[from Rail Magazine, 26th November 2014]
At last, some sense from a senior railway industry figure.
“One of the things that really strikes me is that the gap between the quality of local services between the North and the South has actually widened.”
“People arrive on a sleek Pendolino train at Manchester Piccadilly, and then we put them on a Pacer to Marple.”
“We’ve talked about HS3 and speeding up journey times across the North, which is absolutely the right thing to do. But people still need to get into work in Leeds and Manchester.”
“The workers don’t live there, they need to get from the suburbs, and there needs to be a plan for that. At the moment I don’t see it.”
“You can’t keep speeding the inter-city services at the expense of local rail services.”
Alex Hynes, Managing Director of Northern Rail
