Most people on a 'day out' from Edinburgh or Glasgow to Manchester would prefer to enter the city through the 'Victoria end', rather than the dump that is Piccadilly Gardens. Even for business travellers the Victoria end is fast catching up with Piccadilly and Oxford Road in terms of the number of offices there.

 

[Purple Orange]

I'm sure @yorksrob would be mortified if we were ever on the same side of any debate

Seriously though, Wigan to Manchester is a messy situation for what should be a relatively short distance everyday journey - some services are for Piccadilly, some are for Victoria, there are some for Wallgate and some for North Western - that must make things unnecessarily confusing for passengers doing what ought to be a fairly standard journey that ought to have a pretty simple "turn up and go" frequency IMHO.

Two per hour from Victoria to Wallgate via Bolton, two per hour from Victoria to Wallgate via Atherton (all trains at appropriate lengths, rather than cramming more short trains over busy junctions - some extended to Southport/Kirkby) - keep it simple - much easier to recover the service in the event of a delay - no need for all the fancy hourly service patterns that are prone to going wrong.



I don't think that other people are as obsessed about the difference between "proper InterCity" and "regional express" - train services are just train services - sometimes people use long distance services to do short distance journeys - it's really not as binary as you make out.



That would presumably mean sending the fast Liverpool services through Castlefield to Piccadilly? And Liverpool to Leeds services crossing the entire throat at Piccadilly? Would the Calder Valley services qualify as "long distance" and therefore have to be extended to Piccadilly too?

I agree with the idea of focussing services at particular stations (e.g. all Preston services use Piccadilly but all Wigan services use Victoria, so that passengers have a more reliable service) but I don't think that the map of Manchester would make it easy to relegate Victoria to a kind of Mancunian "Snow Hill - Moor Street" or "Glasgow Central Low Level" kind of arrangement.

I should have qualified my comment to state that concentrating long distance services at Piccadilly should only happen if NPR is developed and feeds long distance services from Liverpool through the HS2 tunnel, then out towards Leeds.

Until that point, it is muddling on and tinkering around the edges.

 

[Bevan Price]

The mess they made when they reduced the "old" Victoria, and built that infernal Arena, is going to be far too expensive to resolve - now, or at any time in the near future. There is no easy solution that will satisfy everybody. Other solutions would only be possible if ex-franchises were replaced by a unified passenger network.

My own suggestion would be for the Castlefield curve to be restricted to only a Victoria to Piccadilly & Airport all stations shuttle, maybe every 15 minutes.

Salford Crescent to Piccadilly via Deansgate would also run every 15 minutes, with trains originating from the Bolton or Wigan Wallgate lines. Some of these may be extended to the Buxton line, others would reverse in the loop outside Piccadilly.

Salford Crescent to Victoria would also run every 15 minutes, trains originating as above. Some would continue east of Victoria, as now, to Rochdale or to Todmorden/Burnley/Blackburn, and maybe also to Huddersfield (stopper).

Other services would be rerouted or revised.
Apart from "Liverpool" services, all Trans Pennine services should use Piccadilly, cease to serve Airport, and run via Guide Bridge to Stalybridge.

Most - or all - "Chat Moss" services should use Victoria, and some more could be linked to Calder Valley services.
so we would have (1 tph unless shown otherwise):

Liverpool Lime St. - St. Helens Jn - Manchester Vic. - Leeds - York - Newcastle.
Liverpool Lime St. - Earlestown - Newton Le Willows - Manchester Vic. - Leeds - York (to Scarborough until electrification as far as York.)
Bangor or Llandudno - Manchester Victoria - Bradford / Leeds
Chester - Manchester Victoria - Bradford / Leeds
Liverpool Lime St. - Manchester Victoria stopper (extended to Stalybridge after electrification)

Personally, I don't see Piccadilly Platforms 15/16 solving many problems -- there will still be a major bottleneck between Oxford Road, Deansgate & Castlefield Jn - and it would just move the delays to a different location.

