Passenger numbers down on Northern

[whole diary]

[grahame]

From the Examiner Live

Passengers are making fewer journeys with troubled rail operator Northern, new figures show.

Northern services descended into chaos in May when the franchise introduced significant changes to its timetables. Large numbers of trains were cancelled while many of the services that remained running suffered long delays, spurring MPs^▸ (Member of Parliament, or Mile Post - a method of measuring the railway in miles and chains from a starting point - usually London, depending on context) to call for Transport Secretary Chris Grayling's resignation.


Northern was also affected by strikes in December 2018 and ran a reduced service on Saturdays in the run up to Christmas leading to a reduction in passenger journeys last year.

Passengers made 101 million journeys on Northern services in 2018, according to figures from the Office of Rail and Road. That's a decrease from the 105.8 million in 2017.

It is the second successive year in which passenger journey numbers have dropped, having previously grown strongly from 91.1 million in 2012.

How much of the downturn is due to the problmes that Northern have been having, and how much is an unrelated market effect?

Will figures recover when new trains are running reliably with capacity for all and to a fitting timetable?  How long would such a recovery take??

Where do GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) figures stand currently, planned for and predicted?

[rogerw]

I wonder how much of the reduction is down to the RMT^▸ (National Union of Rail, Maritime & Transport Workers) strikes and the very poor service that Northern offered on those days

[grahame]

I wonder how much of the reduction is down to the RMT^▸ (National Union of Rail, Maritime & Transport Workers) strikes and the very poor service that Northern offered on those days

It is very difficult when taking just a press view - or a press and social media pressure group view - to understand how bad and how general Northern's issues are.   We see headlines and cases - are they the ones that the press has "ambulance chased" for, or are they ten a penny / the norm?   Are the social media groups clumped behind certain routes / even certain trains on those routes, or much wider spread?

With Northern, I am getting the impression of fairly widespread issues; not got the closeness to immediate experience we have with GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) where four services - Severn Beach, Heart of Wessex, TransWilts and one other (help - not got it to hand - Cotswold?) were picked out as performing especially badly and were targeted for increased attention.   Have to say TransWilts has been much better in the last few months ... still prone to freight train break downs and points failures (not GWR's fault) and late crew (much more difficult to assign responsibility there).