Cross Country to operate Leeds-Glasgow via Settle services using HSTs?

[Halifaxlad]

You can buy a Tesco Meal Deal and eat it on a 158.

This would make a great advert for the new Great British Railways I can see it now...

Great British Railways sponsored by Tescos

 

[30907]

2 years ago there were 2 tph between Birmingham and Newcastle via Doncaster. They provided me, and all to the south, with the quickest journey between Sheffield and Newcastle but they've disappeared, along with hourly stops at Chesterfield.

Before diving off into these ideas how about restoring routes and services that already had a market until very recently? Then iron out ways these services can better link up to help more people to get to more places more quickly, including the few who want to go from Leeds to Glasgow or vice versa?

I think the proposal presumes thst the pre-Covid XC network will have been restored, and that an all-Voyager fleet will be operating there.

 

[Ianno87]

2 years ago there were 2 tph between Birmingham and Newcastle via Doncaster. They provided me, and all to the south, with the quickest journey between Sheffield and Newcastle but they've disappeared, along with hourly stops at Chesterfield.

Happy to be corrected, but there has never been 2tph via Doncaster; the established pattern is (in general) 1tph via Doncaster and 1tph via Leeds.

Chesterfield is (AIUI) one of the stops removed on grounds of buying time "social distancing" at other stations.

 

[Killingworth]

Happy to be corrected, but there has never been 2tph via Doncaster; the established pattern is (in general) 1tph via Doncaster and 1tph via Leeds.

Chesterfield is (AIUI) one of the stops removed on grounds of buying time "social distancing" at other stations.

Apologies. 2 tph, one via Leeds and the other about 20 minutes quicker via Doncaster.

Social distancing on hourly 10 coach trains. Thin edge of a wedge to leave it like that for ever.

I think it was maybe 30-40 years ago that service missed out both Leeds and Doncaster between York and Sheffield, but I'm going far too far off at a tangent from this thread now.

 

[Ianno87]

Social distancing on hourly 10 coach trains. Thin edge of a wedge to leave it like that for ever.

Being devil's advocate for a second....

In Transport Planning terms, the relative importance of frequency diminishes as distance (thus journey time) gets longer. So 2tph between Birmingham and Newcastle say is only fractionally more attractive to passengers than 1tph between Birmingham and Newcastle, because the dominant component of "Generalised Journey Time" is the point-to-point journey time not the frequency.

So, what is Cross Country for? Is it a long distance operator where frequency is less important but end-to-end journey time is, or is it a operator focused on short/medium distance journeys (albeit using long distance through trains) where frequency is important (because of the comparative ease of alternative modes such as driving)?

 

[BrianW]

Is there data (pre-Covid?) on how many travellers there are Leeds- Glasgow (or Edinburgh?) or from Nottingham, or Sheffield, or Skipton? or Birmingham- Newcastle...?
Are there still 'steelworkers' (ex Stewarts and Lloyds?) travelling 'home' from Corby to Glasgow, or Motherwell or ...
I appreciate there may be unserved 'latent' demand, and/or 'spare capacity', and endless possibilities of solutions looking for unrealised problems- I like speculating myself, whether blue sky thinking or grey.
Thank goodness we're not in charge


So, what is Cross Country for? Indeed- what is any train for? As many have been increasingly asking, and answering by 'empty-seating'?

 

[py_megapixel]

So, what is Cross Country for? Indeed- what is any train for? As many have been increasingly asking, and answering by 'empty-seating'?

Pre-Covid regular users of CrossCountry will confirm that their trains were often anything but empty.

 

[Bald Rick]

Is there data (pre-Covid?) on how many travellers there are Leeds- Glasgow (or Edinburgh?) or from Nottingham, or Sheffield, or Skipton? or Birmingham- Newcastle...?

Yes, lots. None public.

Are there still 'steelworkers' (ex Stewarts and Lloyds?) travelling 'home' from Corby to Glasgow, or Motherwell or ...

I doubt there’s many.

 

[HSTEd]

One question we should ask is whether it is reasonable to use intercity optimised trains on a service that is largely used by people making shorter journeys.

Perhaps a 395-esque interior with a TPE style first class compartment would be a better fit.

Although I know this is the utmost heresy.

 

[Bletchleyite]

One question we should make it whether it is reasonable to use intercity optimised trains on a service that is largely used by people making shorter journeys.

Perhaps a 395-esque interior with a TPE style first class compartment would be a better fit.

Although I know this is the utmost heresy.

Class 170s would have served XC perfectly well, and could have been a couple of vehicles longer for the same money.