Apart from the "locals" listed above, the only westbound departures from Piccadilly (platforms 13/14) would be the existing semi-fasts via Warrington Central (2 tph), an hourly service via Bolton to Scotland, and an hourly service to Lancaster or beyond (Barrow / Windermere) possibly via Bolton (or Chat Moss), Wigan & Preston.

 

[Bletchleyite]

I agree with the idea of focussing services at particular stations (e.g. all Preston services use Piccadilly but all Wigan services use Victoria, so that passengers have a more reliable service) but I don't think that the map of Manchester would make it easy to relegate Victoria to a kind of Mancunian "Snow Hill - Moor Street" or "Glasgow Central Low Level" kind of arrangement.

I think it easily could, and indeed it basically was in the 90s. Increased frequencies, some beneficial, some not, have meant Castlefield being crowded out. But if you built 15/16 and the Oxford Road work, and mothballed the Ordsall Chord (infernal thing should never have been built and has caused nothing but trouble, all to avoid terminating services from Yorkshire at Picc rather than sending them to Ringway), you could certainly get back to the "Victoria S-Bahn station" type thing that went on back then. OK, it wasn't Merseyrail, but it was definitely a secondary station with only "local services for local people". And for that - which puts it in the league of the likes of Liverpool Central - it's not a bad station at all, the bogs aside (which aren't worse than Liverpool Central's, TBH).

But if you don't do the Castlefield work, it will need to take some long distance services, for which it is inadequate.

With regard to service patterns, there's the common shout to send the Southports to Vic - but people don't want that - they've built up their life and working patterns around a service to Picc that has existed since the late 1980s when the Windsor Link was opened. I actually wonder if you offered Sandgrounders (and Burscoughvites, which I probably just invented as a term) a choice between Castlefield via Bolton once an hour (but with long trains), and Vic via Atherton twice an hour, they would choose the former. Indeed, that was roughly the service pattern pre-1998 - once an hour (ish) to Castlefield and beyond (usually onward to Chester via Altrincham, if I recall) and I think one or two peak extras to Vic in the morning and from it in the evening.

This actually plays into the argument for Victoria to take more IC traffic and Castlefield be the S-Bahn type thing, because people travelling a long distance tend to do so occasionally and be going to Manchester generically, whereas someone who lives in West Lancashire (say) and has taken a job in Manchester Uni specifically because of the long-established train service making it easy to get there via a train to Oxford Road and 10 minutes' not unpleasant walk is going to be far more put out by having to switch to Vic, potentially get up an hour earlier/get home later and pay for a bus or tram as well. That is, short distance traffic is going to be much less tolerant of a switch of Manchester station than long-distance traffic.

 

[RHolmes]

Actually, here's an idea:

CGI rendering of Vic from ilovemanchester.com

There's a dirty great surface car park out front, taking up a space which would be perfect to create a Piccadilly style steel-and-glass (NOT plastic) concourse leading to a widened footbridge with escalators and lifts to all the platforms including the trams, with a completely new set of facilities and a separate bridge to the Arena if required

No there isn’t! It’s been closed since August and is now a building site and future home of apartments

 

[Purple Orange]

I think it easily could, and indeed it basically was in the 90s. Increased frequencies, some beneficial, some not, have meant Castlefield being crowded out. But if you built 15/16 and the Oxford Road work, and mothballed the Ordsall Chord (infernal thing should never have been built and has caused nothing but trouble, all to avoid terminating services from Yorkshire at Picc rather than sending them to Ringway), you could certainly get back to the "Victoria S-Bahn station" type thing that went on back then. OK, it wasn't Merseyrail, but it was definitely a secondary station with only "local services for local people". And for that - which puts it in the league of the likes of Liverpool Central - it's not a bad station at all, the bogs aside (which aren't worse than Liverpool Central's, TBH).

But if you don't do the Castlefield work, it will need to take some long distance services, for which it is inadequate.

