Passenger rail usage October to December 2021

[Nicholas Lewis]

ORR released Q3 rail usage stats yesterday.

Some headlines LNER doing the best on journeys made compared to two years ago ScotRail worst.



Train km run was looking reasonable this qtr although of course we know that since Omicron appeared train km have been cut again so current qtr is bound to see a reduction again.



The most telling statistic is on revenue with season tickets still only achieving 27.4% of pre covid

 

[Jorge Da Silva]

ORR released Q4 rail usage stats yesterday.

Some headlines LNER doing the best on journeys made compared to two years ago ScotRail worst.

View attachment 111701

Train km run was looking reasonable this qtr although of course we know that since Omicron appeared train km have been cut again so current qtr is bound to see a reduction again.

View attachment 111702

The most telling statistic is on revenue with season tickets still only achieving 27.4% of pre covid

View attachment 111708

Q3 not Q4 as its for the 2021-22 FY

But yeah its interesting i was expecting it to be lower, interesting LNER is ahead of the pack

 

[tommy2215]

Funny how EMR have had one of the fastest recoveries in terms of passenger numbers but one of the slowest in terms of service levels (on regional routes anyway)

 

[Killingworth]

Funny how EMR have had one of the fastest recoveries in terms of passenger numbers but one of the slowest in terms of service levels (on regional routes anyway)

It's not very funny if you're an intending user of their regional routes!

 

[DPQ]

I love stats like this.

Caledonian Sleeper passenger kilometres up 1%, was there an extra Saturday night in the pre covid data...

 

[Watershed]

I love stats like this.

Caledonian Sleeper passenger kilometres up 1%, was there an extra Saturday night in the pre covid data...

More than anything else it's just likely to be an increased mileage due to engineering work diversions.

 

[Bald Rick]

Funny how EMR have had one of the fastest recoveries in terms of passenger numbers but one of the slowest in terms of service levels (on regional routes anyway)

I suspect it’s because of the increased Corby services generating new traffic (directly, an through speeding up the Nottinghams).

 

[Goldfish62]

Roger Ford puts LNER's recovery down to the greater flexibility they have in initiatives to attract passengers back because they report direct to Operator of Last Resort (OLR) instead of to the DfT.

I note the dismal stats for Cross Country. That's what happens when you chop your core network in half.

SWR, GTR and Southeastern all appear to be struggling.

 

[philosopher]

Roger Ford puts LNER's recovery down to the greater flexibility they have in initiatives to attract passengers back because they report direct to Operator of Last Resort (OLR) instead of to the DfT.

I note the dismal stats for Cross Country. That's what happens when you chop your core network in half.

SWR, GTR and Southeastern all appear to be struggling.

The contrast betwwen LNER and Avanti is quite stark and given they serve similar markets, the only explanations I can really think for this difference are due to train operations such as train frequencies, promotions and on board service.

 

[Goldfish62]

The contrast betwwen LNER and Avanti is quite stark and given they serve similar markets, the only explanations I can really think for this difference are due to train operations such as train frequencies, promotions and on board service.

Which is what I was saying! Letting railway managers run the railway rather than the Treasury and DfT trying to run the railway.

 

[Horizon22]

Roger Ford puts LNER's recovery down to the greater flexibility they have in initiatives to attract passengers back because they report direct to Operator of Last Resort (OLR) instead of to the DfT.

I note the dismal stats for Cross Country. That's what happens when you chop your core network in half.

SWR, GTR and Southeastern all appear to be struggling.

Yeah Crosscountry really is bad given how much demand their could be for their leisure routes and they’ve never had the same sort of commuter demand as some others. Perhaps they had a bigger business contingent but still poor.

Not suprised that much by the other three given how they were always driven heavily by London & SE commuting from the Home Counties.

What is clear is that many TOCs are running close to 100% of train kms but nowhere near passenger journeys (and by default, revenues). It isn’t sustainable if this continues long-term.

 

[Western 52]

Train operators running nearer 100% of pre-covid train km is obviously a way to attract passengers back Yes, they'll be running some fairly lightly loaded services for a while, but from recent journeys I've made, trains seem to be getting busier. More recent stats will be interesting! The ending of all covid travel restrictions will benefit the railway too.

 

[Watershed]

It's also worth bearing in mind that these figures cover a period of suppressed demand due to the Omicron variant and its various impacts.

Passenger numbers are now higher than pre-Omicron levels, despite many operators still running reduced "Omicron" timetables.

 

[wobman]

Most tocs are increasing to pre covid service levels from May by the looks of things, I personally think it's ambitious as we still have staff that are returning with long covid and there's another covid spike that's ongoing.

Our toc struggle to cover 85% of its services as it is, we still cancel services due to traincrew availability.

Let's see what happens in May

 

[DPQ]

If I get time later I might do some quick analysis of Train km divided by passenger numbers. This would give an idea, albeit very loosely, whether services on average are busier now than pre-Covid for each TOC.

