The UK and white elephant stations

[duffield]

Its a poor service unfortunately and frankly either Scotrail need to extend to Berwick Upon Tweed or TPE need to run hourly between Edinburgh and Newcastle or merge the Scotrail Dunbar service with the Northern Morpeth service and run hourly.


Not sure how an extra service(s) can be accommodated at Leeds to be honest


Indeed see first comment above, but TPE didn't have firm rights but Lumo did so TPE got booted out.


Soham was apparently built on the 'cheap' by building it on the single line section between Bury St Edmunds and Ely, it didn't need lifts nor a second platform, thats proving a folly due to the amount of freight on the line.

For me though I'd be interested to know how much of a white elephant Ilkeston is? That was meant to be parkway station but only gets an hourly service from Northern with a few random extras from EMR each day,

Ilkeston may or may not be as successful as hoped for but the ORR stats for 2022/23 seem to show it's twice as busy (127k vs 63k total entries/exits) as Bingham, another local station picked as an example with a roughly hourly service. So probably not a white elephant.

Link to ORR statistics page:

Estimates of station usage | ORR Data Portal

 

[Djgr]

Seems like it has been approved costing 96M.

I would guess that are planning Liverpool Baltic for around 1.5m passengers a year and Daresbury 0.1 to 0.2m

 

[70014IronDuke]

Ilkeston may or may not be as successful as hoped for but the ORR stats for 2022/23 seem to show it's twice as busy (127k vs 63k total entries/exits) as Bingham, another local station picked as an example with a roughly hourly service. So probably not a white elephant.

Link to ORR statistics page:

Estimates of station usage | ORR Data Portal

To be fair to Bingham (not that I have anything for or against), its service is primarily local, with the seasonal add on of Skeggy. (Yes, there is the odd EMR service too, and I'm sure there are Bingham folks who change at Nottingham and Grantham for onward journeys, but my bet is that 40%, maybe 50%, of Bingham pax are just for Nottingham.)

In contrast, the service at Ilkeston, while not exactly on electric timings, serves serious places all along the Nottingham - Sheffield - Leeds route, plus some EMR services to Manchester, central Lancs, Liverpool and East Anglia.
Ploddding the may be, but without the need to change, the NR trains provide a solid and, as far as I can see, reasonably reliable service.

 

[duffield]

To be fair to Bingham (not that I have anything for or against), its service is primarily local, with the seasonal add on of Skeggy. (Yes, there is the odd EMR service too, and I'm sure there are Bingham folks who change at Nottingham and Grantham for onward journeys, but my bet is that 40%, maybe 50%, of Bingham pax are just for Nottingham.)

In contrast, the service at Ilkeston, while not exactly on electric timings, serves serious places all along the Nottingham - Sheffield - Leeds route, plus some EMR services to Manchester, central Lancs, Liverpool and East Anglia.
Ploddding the may be, but without the need to change, the NR trains provide a solid and, as far as I can see, reasonably reliable service.

Oh yes, I wasn't trying to suggest Bingham *was* a white elephant at all, just that Ilkeston definitely wasn't!

But thinking about it, a much better comparison would have been Langley Mill, since it has basically the same service as Ilkeston minus a few EMR stops - and it gets 80k entries/exits vs 127k for Ilkeston, again pointing to Ilkeston not being a white elephant station.

 

[Class 170101]

I was still expecting Ilkeston to have 2tph service when it opened and was rather surprised EMR didn't serve it hourly to make it so.

 

[MadMac]

Surprised that Breich hasn’t come up. Substantial amount spent to retain it post-electrification when it had one service each way with one passenger. I understand that it now has an hourly service for most of the day and that patronage has, to a degree, improved.

 

[AlastairFraser]

Surprised that Breich hasn’t come up. Substantial amount spent to retain it post-electrification when it had one service each way with one passenger. I understand that it now has an hourly service for most of the day and that patronage has, to a degree, improved.

Well, yes patronage has increased by over a thousand percent on pre-rebuild numbers, so I'd say it could be considered a success.

 

[Stopper]

Surprised that Breich hasn’t come up. Substantial amount spent to retain it post-electrification when it had one service each way with one passenger. I understand that it now has an hourly service for most of the day and that patronage has, to a degree, improved.