With regard to service patterns, there's the common shout to send the Southports to Vic - but people don't want that - they've built up their life and working patterns around a service to Picc that has existed since the late 1980s when the Windsor Link was opened. I actually wonder if you offered Sandgrounders (and Burscoughvites, which I probably just invented as a term) a choice between Castlefield via Bolton once an hour (but with long trains), and Vic via Atherton twice an hour, they would choose the former. Indeed, that was roughly the service pattern pre-1998 - once an hour (ish) to Castlefield and beyond (usually onward to Chester via Altrincham, if I recall) and I think one or two peak extras to Vic in the morning and from it in the evening.

This actually plays into the argument for Victoria to take more IC traffic and Castlefield be the S-Bahn type thing, because people travelling a long distance tend to do so occasionally and be going to Manchester generically, whereas someone who lives in West Lancashire (say) and has taken a job in Manchester Uni specifically because of the long-established train service making it easy to get there via a train to Oxford Road and 10 minutes' not unpleasant walk is going to be far more put out by having to switch to Vic, potentially get up an hour earlier/get home later and pay for a bus or tram as well. That is, short distance traffic is going to be much less tolerant of a switch of Manchester station than long-distance traffic.

Oh I wouldn’t mothball the Ordsall Chord at all. I see it as a valuable piece of the jigsaw for creating a Manchester metro network. There are 6 key routes through the city centre:

• Piccadilly - Oxford Road - Deansgate - Salford Central - Victoria
• Piccadilly - Oxford Road - Deansgate - Salford Crescent
• Piccadilly - Oxford Road - Deansgate - Chat Moss line
• Piccadilly - Oxford Road - Deansgate - CLC line
• Victoria - Salford Central - Salford Crescent
• Victoria - Salford Central - Chat Moss line

Clear of the majority of long distance traffic, these routes could be part of a metro network in central Manchester in combination with Metrolink providing light rail access to the very centre.

Feeding in to that you’ve got several starting points.

• Picadilly
  • Airport
  • Crewe or Alderley Edge via Stockport
  • Stoke or Macclesfield
  • Buxton or Hazel Grove
• Victoria
  • Stalybridge
  • Bradford via Rochdale
  • Burnley via Rochdale
• Salford Crescent
  • Blackpool via Preston & Bolton
  • Southport via Wigan & Bolton
  • Blackburn
  • Wigan via Atherton (if not converted to tram train)
• Liverpool via CLC
• Liverpool via Chat Moss
• North Wales via Chat Moss

I’d keep the Chat Moss for fasts from Liverpool, North Wales & Chester and north of Preston and a couple of stoppers. The rest, can be combined to make a metro system with specific routes. I.e. services from the airport may only go to Blackpool & Bradford. Any other route needs a change in central Manchester.

 

[Bletchleyite]

No there isn’t! It’s been closed since August and is now a building site and future home of apartments

Fantastic missed opportunity there - it could have been a decent, glass-sided, high-roofed concourse with those same apartments on top of it. And the apartment developer could have paid for said concourse, too, as part of the deal.

 

[RHolmes]

Fantastic missed opportunity there - it could have been a decent, glass-sided, high-roofed concourse with those same apartments on top of it. And the apartment developer could have paid for said concourse, too, as part of the deal.

Completely agree that the opportunity has been missed, even if not for an improved concourse but using the old car-park land to move the current tram platforms and then reclaiming Metrolink are to build more East facing platforms on the land.

Services such as TPE’s Huddersfield stopper could then be moved to Manchester Victoria with an additional call at Ashton (operated by either TPE or Northern) and allow for greater termination of Calder Valley services, the through platforms for services terminating from the west and 3/4 exclusively for NPR route

 

[cle]

More local branches need to be evolved onto Metrolink to remove so many cross-Manchester services. Especially 2 car diesel ones. Metrolink works far better as Manchester's own rail network.

Atherton route yes, but also arguably Warrington Central, and a few from the Guide Bridge direction (Glossop and Rose Hill) which would free up paths and platforms across multiple routes and termini.

 

[Bletchleyite]

More local branches need to be evolved onto Metrolink to remove so many cross-Manchester services. Especially 2 car diesel ones. Metrolink works far better as Manchester's own rail network.