 

[JonathanH]

Class 170s would have served XC perfectly well, and could have been a couple of vehicles longer for the same money.

Maybe, but they would have got in the way north of York and north of Crewe. If Cross Country (as it was in 2000) wanted to serve routes where the other operators ran at 125mph, it needed to have 125mph trains. (I appreciate that the routes slow down further north but there are sufficient stretches of 125mph such that the higher top speed was needed.)

You can make the same point about the use of Meridians replacing 170s on the Midland route. Why didn't they just build more intermediate coaches for the 170s they had? (Part of the answer is that there was a willing outlet at Central Trains for the 170s but it isn't the whole answer.)

If Cross Country only ran Manchester to Reading / York to Bristol, 170s could arguably have worked.

 

[Ianno87]

Is there data (pre-Covid?) on how many travellers there are Leeds- Glasgow (or Edinburgh?) or from Nottingham, or Sheffield, or Skipton? or Birmingham- Newcastle...?
Are there still 'steelworkers' (ex Stewarts and Lloyds?) travelling 'home' from Corby to Glasgow, or Motherwell or ...
I appreciate there may be unserved 'latent' demand, and/or 'spare capacity', and endless possibilities of solutions looking for unrealised problems- I like speculating myself, whether blue sky thinking or grey.
Thank goodness we're not in charge


So, what is Cross Country for? Indeed- what is any train for? As many have been increasingly asking, and answering by 'empty-seating'?

And my counter to that would be "did Cross Country, through prioritising frequency over on-train capacity, adequately serve long distance flows, or were the trains too bogged down and crowded with shorter distance traffic stimulated by the frequency?"

It is however worth noting that pre-Covid CrossCountry was a net-premium-paying franchise.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 25 May 2021 ==

One question we should ask is whether it is reasonable to use intercity optimised trains on a service that is largely used by people making shorter journeys.

Perhaps a 395-esque interior with a TPE style first class compartment would be a better fit.

Although I know this is the utmost heresy.

Yes, definitely part of the Cross Country 'problem' is dwell times at Coventry, Wolverhampton etc going through the roof at busy periods as passengers doing short hops to Birmingham cram themselves into end-door vestibules, luggage racks, toilets etc.

 

[py_megapixel]

Yes, definitely part of the Cross Country 'problem' is dwell times at Coventry, Wolverhampton etc going through the roof at busy periods as passengers doing short hops to Birmingham cram themselves into end-door vestibules, luggage racks, toilets etc.

At Wolverhampton why couldn't you just take the stop out? In reality for most long-distance journeys there is somewhere else a passenger could change and for hops to Birmingham there's already plenty of services

 

[JonathanH]

At Wolverhampton why couldn't you just take the stop out? In reality for most long-distance journeys there is somewhere else a passenger could change and for hops to Birmingham there's already plenty of services

Virgin Trains tried taking out stops at Wolverhampton as one of the mitigation measures after Operation Princess - similarly the Stafford stop isn't in the Birmingham to Scotland trains. The reality is that the Wolverhampton stop is useful as a connection point for people who want to avoid changing at Birmingham New Street (as well as a source of passengers). Presumably Cross Country make more money with the stop than without when they put it through their modelling.

 

[37424]

I'm baffled by some of the ideas brought forward.

The HST preservation lobby I can understand, but contemplating the operation of 50 year old trains, designed for 7, 8 and 9 carriages, running at 125mph, over the bleak S&C on a scheduled inter-city service seems fanciful, even if reduced to 4 car. Great to operate a few HST charter rail tours, maybe regular Jacobite style where timings are not critical, but that's a different animal. (I like HSTs and the S&C as much as anyone.)

Alternative traction for a regular service runs up against capacity constraints.

But the clincher is surely the volume of traffic likely between Leeds and Glasgow. Where else along that route is there volume that's not reasonably well served already?

Currently there are a very few direct trains by XC taking about 4 hours, Leeds-Glasgow, otherwise connections are needed. 2 years ago there were 2 tph between Birmingham and Newcastle via Doncaster. They provided me, and all to the south, with the quickest journey between Sheffield and Newcastle but they've disappeared, along with hourly stops at Chesterfield.

Before diving off into these ideas how about restoring routes and services that already had a market until very recently? Then iron out ways these services can better link up to help more people to get to more places more quickly, including the few who want to go from Leeds to Glasgow or vice versa?

There seems to be a number of people going off at a tangent with regard to XC core routes which doesn't seem particularly relevant.

