Remember when TPE only ran every two hours up the WCML (north of Oxenholme), only every hour to Liverpool and the Newcastle service was only an hourly train off-peak (with the unit being used to beef up services south/west of York at rush hour)... and hourly services from Manchester to Sheffield with single DMUs?
Then the WCML service (north of Oxenholme) was increased to hourly over the course of a few timetable changes, the Liverpool service became half hourly and the Newcastle service became two per hour (albeit badly spaced for the sake of passengers wanting direct services to both Liverpool and Manchester Airport).
Now resources are being found to provide Liverpool services up the WCML plus extending some of the Newcastle services to Edinburgh... but the Sheffield service is still getting single DMUs.
Great for the fringes of the franchise, amazing if you are the kind of person wanting low priced advanced tickets to/from Edinburgh/ Glasgow, sure, but it's harder to take when you are waiting modest improvements to Sheffield
Which is exactly the point I’m making. TPE could take a much more leisurely approach to introducing their new fleets but then the forum would be filled full of posts along the lines of ‘why am I travelling on a 3 car Class 185 that’s completely rammed, when there are five car Nova 1 trains sat at Heaton awaiting crew training.’
Or maybe "why am I travelling on a 3 car Class 185 that’s completely rammed from Sheffield to Manchester, when TPE are finding the resources to run from Newcastle to Edinburgh and Liverpool to Glasgow"?
Given how terrible the service is on TPEx I do not understand why the same small number of contributors to this thread are sympathetic towards them. Maybe you are Leo Goodwin and his cronies?
The level of cancellation is intolerable in my opinion
Northern deserve some criticism and get more criticism than that
TPE deserve some criticism but get criticised less than that - but TPE are bringing in loco hauled trains, so some people have a blind spot to their problems
With all this going on on the north trans pennine routes theirs not much talk about the South pennine route is this largely unaffected by the problems. As people has said on here TPE should forget about the Edinburgh extension from Newcastle and the Liverpool to Glasgow till May and see if this will ease the problems.
South TPE hasn't had things as bad. The main issue is 3-car when 6 has been promised especially in peaks and weekends when football matches are taking place especially now that Sheffield United are in the Prem.
Agreed re the extensions (a luxury in the short term IMHO)
The "south" route has been affected by general reliability problems (given the number of trains squeezed through the Dore - Swinton corridor, signalling around Sheffield, regulation...) but we are crying out for the longer trains that we were promised (but are being used to extend other services)
Short forming on LNER is no-where near as bad implied on this thread. Maybe a couple of diagrams a day, pretty similar to what TPE do on the South Pennie route every day. Couple this with LNER try to focus the short-forming on the quieter services (Sorry Leeds)
In LNER's favour, the services were cut under VTEC (to ensure reliability) - at least Virgin took action to thin out the timetable (instead of promising to run 100% and regularly cancelling trains), so I think they are more honest about cancellations
Perhaps LNER made that a condition of a ticket acceptance agreement!
