The 7am departure from Manchester Piccadilly to London Euston, a sought-after service that stops only in Stockport and takes less than two hours to reach the capital, will now run with only staff on board.
Arriving in London just before 9am, it’s a service that has proved popular among MPs, financiers and even pop stars — it is not unusual to witness one of the Gallagher brothers boarding the service, perhaps returning home to London after a heavy night out, so say some regular users. It is one of the most lucrative intercity trains, with passengers parting with hundreds of pounds for a seat.
Yet the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) has said no passengers will be allowed on board Avanti West Coast service when timetables change on December 15.
The farcical situation is a product of the need for the train, carriages and crew to travel south to fulfil the needs of subsequent services. Carrying passengers risks impacting the overall reliability of the service, so the logic goes. A failure to stick to the schedule would have adverse ramifications for services thereafter.
We cannot let passengers on because this might delay the train.
Shoot them, obviously.
Life imitating art, again.
https://youtu.be/Eyf97LAjjcY?si=a2R1I2swype5PNd5&t=28
Exactly the clip I was reminded of. But too slow to beat BiND to post it.
Manchester to London in less than two hours? So what is HS2 for?
Job creation, politicians that used to play with Hornby sets?
HS2 is too long for a daily commute, but the current times are fine for an occasional meeting with a client.
The only high speed train that might be worth building in the UK is London to Newcastle, then fork to Edinburgh and Glasgow. And even then, the amount that people now do meetings on Microsoft Teams means it probably isn’t worth it.
HS2 was so that politicians could boast about Britain having the fastest trains in Europe. It was always just a vanity project with some vague hopes of industrial policy attached.
It was also an EU policy and Directive. Gotta be able to move those gendarmes, y’know.
That doesn’t explain Boris pushing the button on the project after we left.
BoJo was always a fan of Grands Projets – the dafter, the better. London’s Garden Bridge, Boris Airport to name but two.
Take out the Stockport stop. If there’s demand, put on a bus from Stockport to Piccadilly. It’s only 7 miles. That buys you around 3 minutes for the stop, plus I guess a couple more minutes removing deceleration and acceleration time. And call it an 0650. The gate to the platform closes then. The doors lock at 0655. It leaves at 0700 on the dot.
Of course, this would require people who give a shit about passengers or costs, and nearly everyone running railways doesn’t. No-one is drinking La Tache for success, or meths for failure.
It stops at Stockport for the same reason northbound trains stop at Watford. Those 7 miles up the A6 at rush hour? Might as well drive to London.
Manchester isn’t London. According to Google Maps it’s 20-35 minutes by car at 0615. But there’s also trains, which take about 10 minutes.
I’m not saying it’s a great solution. But what do you have that’s better?
20 minutes from Stockport station to Piccadilly by road at any time is wildly optimistic. The A6 is slow and has more speed cameras than white lines. I guess you can head west and use the slightly faster A34, at least going into Manchester that isn’t the roundabout hell that it is further south. But I concede, hyperbole. Still, they are now Beechaming the main lines. In any case, the London to Manchester train has long been exclusively for those who balk at the slightly higher taxi fare.
Not forgetting our Minister of Transport Mr W Hay
https://youtu.be/OhoI9VRppEg?si=g9myetIwHH6SbBcO
Train movements are a thing. Getting them in position to service peak times makes sense. I can understand why they don’t want passengers. Especially the Gallagher brothers after a heavy night out. The point is that the train doesn’t need cleaning and is ready to go. One person vomits, there goes the morning timetable.
I used to take advantage of something similar, if I could haul my arse out of bed early enough I could get an early express out of Melbourne to Ringwood for work, very limited stops, virtually no passengers, quick service. This was metro, not intercity, but same deal, they were just getting the train to where it needed to be.
Yes, it would seem MPs, financiers and even pop stars are the problem.
Well, they’re not giving up hundreds of pounds a seat for no reason. So yep, it would seem so.
“One person vomits, there goes the morning timetable.”
Seriously? They can’t just put some towels somewhere? Oh, I guess that would mean dealing with union demarcation, a ticket inspector can’t go clearing up some vomit so now they have to include a special Vomit Removal Operative earning £50K a year.
Oh, you’ve worked in Australia? Yes, exactly what you said WB. Although from what I hear the UK isn’t much different. You’re just reinforcing my point that they’re better off travelling customer free for that leg.
Then why not CUSTOMER FREE EVERYWHERE!
Drunks vomiting on Tokyo trains doesn’t stop them, though late at night you do need to walk a bit gingerly around the stations.
Do they still stop for bodies on the tracks?
My son tells me they actually have a symbol for it on Google Maps.
There’s a 6:54 ex MCR getting into Euston at 9:09. One like it every 20 minutes.
Looking at the next two weeks this this 7am overtaking service still runs for an extra £30 – there are people whose time is worth £30 to save less than 20 minutes -mm, I suppose there are.
But the article says Avanti opposed the decision to run empty – clearly we never had a privatised railway then.
“But the article says Avanti opposed the decision to run empty – clearly we never had a privatised railway then.”
Outsourced railways. Micromanagement of everything by the state. When they run, where they stop, whether there’s a buffet car or not. What trains they get. Whether there’s wifi or e-ticketing. And on a temporary basis, so no-one is going to bother investing much.