There's that option too. I know there are people who oppose it, but I would put Wigan via Atherton onto it (probably terminating at a new on-street station in Wigan town centre due to the issue of getting wires under the bridge), the Kirkby branch onto Merseyrail (terminating at Wallgate centre bay), and Southports to run via Bolton (calling at Wallgate normal platforms). Also consider a Den Haag-style tram tunnel through Manchester city centre.

Would require tram-train type vehicles for running between Ince and Hindley (or separate single lines) but that's not insurmountable either way. There's only a car park in the way of diverging to the road just before Wallgate and running a loop via King St, an island platform (but one way) station on Wallgate and Library St, or even a bigger loop taking in the actual town centre.

With regard to the original discussion, that's then 3tph of diesel trains out of Victoria's through platforms and potentially able to terminate in the bays instead. Would make potentially quite a difference.

 

[tbtc]

I should have qualified my comment to state that concentrating long distance services at Piccadilly should only happen if NPR is developed and feeds long distance services from Liverpool through the HS2 tunnel, then out towards Leeds.

Until that point, it is muddling on and tinkering around the edges.

I think the NPR should sort out a lot of the problems around Manchester - until then I think we need to accept compromise (and that not everything is going to be as pretty/perfect as it would be in Germany!)

if you built 15/16 and the Oxford Road work, and mothballed the Ordsall Chord (infernal thing should never have been built and has caused nothing but trouble, all to avoid terminating services from Yorkshire at Picc rather than sending them to Ringway), you could certainly get back to the "Victoria S-Bahn station" type thing that went on back then.

So, after spending money on the Ordsal Chord (which, much as you may not like it, was tens of millions of pounds of investment on heavy rail infrastructure) your shopping list is for two more platforms at Piccadilly plus additional work at Oxford Road and then investment at Victoria too... how long until you run out of Manchester schemes and we can spend money on the rest of the country?

With regard to service patterns, there's the common shout to send the Southports to Vic - but people don't want that - they've built up their life and working patterns around a service to Picc that has existed since the late 1980s when the Windsor Link was opened. I actually wonder if you offered Sandgrounders (and Burscoughvites, which I probably just invented as a term) a choice between Castlefield via Bolton once an hour (but with long trains), and Vic via Atherton twice an hour, they would choose the former. Indeed, that was roughly the service pattern pre-1998 - once an hour (ish) to Castlefield and beyond (usually onward to Chester via Altrincham, if I recall) and I think one or two peak extras to Vic in the morning and from it in the evening.

This actually plays into the argument for Victoria to take more IC traffic and Castlefield be the S-Bahn type thing, because people travelling a long distance tend to do so occasionally and be going to Manchester generically, whereas someone who lives in West Lancashire (say) and has taken a job in Manchester Uni specifically because of the long-established train service making it easy to get there via a train to Oxford Road and 10 minutes' not unpleasant walk is going to be far more put out by having to switch to Vic, potentially get up an hour earlier/get home later and pay for a bus or tram as well. That is, short distance traffic is going to be much less tolerant of a switch of Manchester station than long-distance traffic.

Here's the problem... you talk a good game about simplifying the route patterns (to stop the nonsense of all the individual hourly services around Manchester run by short DMUs and thinning out the timetable by providing a more consistent service with longer trains - forgive me if I forget whatever German name you want to use)...

...but when I suggest that we trim the Manchester - Wigan service from five trains per hour to four trains an hour, and having them all serve the same central Manchester station (which sounds like the kind of thing that you say that you are in favour of when applied to other lines) you're against it...

...the idea that "we should solve the Castlefield problem by removing short DMUs and the idea that everywhere needs an hourly service to everywhere else BUT we should keep an hourly diesel service from Wallgate to Piccadilly" feels a bit like one rule for most lines but another rule for the one that I assume you grew up on?

I'm sure that some of the people of Blackburn and other places would also like some kind of Castlefield service but I thought that the idea was that there wasn't room for all of these?