It doesn’t help that the station wasn’t even in Breich, and they rebuilt it in the exact same place. However, the only reason it had 1 passenger was because it only had about 3 trains. With an hourly service it has a solid, if unspectacular, steady usage now. The Shotts line is pretty lightly used anyway, especially on the eastern end. Breich has always been singled out but Hartwood and Addiewell aren’t used by many more and the Lothian/Edinburgh stations in general are fairly deserted.

 

[lachlan]

It doesn’t help that the station wasn’t even in Breich, and they rebuilt it in the exact same place. However, the only reason it had 1 passenger was because it only had about 3 trains. With an hourly service it has a solid, if unspectacular, steady usage now. The Shotts line is pretty lightly used anyway, especially on the eastern end. Breich has always been singled out but Hartwood and Addiewell aren’t used by many more and the Lothian/Edinburgh stations in general are fairly deserted.

A proper shared use path from Breich and Longridge to Breich station may improve things further - those tiny pavements can't be pleasant to walk down

 

[AlastairFraser]

A proper shared use path from Breich and Longridge to Breich station may improve things further - those tiny pavements can't be pleasant to walk down

It also seems like a relatively good location for an Edinburgh satellite town of around 5k population.
It's only around 10 mins off the M8 junction at Whitburn, close to equidistant between Glasgow and Edinburgh, and 35 mins into Haymarket on the train makes it a decent commute.

 

[JRT]

Bramley (West Yorkshire) doesn't receive much patronage outside peak times, and wasn't expected to be used much with the Leeds-bound platform rather narrow and initially only 2 tph (the Manchester Victoria trains didn't call). Not long after opening, trains became 3 tph, a few years later at the morning peak it became very crowded every day.

So it's hard to predict usage at stations.

 

[lachlan]

Bramley (West Yorkshire) doesn't receive much patronage outside peak times, and wasn't expected to be used much with the Leeds-bound platform rather narrow and initially only 2 tph (the Manchester Victoria trains didn't call). Not long after opening, trains became 3 tph, a few years later at the morning peak it became very crowded every day.

So it's hard to predict usage at stations.

Patronage can jump if service levels increase - an example is Portlethen which saw a regular service introduced in recent years and passenger numbers increased, bucking the trend of decreasing numbers in the Aberdeen area.

 

[Acfb]

I'm wondering if Inverness Airport should be added to this list. I thought it was doing OK in its first few months of operation but 54,000 seems fairly low to me. That is less than half of Kintore's numbers for this year. I can see why the bus is much more attractive from Inverness itself to the terminal building but I thought it would attract passengers from Nairn, Forres, Elgin etc who want to travel to the Airport.

 

[AlastairFraser]

I'm wondering if Inverness Airport should be added to this list. I thought it was doing OK in its first few months of operation but 54,000 seems fairly low to me. That is less than half of Kintore's numbers for this year. I can see why the bus is much more attractive from Inverness itself to the terminal building but I thought it would attract passengers from Nairn, Forres, Elgin etc who want to travel to the Airport.

It is a bit of a trek from the station to the actual airport terminal, and NE Scotland is hardly known for year-round decent weather.

I expect passenger numbers will pick up with commuters and leisure travellers from the nearby large settlement being built at Tornagrain (which is projected to have 10,000 residents when completed) taking the train into to Inverness/Aberdeen.

 

[paul1609]

It is a bit of a trek from the station to the actual airport terminal, and NE Scotland is hardly known for year-round decent weather.

I expect passenger numbers will pick up with commuters and leisure travellers from the nearby large settlement being built at Tornagrain (which is projected to have 10,000 residents when completed) taking the train into to Inverness/Aberdeen.

Inverness Airport to Aberdeen is just under 100 miles taking 2 hours by train why would that generate significant traffic? I'm not sure what service anybody would regularly travel there for?

 

[AlastairFraser]

Inverness Airport to Aberdeen is just under 100 miles taking 2 hours by train why would that generate significant traffic? I'm not sure what service anybody would regularly travel there for?

Concerts (P and J Live is the largest arena for probably at least 100 miles in any direction), shopping, financial/oil industry workers who work hybrid and have to go into the office once or twice a week etc...

Places like Tornagrain are significantly more attractive than a lot of other new or preexisting suburban housing projects near Aberdeen/Inverness, because of the style of development (the housing is sort of similar to what is seen in the Poundbury development in Dorset) and the proximity to a train link - rather than dealing with the poor standard A96 or the hassle of parking in Aberdeen.

Reminder that you also have a market in the eastern Inverness suburban villages (Inshes/Culloden/Smithton) for this.