LNER Leeds to Edinburgh?

[dk1]

9.185 million entry/exits along with another 1.276million interchanging in the last 2023/24 year speaks volumes to me.

 

[Snex]

As with Swindon, I think York's strong London service is due to its place on the network as much as to do with demand to it. Without a faster route between Sheffield and Leeds, a Liverpool Lime Street High Level – Prestatyn tunnel, reinstatement of a north-south route through Nottingham or massive works around Castlefield, those cities aren't going to have the same level of demand for through services as York.

I think the current / planned for this December levels of London services are as far as it should go for now. If HS2 had been going ahead in full, I think 4-5 tph for London – York would have been justifiable (2 tph HS2, 1 tph via Peterborough, Newark and Doncaster, 1 tph via smaller ECML stations plus Grand Central), but without it, other services should be prioritised even considering how much rail demand to / from London compared to other cities there often is.

Yeah can't disagree with that. Crewe is the other noticeable one. The service is ideal for the place really especially with connections etc. It's just a shame some of the connections are rather poor especially up Teesside way which always feels disconnected from the rail network.

Agreed with HS2, if they ever got it upto Manchester, I'd always love to see a Newcastle - York - Leeds - Manchester - Birmingham service. Would massively relieve both XC and TPE for the long distance travel and would be comparable to the current route anyway between Leeds and Birmingham. Would help open some paths in the North East aswell since you could ditch some of the XC / TPE trains aswell.

Since we're talking about LNER though, I always think it's a shame that the 10 Car trains couldn't be used on the new short Newcastle splitting at Northallerton, with 1 half heading to Middlesbrough and the other half heading to Newcastle stopping everywhere as now; Teesside really does deserve more imo.

 

[HSTEd]

I seem to remember a named GNER train (or was it 3 trains a day?) running Leeds to Aberdeen.

Or am I misremembering that?
Possibly named 'Northern Lights'?