What could be done to increase rail usage outside of London?

[eldomtom2]

Rail usage is severely biased towards London. The number of people who use rail travel daily is significantly higher in London compared to the rest of the country. While this is understandable in e.g. rural areas, what about the UK's other major cities and their rail networks means usage is so much lower, and how could usage in those cities be increased?

 

[JonathanH]

While this is understandable in e.g. rural areas, what about the UK's other major cities and their rail networks means usage is so much lower, and how could usage in those cities be increased?

Taxing workplace car parking as a benefit in kind. However, realistically not everyone can use the railway to go about their daily lives.

The point about (central) London is that people live near enough to stations, their workplaces are close to stations, and it isn't easy to take a car between the two. Moreover, for leisure purposes, the railway also takes people where they want to go.

Rail usage is severely biased towards London.

Many people consider the railway something you use when you want to go to London. However, is the pattern of use of the railway, and this severe bias, a problem? The railway is essentially geared up to reflect a severe bias towards London.

 

[jfollows]

Unwind years of focussing on long distance services at the cost of local services.
Just one example, but there used to be local stopping trains Manchester-Macclesfield at 16:43, 17:02, 17:15, 17:30, 17:43 & 17:58 when I went to school in Manchester. Now there’s one additional service only on top of the base hourly service (2K50 17:18 Manchester-Stoke) and even this requires the diversion of a Cross Country service via Crewe. The 17:02 omitted Adlington just to squeeze it in the timetable!
So the focus has changed. The local services aren’t good enough. If I still lived in Poynton I’d drive.
But there are loads of long distance express services using the lines instead.

 

[Magdalia]

what about the UK's other major cities and their rail networks means usage is so much lower, and how could usage in those cities be increased?

Build workplaces, educational establishments and homes next to railways, preferably near existing stations but also building new stations next to the new workplaces, educational establishments and homes.

Run longer trains to take the increased traffic.

Unwind years of focussing on long distance services at the cost of local services.

Absolutely! Rail is good at moving lots of people short distances, journey time up to 45 minutes.

Here in the Fens we have over 1 million journeys per year Ely-Cambridge, rail should be doing a lot more of that.

 

[Topological]

Unwind years of focussing on long distance services at the cost of local services.
Just one example, but there used to be local stopping trains Manchester-Macclesfield at 16:43, 17:02, 17:15, 17:30, 17:43 & 17:58 when I went to school in Manchester. Now there’s one additional service only on top of the base hourly service (2K50 17:18 Manchester-Stoke) and even this requires the diversion of a Cross Country service via Crewe. The 17:02 omitted Adlington just to squeeze it in the timetable!
So the focus has changed. The local services aren’t good enough. If I still lived in Poynton I’d drive.
But there are loads of long distance express services using the lines instead.

In Manchester's case there will be a huge benefit from the HS2 tunnel. That is 4/5 trains from the Stockport viaduct and potentially all the fast Liverpool as well. The additional local services unlocked will be completely transformational.

Birmingham will also get a HS2 bounce, but it is yet to be seen how much, especially as HS2 Birmingham to Manchester struggles without the line extending beyond Handsacre.

Similar expansionary options for Leeds could be explored, but HS2 was never set to take over the long distance fasts in the way it is elsewhere.

 

[quantinghome]

Rail usage is severely biased towards London. The number of people who use rail travel daily is significantly higher in London compared to the rest of the country. While this is understandable in e.g. rural areas, what about the UK's other major cities and their rail networks means usage is so much lower, and how could usage in those cities be increased?

It's actually been moving in that direction over the past few decades as work patterns in major cities have come to resemble London and the South-East. The % growth of commuting into other cities has outstripped London over this time.

The context is that historically, major cities and surrounding smaller towns were more economically self-contained with people working fairly close to where they lived. Travel within cities was provided mostly by trams and later buses. This has changed significantly over the past decades as surrounding towns look to their nearest big city for work. But, it is stymied by a lack of capacity. As others have pointed out, local services play second fiddle to longer distance trains. And crucially unlike London, the railway lines serving major cities weren't really built with commuter traffic in mind - they were designed for long distance traffic and (mostly mineral) freight. The rail networks around cities are now having to be reworked into commuter networks, which they were never designed for.