And, whilst there are places where you could trim frequencies a little, I think that just an hourly train from Wigan to Bolton is a bit on the thin side.

 

[Bevan Price]

Personally I think that Manchester to Wigan is too far for a tram (or tram-train) route. One alternative might be to reinstate the former fast lines on the Atherton route, with trains to Wigan Wallgate (or beyond) calling only at Walkden, Atherton, Daisy Hill, Hindley & Wigan.
From Salford Crescent, the current ("slow") lines could be converted to a Metrolink route as far as Atherton and Hag Fold, and then run "on street" to Atherton Town Centre, with a possible extension to Leigh.

 

[cle]

Also, Manchester has grown a lot economically and in city centre spread, in the past few years - including residentially too. Victoria is no longer the wasteland it was seen as, there is Spinningfields, the ex-Granada sites below it, the Castlefield to Cornbrook spread and the crossing of the river with Lowry/New Bailey developments which are best for Salford Central. Plus of course growth around the unis, and the NQ/Ancoats. And Salford Quays / Media City.

Overall, my point is that Manchester has 'grown up' a lot as a city. It doesn't need one long distance station and then secondary commuter ones. It needs what the railway infrastructure can deliver, and folks can travel onwards across the city accordingly. London and Paris have termini (and far bigger) so not great examples - but nobody moans because you can't get a train from Liverpool Street to Birmingham.

Generally speaking, Piccadilly for south and Victoria for north - with both offering some east and west, seems the right fit. I would suggest all Wales services move to Victoria too, but then the South Wales path can be another service, perhaps a nice long Pendo or IC MK4 to Birmingham.

Kill the every shack hourly to both Vic and Picc tradition, kill the every shack hourly to the airport too. Remove branches to the Met where makes sense, diesel being kicked off first and then intensify existing services. Simplify, encourage good changes - and encourage walking/cycling/scooters/Met hops for last mile as big boy cities have. And yes the weather's ****, but we all already knew that

 

[Bletchleyite]

Overall, my point is that Manchester has 'grown up' a lot as a city. It doesn't need one long distance station and then secondary commuter ones. It needs what the railway infrastructure can deliver, and folks can travel onwards across the city accordingly. London and Paris have termini (and far bigger) so not great examples - but nobody moans because you can't get a train from Liverpool Street to Birmingham.

Actually, people do moan about having to faff about crossing London if they aren't actually going to London (because most trains run on an hourly based pattern, it usually costs about an hour), and there are a couple of very useful routes that cross it e.g. the Southern MKC-East Croydon service or more notably Thameslink. London is what it is because by the time the railway came there was a city in the way. But if you had a clean slate (not ever going to happen) you would certainly go for a Berlin style "London Hbf", not a load of separate stations. The Hauptbahnhof-Konzept has served Germany very, very well (though there are a few exceptions, mainly due to the route of high speed lines e.g. Kassel Hbf is really a regional station a bit like Vic).

Birmingham is maybe more comparable - if it was viable to expand New St (it isn't), surely you wouldn't choose to have Moor St and Curzon St separately? (Snow Hill is maybe a bit different, being a commuter stop on the way in).

The thing about Manchester is that it is viable to build out either Castlefield or Vic to make it a main long distance station. You don't need both, but you certainly, in my view, need one of them, unless you are going to build out Metrolink as a third option. Even if you did put Atherton onto Metrolink[1] to remove 3tph from Vic so there's more room for a couple of other services from the West e.g. the Welsh ones it still needs a tidy-up, though, cosmetically (and for passengers generally) it's just a nasty station that would be improved well by chucking say ten million quid at it, which isn't a lot in railway terms. Stuff like new bogs, new footbridge, Arena access moved outside, proper departure boards visible from both sides of the barrier line, sandblast the ceiling clear, tidy up the messy structure over 3/4, maybe add a food mezzanine, etc.

[1] Hadfield and Rose Hill are a red herring, as there is no shortage of east-facing bay capacity in Manchester. They may or may not be worth converting (I'm more convinced of Rose Hill than Hadfield) but they don't really affect the premise of the thread.