They way I look at is any likely Voyager cascade will result in HST's being replaced on the core XC routes and allow them to be Voyager only. So they are then surplus to requirements and this proposed S&C service may be a suitable option for them.

The fact that this appears to be instigated by the Dft would suggest that there is some chance of it happening although of course the provision of rolling stock and operator could change in the mean time if it does happen.

Some people do go that way to Glasgow done it myself sometimes, the fare having worked out cheaper, I wouldn't envisage more than 4 or 5 trains per day each way and it can potentially better cater for passengers who just want to travel the line as well as develop the market for longer distance customer from Scotland, and potentially take some customers off XC/TPE East Coast services to Scotland.

 

[Ianno87]

Virgin Trains tried taking out stops at Wolverhampton as one of the mitigation measures after Operation Princess - similarly the Stafford stop isn't in the Birmingham to Scotland trains. The reality is that the Wolverhampton stop is useful as a connection point for people who want to avoid changing at Birmingham New Street (as well as a source of passengers). Presumably Cross Country make more money with the stop than without when they put it through their modelling.

Depends whether that "money" is net revenue generational to the industry, or merely CrossCountry obtaining a slice of the ORCATS pie at Wolverhampton.

 

[HSTEd]

It is however worth noting that pre-Covid CrossCountry was a net-premium-paying franchise.

ORR had it with a net subsidy of 5.6p per mile in 2018-19.
Only one franchise managed net premium that year, and it was c2c

 

[Ianno87]

the Wolverhampton stop is useful as a connection point for people who want to avoid changing at Birmingham New Street (as well as a source of passengers). Pr

How true actually is this? 90% of pax will just change where the journey planner tells them to change...usually New Street.

 

[Bletchleyite]

How true actually is this? 90% of pax will just change where the journey planner tells them to change...usually New Street.

And New St really is a nice place to change now, with excellent facilities, compared with windswept Wolves with basically nothing there.

 

[Ianno87]

ORR had it with a net subsidy of 5.6p per mile in 2018-19.
Only one franchise managed net premium that year, and it was c2c

According to https://assets.publishing.service.g...data/file/723603/cross-country-prospectus.pdf (Page 31), it was a net premium payer from 2011/12 to 2017/18 (albeit with revenue support in a couple of those years).

 

[HSTEd]

According to https://assets.publishing.service.g...data/file/723603/cross-country-prospectus.pdf (Page 31), it was a net premium payer from 2011/12 to 2017/18 (albeit with revenue support in a couple of those years).

Those figures exclude the network grant.

 

[adrock1976]

My own thoughts on XC running Leeds - Carlisle is that it is a crazy idea, with my concerns being if there is any major disruption or delays around Birmingham, Derby, Sheffield, and Leeds, it would knock out the timings for the single track section over the viaduct at Ribblehead, and would end up being curtailed at Leeds (or Skipton).

Being as Leeds - Glasgow/West Central Scotland via Appleby is the shortest route, I would concentrate on running a clock face frequency of every 2 hours Leeds - Carlisle, optimised for connections depending upon timings for the Leeds - Skipton section. The opposite hour could be used for a clock face frequency of every 2 hours for the Leeds - Lancaster.

If the S&C is to have a limited stop InterCity service at all, I would suggest as an experiment to extend one London St Pancras - Sheffield to Carlisle, calling Barnsley, Wakefield Kirkgate (or routed via Moorthorpe and calling Wakefield Westgate), Leeds, Shipley, maybe Bingley and/or Keighley so as to avoid catching up a Leeds or Bradford - Skipton local), Skipton, Settle, Kirkby Stephen, Appleby, and Carlisle. This could be done in July and August so as to test the leisure demand, and if not successful or ends up being unreliable, can be withdrawn five years after commencement.

 

[Clansman]

Are Modern Railways a reliable source for this sort of information?

 

[Ianno87]

Are Modern Railways a reliable source for this sort of information?

They were also source for the apparent plan to use the would-have-been Grand Central 90+Mk3 sets on Manchester-Birmingham services.

Perhaps some of the "blue sky" ideas getting leaked by an overexcited source slightly too soon?

 

[37424]

My own thoughts on XC running Leeds - Carlisle is that it is a crazy idea, with my concerns being if there is any major disruption or delays around Birmingham, Derby, Sheffield, and Leeds, it would knock out the timings for the single track section over the viaduct at Ribblehead, and would end up being curtailed at Leeds (or Skipton).