 

[The exile]

And crucially unlike London, the railway lines serving major cities weren't really built with commuter traffic in mind - they were designed for long distance traffic and (mostly mineral) freight. The rail networks around cities are now having to be reworked into commuter networks, which they were never designed for.

Also critically, outside London and the SE (and to a certain extent Manchester and Glasgow) the networks of local lines and stations didn’t survive Beeching. That means that, even where growth has been phenomenal, there’s a limit to how much heavy lifting the railway can do in a city like Bristol.

 

[jfollows]

It seems ironic to me that some London lines, such as Waterloo-Reading, have almost completely removed “fast” trains by stopping most services at Vauxhall, Clapham Junction, and so on. Back in the past there used to be trains which had their first stop at Staines. That said, nobody wanted to go to Battersea, Clapham and so on when I lived in the area in the 1980s, so it kind of made sense. Nobody is embarrased by living in Battersea today.
But in Manchester the reverse seems to have happened. Local trains are not good for commuting, if you want to have some flexibility.

 

[anthony263]

Sort out local rail services. Pyle and other swanline stations need a proper hourly service start to finish

 

[Narrowgauge725]

Undo the recent East Coast timetable change and stop kore trains at stops other than Edinburgh, Newcastle and London. Berwick is now a backwater in terms of LNER trains. TPE ones don’t connect at Newcastle with services beyond

 

[lachlan]

Build workplaces, educational establishments and homes next to railways, preferably near existing stations but also building new stations next to the new workplaces, educational establishments and homes.

Run longer trains to take the increased traffic.

This, in addition to infrastructure upgrades and new rolling stock so we can make the most of the lines we've got.

Also critically, outside London and the SE (and to a certain extent Manchester and Glasgow) the networks of local lines and stations didn’t survive Beeching. That means that, even where growth has been phenomenal, there’s a limit to how much heavy lifting the railway can do in a city like Bristol.

indeed though increasing frequencies and reducing dwell times at Temple Meads could make cross-Bristol rail journeys a lot more viable.

 

[eldomtom2]

And crucially unlike London, the railway lines serving major cities weren't really built with commuter traffic in mind - they were designed for long distance traffic and (mostly mineral) freight.

But the same is true of a lot of main lines into London.

 

[Snow1964]

It seems ironic to me that some London lines, such as Waterloo-Reading, have almost completely removed “fast” trains by stopping most services at Vauxhall, Clapham Junction, and so on. Back in the past there used to be trains which had their first stop at Staines. That said, nobody wanted to go to Battersea, Clapham and so on when I lived in the area in the 1980s, so it kind of made sense. Nobody is embarrased by living in Battersea today.
But in Manchester the reverse seems to have happened. Local trains are not good for commuting, if you want to have some flexibility.

Used to be fast trains every hour with first stop Southampton (about 70 miles), but fast trains from Waterloo are no more.

On the Reading line, these days is closer to semi-fast, than fast. Actually most are only semi-fast between Clapham Junction and Staines, and are closer to all stations stoppers for rest of the route.

 

[Farigiraf]

There's nuance to each specific case, you can't generalise the whole non-London area. But there are a few strategies that can't go wrong:

- The rail network outside L&SE is less dense, so integration of buses with trains (including timing buses around rail services) is needed to make rail desirable for those not immediately near a rail station. Currently many of the busiest bus routes are interurbans that are competing with rail, not complementing it.

- Reducing delays/cancellations and making branch lines more self-contained in order to achieve higher frequencies, even if it means the loss of direct London services. Also, more non-London intercity railways are needed: between London and Yorkshire there are 3 (usable) east-west lines: XC's Birmingham to Stansted, EMR's Liverpool to Norwich, TPE's Liverpool-Cleethorpes and the Transpennine mainline. Of these, only one is receiving the investment it deserves, through the TRU. There's also the CrossCountry mainline which is still far from reaching its full potential due to low capacity and high fares.