To what extent do trains to Edin / Glasgow / Aberdeen only make sense for some people due to the regulatory strangulation on flights i.e taxation and all the security kabuki designed to make travel slower & less pleasant?
Long ago, of course, but when I was an undergraduate I sometimes caught a late flight from London to Edinburgh where the cargo was typically a modest number of passengers and lots of sacks of Royal Mail. It was all rather pleasing. Those, natch, were the days without the security theatre, when the seats were comfortable for big, tall chaps, and when you weren’t annoyed by twats trying to stuff oversized luggage into overhead lockers and often proving too weak to do it safely.
The underlying point is that the operator doesn’t employ enough train crew or lease enough rolling stock for a resilient service. This is has been the case with pretty much all TOCs, with the approval of the DfT, for decades. During the pandemic they claimed they were unable to recruit and train enough staff, in the years before and after it was simply a permanent ‘temporary’ issue.
Invariably any government function becomes less about the people it was originally intended to serve and more about the managers’ and employees’ convenience. The same can happen in private industry, though their money may run out faster.
Average rail seat utilisation is 40%. And that’s including commuter trains which are almost full. Off-peak is generally thought to be 35% and under (which is barely more efficient than running cars). That compares with 73% for coaches and over 80% for airlines like Easyjet. Why? Because the fuckers that run it aren’t working their balls out to maximise revenue, to price services correctly to demand.
A seat is empty? Sell it for £10 as £10 is better than £0. But if you get paid whether it gets filled or not, why are you going to work your balls out to improve things?
It’ll be interesting to see how an independent rail LOCO like Lumo works out. Ryanair business model; very much the Ryanair experience.
I can’t find details, but it’s almost certainly going to be better as they use fully dynamic pricing.
The problem with most rail is that “peak” and “off-peak” are seen as the norm, but that means you can’t know demand for a particular train as they could be used on any of them. So the amount of “advance” tickets have to be limited. If you make it all dynamic, for a particular service, you can push the price lower and raise utilisation.
I’m a regular on LKX north and can confirm that seat occupancy rates to DON (First Hull) to YORK (Grand Central) and NCL (Lumo) are very high, 85%+ based on visuals. What the occupancy is like after that e.g the final legs up to Beverley or Sunderland, I couldn’t say, likely much lower
Peak times? If I go Swindon to Gloucester after about 9am, it’s not even 25%. Swindon to Westbury? Maybe 10%.
Ah, but is it equitable and just that someone be able to buy a seat for less than the published fare just because the railroad thinks it’s better to fill an empty seat?
Your percentages are remarkably similar to the output of windfarms. I wonder if there is a conclusion you can reach from that?
It’s really no different to “peak” and “off peak” and “advanced”. It’s just even more granular in terms of pricing. And entirely fair. If you’re someone who is willing to accept some inconvenience, you get a cheaper ticket. Which often means people on lower incomes.
I don’t know about the windfarm comparison, but in both cases, people talk them up in terms of peak efficiency rather than actual (coaches use less CO2 per passenger mile than trains).
I think you’d get the commuters mad because they can’t buy a book of 10 tickets or whatever. At least for those trains without reserved seating.
Since one of the reasons airplane utilization is high is that they can change the price, and you generally buy one ticket at a time.
Commuter trains are not worth bothering with. They’re already at 95%. Those can stay as they are.
A Potemkin train, then. Yes, truly glorious onwards and upwards, comrades.
Reminded of a tale from the days of BR. Commuter service heading to Paddington had dining/coffee/tea car. Dining car served bacon sarnies which were so popular there were always long queues out of the carriage and into rest of the train. This was too much for BR, so they did the obvious thing that wasn’t being better prepared, hiring more staff or, even fitting a second bacon sarnie car. Nope, none of those of course, they stopped selling bacon sandwiches.
This may or may not have happened 🙂
BR Buffet staff used to make and sell their own sandwiches to the punters. Allegedly.
Better than Travellers Fare or Casey Jones I would assume………
Actually they’re not banning passengers because the passengers slow down the train and make it late.
It’s worse than that.
They’re banning passengers because other trains getting in the way usually make this train late, and for operational reasons it would be easier for them if they could make it even later and more often – and having passengers on it makes it being late a problem (complaints, refunds, and their reliability statistics).
The problem isn’t people getting on the train in Stockport, it’s when it merges with the West Coast Main Line south of Stafford, and again around Rugby when it merges with the lines out of Birmingham. Lots of peak time commuter trains all trying to use the same track, and if one of them is late it causes a complete clusterfuck.
So they want the ability to move this train out of the way and park it while another goes past, without it causing them a problem with passengers. And the easiest way to do that is not to sort their trains out, but to remove the passengers.
It really is an industry that has lost sight of what it’s supposed to be doing.
FWIW the ORR have U-turned (tricky on rails), and the train will continue to take paying passengers.
To those drawing the conclusion from this that we don’t need HS2; fick off. No, I mean that, fuck off.
To those saying this proves we need HS2 to Manchester: you fuck off too.
To those willing to invest in HS2 and take their chances getting their money back by selling tickets, without asking for a subsidy: good for you. Because that’s the only test.
Oh yeah, I won’t be investing, so I can fuck off too.