Northern (Arriva Rail North)

[knutstransport]

RE: Northern (Arriva Rail North)

(31/05/2017 19:57)Dentonian Wrote:  > Thanks,
It was possible retiming (or re-allocation of carriages) of peak hour trains I was thinking of - given the haphazard timings of the Hope Valley line at the moment. The peak departure gaps are 13 min, 20 min, 27 min, 16 min, 15 min* & 17 min.
* This one is regularly shown as running late on RTI a good 50 minutes before scheduled departure.

Totally agree that it would make sense to merge (Mo-Sa daytime) 288s with the 200 to form a through service with more efficient use of existing resources.

As regards competing bus services, I was thinking of commercial services, but I take your point about subsidised services, as it illustrates yet another way in which anything to do with rail takes a lot longer to organise than buses.

Unfortunately, due to the variety of services operating in the Manchester area at different frequencies it's unlikely they'll ever be equal intervals between services for every possible journey. However, saying that it appears the timetables for the most recent major recast weren't written as well as they could have been.

Like I've said before bus operators get too much freedom to change services without giving passengers adequate notice. It's not unknown for operators to apply to withdraw a service or make a major change the required 56 days in advance but then for neither the operator or the local authority to publicise the change until a couple of weeks before the change. Although, one issue is when the operator gives their 56 days notice to cancel a service if they were to tell passengers straight away it might mean the passengers worry unnecessarily if another operator ends up running the exactly the same service to the same times. However, in response to your point surely the first point of call after a commercial service is withdrawn is for the local authority to decide whether there's a viable alternative and if not and there's adequate usage then they should look at awarding a contract which retains the most essential journeys on that route.