- More orders for new rolling stock, with high quality trains with surplus capacity, so that the 'London gets all the investment' argument becomes less valid. Northern's massive new rolling stock order doesn't allow for that much growth, just replacement of the existing trains. Ideally you'd want to eliminate 2-3 carriage trains on busy commuter services (Northumberland line, Calder Valley, Robin Hood line).

Other than dated, lower capacity trains, part of the reason rail is used more in L&SE is that the service is actually perceived as good and undergoing improvements. More positive press that demonstrates that funding is going to the provinces as well as the capital will make people aware that the train is indeed a viable transport method and a great one at that. The South Wales Metro is a great example of this, and I'm sure car ownership will decrease by a considerable amount in the valleys in the coming years.

 

[bluenoxid]

There’s also a matter of the population size of London and the South East, the number of jobs in London and its commuter belt.

Consider that London also has highly effective and integrated local transit in the form of the London Underground and London buses.

 

[osmarks]

Train travel is almost always more expensive than buses and for some people probably costlier than using a car. Many suburban/rural routes aren't very fast once you factor in travel to/from stations. The main cost of cars is traffic congestion, and an individual car user doesn't capture most of that negative effect themselves. So people who can use cars for the more direct route and lower or at least less visible cost (people often need a car anyway, and don't know exactly how much each marginal mile driven is costing them), and people who can't use cheaper buses, which often have frequency/directness advantages too.

There's also a perception that the trains aren't very reliable. I looked briefly and I don't see an obvious place to find that information by route, though. Cars also have unreliable journey times, due to traffic jams, but you get to feel slightly more in control of that (and can vary your departure time), which I think people value.

 

[gingerheid]

Rail usage is severely biased towards London. The number of people who use rail travel daily is significantly higher in London compared to the rest of the country. While this is understandable in e.g. rural areas, what about the UK's other major cities and their rail networks means usage is so much lower, and how could usage in those cities be increased?

Build integrated transport networks that mean it's viable to make journeys by more than one mode of transport, and that mean people don't need a car in the first place (because once you have one, it becomes easier and "cheaper" to use it).

 

[HSTEd]

Well if you want to drive up traffic, the obvious example to draw from is Merseyrail.

The problem with that assessment is that Merseyrail consumes rather a lot of subsidy and is a model that would be politically very difficult to replicate elsewhere.

If you want to do Merseyrail without a large increase in subsidy, you are probably looking at Manchester Metrolink more than at conventional rail.

Beyond that, new fast railway lines with lower operating costs and higher revenue potential, and which can eliminate the need for subsidised services on existing routes. But the capital and political backing for that certainly doesn't exist.

In summary, I think your best bet is Metrolink-ification.

 

[LMS 4F]

How many journeys in London and the S.E are run with 40 plus year old two car units? This the usual service with the odd 4 car on the two services from Castleford to Leeds. At commuter times they are often full and standing and hardly make for an attractive package for anyone with an alternative.
This doesn’t apply to all services out of Leeds. The Electrified local routes are run with newer and longer units but the chances of our service being electrified is about nil.

 

[Failed Unit]

Actually if you look at East Midlands regional services. Provide capacity and a frequent service. Pre 2020 the service was ran by 153s. Now the same routes are using 3 coach trains (still very full)

According to the recent station usage service the most popular destination from Grimsby Town is Lincoln Central. However it still only gets a train every 2 hours. The gap in the evening peak particularly annoying. I am sure making it hourly would help.

Lincoln Centrals top destination is London King’s Cross? (I expected Nottingham) probably thanks to the direct train. Other stations in Lincolnshire have had massive % increases in numbers now they have a hourly clock face service. That said as many will point out. Regional railways 2 coach trains will never make a profit.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Rail usage is severely biased towards London. The number of people who use rail travel daily is significantly higher in London compared to the rest of the country. While this is understandable in e.g. rural areas, what about the UK's other major cities and their rail networks means usage is so much lower, and how could usage in those cities be increased?

