You've also had a significant public fare increase, loss of semi-fast services and slight journey time increase. Everyone has now lost the evening discount. Hard times indeed.
That said you've got a significant increase in frequency and capacity if you want to go to Manchester City Centre - which admittedly most people do from that area. People who live near Freehold, South Chadderton and Monsall wouldn't have had access pre-conversion without long walks, Central Park to a much lesser extent. Integration with national rail services should never have been lost back in 1992 - the Altrincham line particularly should not have been allowed to be operated separately from the National Rail network. But the precedent was set, they got away without integrating and the model has been copied on the Oldham-Rochdale line. Welcome to Public Transport in the UK.
I'm by no means anti-tram, although the 3+ years it took for the conversion was a PITA.
The tram has indeed brought increased frequency, a 364 day a year service, earlier trams and [significantly] later last journey possibilities on Friday and Saturday evenings.
No, the point of my original post, was that things move on, and we can't always expect things to remain the same, and we all have accept change in some form or another.
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Just for the avoidance of doubt before I seek clarification from both Metrolink and Northern about the "arrangement" that ANorthernGuard refers to, and that TOCDriver appears to confirm is in place, can one of those two, or other employees of either company confirm that their contractual arrangements do indeed allow for reciprocal free travel on each others services?
I suspect that such an arrangement must be in place or otherwise it would be extremely unwise to come on a public forum boasting about such a set up predicated on the fact that Northern staff (in BR days) could travel free from lets say Manchester Victoria to Whitefield 23 years ago when it was a heavy rail service, and that it is still OK to do so now.
I am happy to be (and hope to be) proved wrong that my concerns are ill founded.
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No one from Northern or Metrolink going to comment further on this "unofficial" agreement then?
In which case I'll press on and seek clarification from the two companies involved.