Being as Leeds - Glasgow/West Central Scotland via Appleby is the shortest route, I would concentrate on running a clock face frequency of every 2 hours Leeds - Carlisle, optimised for connections depending upon timings for the Leeds - Skipton section. The opposite hour could be used for a clock face frequency of every 2 hours for the Leeds - Lancaster.

If the S&C is to have a limited stop InterCity service at all, I would suggest as an experiment to extend one London St Pancras - Sheffield to Carlisle, calling Barnsley, Wakefield Kirkgate (or routed via Moorthorpe and calling Wakefield Westgate), Leeds, Shipley, maybe Bingley and/or Keighley so as to avoid catching up a Leeds or Bradford - Skipton local), Skipton, Settle, Kirkby Stephen, Appleby, and Carlisle. This could be done in July and August so as to test the leisure demand, and if not successful or ends up being unreliable, can be withdrawn five years after commencement.

I think the idea is Leeds to Glasgow not Leeds to Carlisle and it looks more like a stand alone service so I don't see how disruption around Birmingham would be of any relevance, and the single track section around Ribbleshead is very short hardly a major issue.

 

[tbtc]

Perhaps part of the reason could be to help avoid bustition which is widely reviled as passengers have paid lots more to travel by train. With Great British Rail, would that not allow the possibility of passengers being diverted to Cross Country trains (and likely other operators further south) when WCML and ECML or both are closed due to 'operational difficulties' or indeed possibly allow greater flexibility for maintenance work on ECML / WCML?

How often does this happen though? Are you trying to solve a genuine regular problem or just justify HSTs over Ribblehead?

Network Rail do their best to ensure that one of the two Anglo Scottish routes remains open at all times - engineering is planned to keep one of the two open.

Obviously there are some times when extreme weather disrupts both at the same time, but if we have such a bad winter that the ECML is closed then I'm not sure that travelling via Dent is going to be frost free.

I could understand if the premise of this thread was suggesting that, when the ECML is scheduled to be closed (like it is north of Newcastle each October) it might be better to run London - Leeds - Carlisle - Edinburgh, rather than the long established Tyne Valley diversions, now that we have all of these fancy bi-modes capable of running Skpton - Carlisle without any wires - that would presumably be faster than running via Newcastle? That's taking a genuine problem and trying to find a solution to it (on the rare occasions that the line north of Newcastle is closed). But HSTs providing a few trains a day from Leeds to Glasgow? I just can't see what real problems is solves (that aren't problems that could be solved by throwing more resources at existing services)

All goes to show the difficulties in balancing priorities on a constrained network, and with more 'political interference' to come? No XC or TPE etc to 'argue the toss'

This is one worry I have about our brave new world of "nationalised" railway

Some public transport might be run based on passenger needs (reviewing what actual demand is out there, trying to provide capacity to suit genuine needs)

Some public transport might be run based on engineering needs/ to suit drivers etc (or at least that's the suspicion that passengers have!)

But I really don't want Great British Rail to go down the route of focussing more on what works for focus groups of voters who don't use something but have very strong opinions about it.

We've had over a decade of Government policy being based more about what the "main on the Clapham omnibus" thinks/ wants than what actual users want/need. For example, Micheal Gove's education reforms seem to be more about teaching kids in line with what Baby Boomers think children ought to be learning than about listening to educational professionals - no teacher I knew was worrying about whether seven year olds knew enough about fronted adverbials, but today's schools have to follow what older adults think kids ought to be learning.

Same in prisons - policy seems to be more about appeasing angry newspaper columnists than listening to prison wardens/ social workers etc - more focus on "locking people up" than relying to reform behaviour or tackle the "causes of crime"

We've seen the way that the old Wales & Borders has become disproportionally obsessed with Holyhead - Cardiff ("Premier Class" with a restaurant for the politicians, whilst the rest of the franchise struggled)

I now worry that, if this RIbblehead idea is a sign of things to come, that the English railway will be similarly run for political reasons rather than to suit genuine passenger demands. But the idea of 125mph trains over the famous viaduct will go down nicely with the kind of people who like to watch Heartbeat and have this cosy nostalgia for rural Yorkshire (and, whilst the XC service from Leeds to Glasgow can be busy, there are depressingly a lot more of the nostalgia crowd and we have a Prime Minister who desperately wants to be a crowd pleaser, so I could see him wanting to have some stunt like HSTs over Ribblehead

It's a bit like the recent Arriva "Northern" franchise, which committed to trying to create lots of direct links even if these meant throwing additional trains through bottlenecks (Bradford to Manchester Airport? Bradford to Liverpool? Bradford to Nottingham...) - we need a railway run in the interests of ordinary passengers, not local politicians eager to be seen to achieve some small victory for their local line, not national politicians who would be more swayed by the desires of the 95% of people who don't regularly use trains than the 5% of people who do regularly use trains (and would be annoyed that their regular trip still involves them fighting for a scarce seat, whilst resources are thrown at some luxury route like the Ribblehead proposals.