Make it less awful. Manchester's diesel local services for instance are rubbish - infrequent, slow and often overcrowded. All the Metrolink conversions have resulted in significant patronage increase. And as for the Chat Moss stopper on the Liverpool side being hourly...

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 1 Mar 2026 ==

How many journeys in London and the S.E are run with 40 plus year old two car units?

Chiltern Aylesbury branch? I'm sat on one now, though admittedly it's a 3 car and nearly empty. It's definitely old though!

It is more or less just Chiltern now though, the other home of short DMUs around London, the GWR local services, have long since been Lizzed, the branch lines aside! And unsurprisingly, as a result, patronage has rocketed.

 

[Sir Felix Pole]

A Tale of Two Cities...

Exeter (popn. about 110,000) has a very convenient Central station, a surprisingly high number of other stations within the city boundary and a radial network of local lines. The Devon Metro is doing very well - Exmouth has the best ever service in its history, Barnstaple trains are wedged, Okehampton is a success and the Riviera Line is booming. Hopefully local trains from Taunton serving Wellington and Cullompton and a local service to Cranbrook and Axminster will soon be added. But it wasn't always like this - Exmouth was slated for closure by Beeching; Barnstaple and Okehampton were not but Okehampton went anyway and Barnstaple was seriously threatened when the bridges at Cowley Bridge needed replacing. By the '70s the Riviera Line local service was very thin and stations like Starcross and St.Thomas had little more than a token service.

Plymouth (popn. about 250,000),however, has an inconvenient main station and low local usage with just the main-line into Cornwall and the Gunnislake service. Such local lines as there were went before Beeching (Turnchapel, Yealmpton, Tavistock G.W.R) whilst Tavistock S.R. went with Beeching. The planners in their wisdom after the destruction of WW2 dispersed housing, the main hospital and employment centres to the north of the city where there was never a railway anyway. So it is very much a car centric city - with equally chronic congestion as Exeter - and the city council is still stuck in '60s/'70s 'just one more lane' mode. The major Manadon Interchange (A38 / A386) is to be rebuilt. but it will quickly fill up and solve nothing.

So Plymouth is a tougher nut to crack for rail travel - reopening to Tavistock and a station at Plympton would be a start. The city would be ideal for a tram or tram/train system in my view - it has wide European style boulevards in the city centre and could penetrate areas that rail cannot. Plymouth's twin in Brittany, Brest, with a similar population has a successful system and has just opened a second line. In the U.K., however, trams give politicians the vapours - and certain posters on here too!

 

[Floul1]

Well if you want to drive up traffic, the obvious example to draw from is Merseyrail.

The problem with that assessment is that Merseyrail consumes rather a lot of subsidy and is a model that would be politically very difficult to replicate elsewhere.

If you want to do Merseyrail without a large increase in subsidy, you are probably looking at Manchester Metrolink more than at conventional rail.

Beyond that, new fast railway lines with lower operating costs and higher revenue potential, and which can eliminate the need for subsidised services on existing routes. But the capital and political backing for that certainly doesn't exist.

In summary, I think your best bet is Metrolink-ification.

I'm sure you could drive down the subsidy with changes that wouldn't be poltically acceptable on an existing system (DOO and increased fares), and on a per-person basis with better planning for increased patronage. Merseyrail proper doesn't serve large parts of the LCR

 

[JonathanH]

How many journeys in London and the S.E are run with 40 plus year old two car units?

The Bakerloo Line trains are very much over 40 years old. The thing about fleet replacement is that it is cyclic.

 

[Grecian 1998]

London is a unique case simply because its size and the fact it already had a population of 5 million by the time the car was invented means that driving a significant way across it is purgatory. The M25 may have eased road travel from one side to another, but that has filled up rather quickly.

Another key factor is that London has for a long time had a central core with a huge amount of desirable employment / attractions that people want to get to but don't want to live next door to. Consequently London hasn't really had any choice but to invest in mass transit if people want to get anywhere reasonably quickly. The fact that MPs need to get to Westminster and civil servants to Whitehall probably doesn't hurt either.

