So Newcastle to Leeds goes down from 3 tph pre-pandemic (Liverpool, Manchester Airport, Plymouth) to just the Liverpool services?
My proposed Edinburgh to Nottingham service would make 2tph from Newcastle to Leeds when combined with the TPE.
Ah. Losing direct services to Cheltenham and beyond would still be slightly annoying, but as long as Birmingham isn't cut and with 2 tph for Leeds that's more understandable (and Newcastle to Nottingham's far less time-competitive via London than Newcastle to Bristol / Devon).
This site is incredible - thanks for sharing.
Here's another thought, Bristol-Newcastle could be just over 4 hours if it went via Doncaster, which is the ideal journey time for long distance.
Tamworth and Chesterfield lose their long distance XC services completely? The SW to NE needs to be Leeds, not Reading Newcastle.
Not to a great extent, XC interacts with so many routes that any time you save just ends up at a major station or hanging about somewhere.
I think that would have been best done with HS2 or with four through platforms at Piccadilly and some services going Dorset / Devon – Birmingham – Stoke – Manchester – Liverpool. I think it's better to have a regular pattern, so with current infrastructure prioritising connections at Stafford / Wolverhampton. It's only really the extremities of very long distance services (e.g. Edinburgh – Aberdeen and Plymouth – Penzance on CrossCountry and London services) that I can see the benefit of alternating destinations.
You aren't stopping a Pendo at the likes of Penkridge etc though. Birmingham International isnt that flush with platforms with three terminators an hour either.
The reason given, (as per the ECML Dec 2024 discussion), for some of the June 2025 reinstated Reading to Newcastle services being cut back to York is that there is no track capacity available for them north of York. If that’s correct, and there’s no reason to doubt it, there‘ll presumably also be no room for a stopper, which will get in the way of the faster services anyway. They were trying for ages to run a Middlesborough to Newcastle service via Darlington and Durham, even that couldn’t be pathed amongst the current services so has to run via Sunderland.
If going to alternate destinations then XC would be able to sort out the mess that is the Birmingham-Cheltenham core section, where all trains going to South Wales are those from Nottingham and East etc, and those to South West tend to be to/from North East.
That's a good point, didn't think about that. Maybe if XC acquired the 222s then all services on the Birmingham-Derby-Sheffield/Nottingham corridor could be run by 22x while all the 170s could be concentrated on the Leicester services? Alternatively, instead of the Nottingham services picking up all stops between Birmingham and Derby, how about a fast and slow service from Birmingham to Nottingham and a fast and slow service from Birmingham to Leeds? I think XC shouldn't be the Cinderella of the intercity routes anymore
Its a few Bristol Manchesters, not all of them and no SW NE services as far as I know.
I do like the idea of a Nottingham-Sheffield-Leeds-Newcastle-Edinburgh service, would obviously need new stock such as 8xx bi-modes. Extend it to Glasgow and run it hourly, it would provide a lot of direct links that are constantly proposed on this forum. If it partly replaced the XC north of Newcastle, the only big direct flows that would be lost would be between Edinburgh and points south of Birmingham i.e. Bristol, Exeter and Plymouth.
I agree. Let's hope that whoever gets into Government has the intelligence to give people what they actually want. But don't hold your breath on that!
That’s the most incorrect statement I’ve seen on this forum in a long time. Wolverhampton and Stafford are the only two destinations that Avanti shares with CrossCountry’s Manchester Bournemouth route from Birmingham. Birmingham International and Coventry would lose all services to Stoke, Stockport, Manchester, Banbury, Oxford, Reading, Basingstoke, Winchester, Southampton and Bournemouth.
Any long distance scheduled service would be better than what's on offer at the moment. We'll take what we can get.
2ph to Peterborough seems like an obvious extension, not sure why it's not been done tbh. My plan would be 2ph Birmingham-Peterborough, with one extending to Stanstead and the other to Norwich.I believe that did used to happen back in history?
There are lots of potential journeys along that corridor that are torpedoed by the lack of a Bristol - Birmingham “Regional Express” service, which would also help free up space on XC for “real” long distance passengers.
Some Birmingham trains used to go to Norwich and some Manchester trains used to go to Cambridge, but Birmingham to Peterborough was never 2tph to achieve that.
Could mean Edinburgh to Plymouth and possibly Manchester to Bristol services could skip Cheltenham and Worcestershire Parkway? How about making the Cardiff-Plymouth more frequent and enable XC to lose a few other stops like Tiv Parkway and Totnes?
During the middle of the day at the launch of the 1988 Express timetable Norwich-Birmingham services only called Thetford, Ely, Peterborough, Leicester & Nuneaton. Stamford, Oakham & Melton had 2-hourly calls by Ipswich/Cambridge services.
