Suitable candidates for conversion to light rail

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Why not just improve the suburban rail routes instead of downgrading them to be lower capacity? And why cant Manchester have a tube line? there are smaller cities with similar setups, here and abroad.

I'd love Manchester (and all the other Northern cities that are missing metro systems) to have underground systems, but the funding for that is unlikely to be forthcoming as it would be extremely expensive and, to some extent, unproven.

I just don't see why we are aiming to essentially handicap lines to be a situation where they are grossly unfit for the current, never mind the future, demands of the city.

I don't really know what you're talking about. There are current south Manchester suburban lines which really need more capacity but are handicapped by paths into Piccadilly, Northern's crew and rolling stock shortages, and other things besides. By running trams into the city centre rather than trains into Piccadilly, one is not only providing a more useful service to people who live along those lines (because they can now get closer to their city-centre destination) but also freeing oneself from this constraint, allowing much more capacity.

Take the Glossop/Hadfield route for example, which is served on a timetable that I can only describe as "sort-of-hourly*" with 323s with a capacity of 275 seats. What would happen if this line were converted to Metrolink? Let's suppose we start with the bare minimum Metrolink service - a single tram every 12 minutes. An M5000 tram has approximately 60 seats (varies depending on which variant you look at) and one tram every 12 mins is 5 per hour. So Already that is 300 seats per hour, slightly exceeding our hourly 323.

But there is loads of room to expand this. Doubling up half the trams would give 450 seats. Doubling all would give 600. Then if there still isn't enough capacity you can bring the frequency up to every six minutes (1200 seats). We haven't even considered yet that different designs of vehicles are much more than seat numbers: M5000s have wide open spaces which facilitate lots of standing passengers, and they have level boarding which makes the service more useful to everyone from the disabled to people who simply have heavy bags they'd rather not lift up a step.

*It's essentially hourly, but every two hours it switches which half of the hour it runs in, so you get a 30 minute gap, then a 60 minute gap, then a 90 minute gap, then a 60 minute gap, then repeat. Eliminating this kind of passenger-unfriendly scheduling nonsense is another factor in favour or a turn-up-and-go style service This is wrong, see discussion below.

 

[Bletchleyite]

*It's essentially hourly, but every two hours it switches which half of the hour it runs in, so you get a 30 minute gap, then a 60 minute gap, then a 90 minute gap, then a 60 minute gap, then repeat. Eliminating this kind of passenger-unfriendly scheduling nonsense is another factor in favour or a turn-up-and-go style service.

Wha? Hadfield? It's half-hourly and almost always has been, at xx14/xx44 all day from Hadfield. Are you looking at the strike timetable?

It was increased to 3tph for a period a while back but demand did not justify retaining it.

Edit: Oh, I see what you mean, there still seems to be a diagram missing. It's meant to be half hourly. This is clearly still a legacy of COVID. However there aren't any 90 minute gaps I can see other than between 2200 and 2329, which isn't unusual for hourly evening services in the North so the last train is more useful (it's also the case for Barrow, for example, or if it's not now it will be in Dec).

 

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Wha? Hadfield? It's half-hourly and almost always has been, at xx14/xx44 all day from Hadfield. Are you looking at the strike timetable?

It was increased to 3tph for a period a while back but demand did not justify retaining it.

Edit: Oh, I see what you mean, there still seems to be a diagram missing. It's meant to be half hourly. This is clearly still a legacy of COVID. However there aren't any 90 minute gaps I can see other than between 2200 and 2329, which isn't unusual for hourly evening services in the North so the last train is more useful (it's also the case for Barrow, for example, or if it's not now it will be in Dec).

Yes, sorry, I used that line a while ago (before May) and I remember being irritated at some 90 min gaps (particularly one between 15:14 and 16:44, but I think it was actually that Northern were having a bad day regarding staff shortages so some were cancelled.

The gap to make the last train later makes sense and I don't really have an issue with that.