Hopefully just a belated April Fool though, eh?

I think it was maybe 30-40 years ago that service missed out both Leeds and Doncaster between York and Sheffield, but I'm going far too far off at a tangent from this thread now.

pre-Princess it was quite a mess - sometimes going via both Leeds and Doncaster, sometimes going via neither (the route through Pontefract), certainly never clock face in this neck of the woods

So, what is Cross Country for? Is it a long distance operator where frequency is less important but end-to-end journey time is, or is it a operator focused on short/medium distance journeys (albeit using long distance through trains) where frequency is important (because of the comparative ease of alternative modes such as driving)?

Now there's a question...

I think it's a messy mix of a lot of things. On some bits of the route, it's the only option

Maybe, but they would have got in the way north of York and north of Crewe. If Cross Country (as it was in 2000) wanted to serve routes where the other operators ran at 125mph, it needed to have 125mph trains. (I appreciate that the routes slow down further north but there are sufficient stretches of 125mph such that the higher top speed was needed.)

You can make the same point about the use of Meridians replacing 170s on the Midland route. Why didn't they just build more intermediate coaches for the 170s they had? (Part of the answer is that there was a willing outlet at Central Trains for the 170s but it isn't the whole answer.)

If Cross Country only ran Manchester to Reading / York to Bristol, 170s could arguably have worked.

I think 100mph trains would have been better for XC

Too late now, of course, but the space taken up by crumple zones required to facilitate 125mph running is a bit like the narrow body frame required to facilitate tilt on the Voyagers - I don't think that the small/short sections of 125mph running and/or tilt warranted the impact upon capacity that crumple zones/ tilting required

Remember, XC were running Class 47s/ 86s and 158s (and some HSTs) prior to Voyagers, so it wasn't a "fast" railway. And even if the line speed is 125mph that doesn't mean that all trains have to be (e.g. the Transpennine services from Newcastle to York)

Whereas, if they'd had 100mph trains it'd have been a heck of a lot easier to bring in additional stock, given the large number of 100mph DMUs - rather than having timetables based on Voyagers which meant only Voyagers could manage most of the diagrams

In the case of Midland Mainline, the order was for some nine coach trains for an hourly London - Leeds service, as well as providing additional capacity on routes operated by the 170s, so one big order made sense I guess

(the SRA turned that hourly Leeds service down, hence the 222s being reformed into seven coaches to replace HSTs with the remaining coaches used to extend most of the four coach trains to five)

 

[Bald Rick]

Those figures exclude the network grant.

Which Cross Country (or any other TOC) don’t pay.

And New St really is a nice place to change now, with excellent facilities, compared with windswept Wolves with basically nothing there.

The new Wolverhampton is better. And besides, the best thing about changing trains at Wolves is the Great Western next door. But beware if you are drinking a pint every 30 mins and have a train every thirty minutes, and get out of sync.

 

[Clansman]

They were also source for the apparent plan to use the would-have-been Grand Central 90+Mk3 sets on Manchester-Birmingham services.

Perhaps some of the "blue sky" ideas getting leaked by an overexcited source slightly too soon?

That's interesting.

I don't take much seriousness with any dedicated railway news source, as I find there's a tendancy for the writers to go off script or get overly speculative on the topics they're covering. I feel like Leeds - Glasgow via S&C is another such example.

Though I'd love to be proven wrong.

 

[greatvoyager]

According to the (online) version of the latest edition of Modern Railways, vegetables have infiltrated the DfT Cross Country and the DfT are investigating the possibility of XC running Leeds-Glasgow services via the Settle-Carlisle line, using class 442s (sorry, couldn't resist it!) XC's HST fleet. This would be possible through the transfer of Avanti's voyagers to XC. It also mentions the possibility of voyagers being used on Cardiff-Nottingham services.

Let the wibblefest commence!


Here's the headline and first paragraph from the news item; I won't copy any more, I'm not sure what the copyright issues might be.

It seems very unrealistic. Is this just a plan to justify the additional rolling stock for XC?

 

[30907]

It seems very unrealistic. Is this just a plan to justify the additional rolling stock for XC?

More like asking what to do with HSTs that have been PRM modified and have a few years more life in them IMO.