The expansion of office jobs in other cities is rather more recent. A lot of towns around Greater Manchester and the industrial bits of Yorkshire had until around the 1980s plenty of local industrial employment. Congestion into large cities probably wasn't as bad then as there wouldn't have been the same number of people needing to get there for work (admittedly I'm not from that part of the world so please do correct me if I'm wrong). As that has fallen away and not been replaced by much other employment in those towns, the need to provide decent links into Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield etc. for employment opportunities has grown, presumably with the resultant congestion.

There is surely an element of 'build it and they will come' with suburban and interregional lines though. The Devon and EMR examples given above are a good example of this, as is the Cross-City line in Birmingham - what was a sporadic elderly DMU operated service in the late 70s is a frequent electric service. The Severn Beach line in Bristol has seen a sizeable increase in patronage by running more frequent services more reliably (employing onboard ticket sellers / examiners probably also helps). Providing reliable commuter services where passengers can be confident of getting onboard, and reliable interregional services where passengers can be confident of getting a seat is always helpful. TFW and GWR's habit of putting a 2 coach 197 / 165 or 158 respectively on Cardiff - Manchester and Cardiff - Portsmouth services can't help confidence in the service. Granted it's usually that or cancelling the train, but having a longer train consistently turning up is always useful.

As for XC, there are still frequently 4 coach trains with 2.5 standard class coaches running Plymouth - Exeter - Bristol - Birmingham - Derby - Sheffield - Leeds - York - Newcastle - Edinburgh, and also Bournemouth - Southampton - Reading - Oxford - Coventry - Birmingham - Wolverhampton - Stoke - Manchester. Call me old-fashioned, but I can't help feeling that there should be enough people on those routes to fill that several times over if they could be reasonably sure of getting a seat. There must be huge suppressed demand on the XC axis (and yes I know there's at least one thread here about XC overcrowding every month).

Longer trains are an easy fix as long as they fit into platforms. It's frequently said that pretty much all of XC's problems would be fixed with longer trains and it's hard not to believe that.

How many journeys in London and the S.E are run with 40 plus year old two car units?

It's really just trains to and from Central London where this applies. GWR run 2 coach 30 year old diesel 165s on Newbury - Bedwyn shuttles, Reading - Basingstoke and the Thames Valley branches. Reading - Redhill trains are run with 3 coach class 165s but are frequently full and standing for a large part of the journey. Many of the Ashford - Hastings services are run with 2 coach 25 year old diesel 171s. As for the Marston Vale... There aren't many services in the SE which don't go into London, but those that avoid it aren't really better than services anywhere else.

 

[LMS 4F]

The Bakerloo Line trains are very much over 40 years old. The thing about fleet replacement is that it is cyclic.

I am aware of how trains are replaced. However the question was how can we increase rail usage and 40 year old Sprinters won’t emcourage anyone to take up rail travel, especially if they crammed into two carriages full and standing everyday.

 

[JonathanH]

I am aware of how trains are replaced. However the question was how can we increase rail usage and 40 year old Sprinters won’t emcourage anyone to take up rail travel, especially if they crammed into two carriages full and standing everyday.

Yes, of course, but I think it the age factor is overplayed a little, relative to capacity being available. The challenge has been keeping the trains like new.

 

[Peter Mugridge]

Frequencies would be a good place to start.

Look at Peterborough to Leicester for a start... two very large places, both with an excellent range of destinations, three stations between them all at decent sized towns at just the right distance apart to be useful for the intermediate as well as the through market...

...and it only gets one train an hour on the route. There is probably quite a lot of suppressed demand on this corridor, and there are many more routes like it as well.

 

[brad465]

Replace the Network Railcard with an equivalent valid across the whole country.

 

[HSTEd]

Replace the Network Railcard with an equivalent valid across the whole country.

Railcards are now so cheap that they can often be paid back with a single journey.

At that point might as well just abolish railcards entirely and cut fares by 20%!