 

[yorksrob]

It's not very funny if you're an intending user of their regional routes!

The company seems to be experiencing systematic failure at the moment.

 

[iphone76]

We were told at our place (TFL rail) that we had 96% of pre-pandemic passenger numbers last Thursday. We certainly seem to be getting back to normal. For the first time in 2 years, I've had to ask people to stand clear of the closing doors on the morning up to London trains on the East side. Unfortunately some of the bad things such a sick on the late trains out of Liverpool Street have also returned.

 

[Watershed]

We were told at our place (TFL rail) that we had 96% of pre-pandemic passenger numbers last Thursday. We certainly seem to be getting back to normal. For the first time in 2 years, I've had to ask people to stand clear of the closing doors on the morning up to London trains on the East side. Unfortunately some of the bad things such a sick on the late trains out of Liverpool Street have also returned.

Hardly surprising given that they've taken over GWR stopping services to Reading and that they have a lot more short-distance commuter flows. Not much business travel from Shenfield to Ilford to lose!

 

[iphone76]

Hardly surprising given that they've taken over GWR stopping services to Reading and that they have a lot more short-distance commuter flows. Not much business travel from Shenfield to Ilford to lose!

They did say the GWR takeover was taken into account with those figures.

 

[Horizon22]

They did say the GWR takeover was taken into account with those figures.

Indeed and that’s why they are at 141% of train kms. The sort of outer London and suburban travel has been maintained pretty steadily probably due to low car ownership in London, decent level of service provision and fewer in “white collar” jobs able to work from home. These are the sort of services taken over from GWR although I doubt the full Heathrow demand has obviously returned.

Wider Home Counties travel is a different matter.

 

[tbtc]

Hard to be certain of anything (e.g. a lot of the LNER demand might be for the kind of "Wakefield to Leeds" journeys or the "London to Edinburgh" journeys, given that most TOCs deal with various different passengers. However...

• Interesting that the "short distance, urban" Merseyrail/ London Overground/ TfL Rail all seem to be doing fairly well, and some of the "long distance" TOCs are doing okay (LNER, EMR to a lesser extend) but it's the "middle distance" TOCs that are struggling more
• The LNER figures look even better when you consider that the baseline (two years ago) didn't have any competition from Lumo)
• Hull Trains bouncing back much better than Grand Central - I've not been paying attention to such things, so the difference seems fairly noticeable
• TfW doing a lot better than ScotRail (given that Scotland and Wales both saw greater restrictions than England, it feels reasonable to compare the two since they both run a mix of everything - 61.2% vs 52.8% is a big win for the Welsh though)
• Northern must be running a lot more than 91% of services around Newcastle/ Leeds/ Manchester, since their services in South Yorkshire seem to be a lot lower than that!
• In normal times, TSGN/ Overground/ SWR carry a huge number of passengers, but we seem to discuss them less than some rural branch lines that carry a tiny number

I note the dismal stats for Cross Country. That's what happens when you chop your core network in half

True - but I kept reading on here that (on routes like XC and TPE) we'd be better running fewer trains but of proper length, rather than cramming the network with lots of short services - and that frequency matters less since so many passengers are on "advanced" tickets restricting them to a particular train - it seems that many passengers prefer a single Voyager every half hour to a doubled up one very hour

Yeah Crosscountry really is bad given how much demand their could be for their leisure routes and they’ve never had the same sort of commuter demand as some others. Perhaps they had a bigger business contingent but still poor

Agreed - I would have guessed that they'd have done better since I keep getting told how "leisure" demand is bouncing back healthily compared to "commuter" demand

 

[northwichcat]

• Northern must be running a lot more than 91% of services around Newcastle/ Leeds/ Manchester, since their services in South Yorkshire seem to be a lot lower than that!

Northern introduced additional services in December 2019, which makes the figure misleading. I'm not sure how many of them materialised but there's a thread on them here: https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/northern-dec-2019-timetable-bid.184384/

For Manchester to Chester via Altrincham the difference would have been:
Weekdays: 37 services in total, instead of 42.
Saturday: 37 services, remaining the same.
Sunday: 14 services, remaining the same.

Over 7 days that's 236 services instead of 261. (90%)

However, I'm pretty sure Mid-Cheshire was the 2nd worse in the Manchester area, after Buxton that returned to an hourly service instead of it's post-2018 half-hourly level.

The contrast betwwen LNER and Avanti is quite stark and given they serve similar markets, the only explanations I can really think for this difference are due to train operations such as train frequencies, promotions and on board service.

Avanti were running 2/3rds of their normal Manchester to London services in November and December. I made two return journeys and on all trains I used they were fairly full. For one journey there was even an announcement that the service would be very busy and that passengers with open tickets should consider travelling on a later service.

 

[Starmill]

The company seems to be experiencing systematic failure at the moment.

I notice that today all services between Crewe and Nottingham / Newark Castle are formed of four coaches, with reliefs between Derby and Stoke-on-Trent formed of seven coaches. Additional capacity has been provided mainly for the benefit of the Midland Grand National at Uttoxeter today.

