The possibly exceptions being towards the end of service, when you're not quite sure when exactly the last tube train is to wherever it is that you want to go, or if you're doing an overly tight Cross London transfer from one London Terminal to another, and your onward journey maybe involves a time-specific Advance ticket.
I didn't realise the shop had closed I have changed trains there once in last few months - but last time I passed through the station building was on a BLS Merseyrail Tour which originated from platform 1. It was open then.
The recent resignalling project abolished platform 1, and platform 2 is out-of-use due to a non-compliant bufferstop. In the pre-resignalling layout, platform 2 could only be entered by a train performing a shunt on the main line. Now there's a facing crossover just country-end of St Margarets, the bufferstops have to be upgraded as it's a main route into the platform - but it's still a route that conflicts with both Up lines. So it'd have to be a strange service pattern to make it worth re-opening platform 2 without causing other delays elsewhere.
I think Skegness is the best example here out of all of them, given it only has a single hourly service to Nottingham outside of special summer services (thus 6 platforms is OVERKILL), whereas others like Blackpool, Southport, Scarborough and Cleethorpes have multiple different services running different ways and especially Blackpool which also has high frequencies that require the amount of platforms it has, thus doesn't make this list.
6 & 7 are officially OOU, whereas 2 & 5 are merely 'restricted use'. But in practice 3 and 4 are the only ones used nowadays.
Thanks for the correction. It'd been a good few years since I was there.
Make sense. I bet it hasn't been touched for a decade or more as it isn't needed or likely to be.
It does gets used though to allow late running Avanti's from Scotland to pass. It never gets timetabled but it does see use 4 or 5 times a week due to the above. Usage may vary but i tried for this earlier in the year shuttling back and to on the Crewe to Liverpool service and achieved my goal on the third attempt.
Platform 5 last year was used for the "Extra" Saturday services that EM put on for 6 weeks in the summer but at that time of the year lighting wasn't an issue of course. For 2020 i believe the HST's on the same gig were placed into P4, partially because it was (so i was told by the dispatch staff) the longest of the available platforms. This meant the regular services used P3.
Are these branded MToGo though?
I don't agree with making Ellesmere Port a shuttle but it is a fair comment that its performance has always been a bit of a disappointment.
But once upon a time an important junction station.
Early morning and late night trains terminate there instead of Tonbridge to allow trains to use the SEML to get to/from to Tonbridge/Ashford for stabling.
There does appear to be 2 trains a day that still carry on to Tonbridge in December
2 in the morning (0826 and 0852 arrivals), 2 in the evening (1555 and 1655 arrivals) and one at night (2330 arrival). I assume the daytime 4 are for schools and the last is for stabling at the Jubilee Sidings overnight.
By coincidence as I was only reading this thread last night, we were pulled into Platform 5 this morning at Skegness and I really can't remember the last time that happened. We were 30 mins late into Skegness on the 0645 from Nottingham so maybe it was just because the 0731 from Nottingham wouldnt have been too far behind us by then.