 

[yorksrob]

I notice that today all services between Crewe and Nottingham / Newark Castle are formed of four coaches, with reliefs between Derby and Stoke-on-Trent formed of seven coaches. Additional capacity has been provided mainly for the benefit of the Midland Grand National at Uttoxeter today.

Ah well, perhaps that explains it.

It shows how little spare capacity there is in the network. One has to rob Peter to pay Paul.

One can't put all the blame on EMR because TPE have also been found wanting.

 

[Killingworth]

Ah well, perhaps that explains it.

It shows how little spare capacity there is in the network. One has to rob Peter to pay Paul.

One can't put all the blame on EMR because TPE have also been found wanting.

Time was when there were spare carriages available across the network, but that was 60 years ago and Dr Beeching highlighted how many of those thousands weren't used for more than a few days a year. Almost all could be easily coupled to each other too.

Keeping a few older units as reserve stock seems too difficult for the modern age but old coaches and a spare loco or two might come in handy.

 

[yorksrob]

Time was when there were spare carriages available across the network, but that was 60 years ago and Dr Beeching highlighted how many of those thousands weren't used for more than a few days a year. Almost all could be easily coupled to each other too.

Keeping a few older units as reserve stock seems too difficult for the modern age but old coaches and a spare loco or two might come in handy.

I agree wholeheartedly. The 153's would have been ideal for this, but now moving passengers comfortably seems to have the lowest priority on the railway

 

[Peterthegreat]

I assume the passenger journeys were derived from ORCATS. If this was the case then the number of passenger journeys by TOC will be broadly in line with the number of trains operated over each section. (I know it is more complicated than that but it works as a broad comparison).
On a number of routes some operators are running fewer services whilst others have, more or less, maintained services levels. Therefore looking at Cross Country in comparison to others

Edinburgh to Newcastle
Pre Covid one train per hour
Post Covid one train per two hours
but LNER have maintained two trains per hour meaning XC's share of passengers drops from roughly one third to one sixth whilst LNER's rises from two thirds to four fifths.

Newcastle to York
Pre Covid two trains per hour
Post Covid one train per hour
TPE have also cut services from two trains per hour to one whilst LNER have maintained two.
So the XC share drops from one third to one quarter (as does TPE). LNER's share rises from one third to one half.

Doncaster to Sheffield
Pre Covid one train per hour
Post Covid very few
So virtually no share of a large flow.

Similar statistics can be applied to other XC flows
e.g
Oxford to Reading
Reading to Basingstoke
Bristol to Plymouth
Wolverhampton to Birmingham

Also by cutting out stops at places such as Chesterfield and Winchester relatively large flows are lost to XC but transferred to other operators.

 

[tbtc]

Northern introduced additional services in December 2019, which makes the figure misleading. I'm not sure how many of them materialised but there's a thread on them here: https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/northern-dec-2019-timetable-bid.184384/

Cheers for explaining

Time was when there were spare carriages available across the network, but that was 60 years ago and Dr Beeching highlighted how many of those thousands weren't used for more than a few days a year. Almost all could be easily coupled to each other too.

Keeping a few older units as reserve stock seems too difficult for the modern age but old coaches and a spare loco or two might come in handy.

That would have worked better if we had stock as uncomplicated as the carriages scrapped in the 1960s - you could couple them to an existing loco hauled rake without many problems

Keeping DMUs "spare" on a Just In Case basis would have been a lot more complicated though - they'd need a lot more looking after to keep them mechanically sound plus we'd presumably need to keep staff trained on them since they'd be driving/working on them (rather than them just being coaches on a longer rake), so we'd have some conversations to have about how much money to spend on maintaining them and taking staff off their regular duties to keep their training up to date

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Keeping DMUs "spare" on a Just In Case basis would have been a lot more complicated though - they'd need a lot more looking after to keep them mechanically sound plus we'd presumably need to keep staff trained on them since they'd be driving/working on them (rather than them just being coaches on a longer rake), so we'd have some conversations to have about how much money to spend on maintaining them and taking staff off their regular duties to keep their training up to date

Presumably some of those problems would be solved if you worked it by simply ordering a bit more stock than you need each time you order new trains, so that you have some spare capacity of the same design as the ones you're using, rather than ordering the bare minimum that you think you need to run the planned service levels. You might still need extra maintenance (although reduced by each unit being in use for slightly fewer hours) but no extra staff training required.

In the long run, I do wonder whether we should be looking at how we can reduce the numbers of different designs of train and make trains that run on similar types of route more inter-operable, but I'm sure that's a topic for a separate thread.

 

[northwichcat]

I think some of the services cancelled due to a failed train occur because of privitisation. There's often spare units sat at Chester station but if one of the Northern's units fails there the outbound service gets cancelled as the other trains there belong to TfW Rail. The reverse probably happens at Manchester.