Northern Strike Days, 19th, 21st & 23rd June

Posted on June 12, 2018 by admin

Next strike days on Northern Rail now announced as Tuesday 19th, Thursday 21st & Saturday 23rd June.

TPEs trains should be unaffected, but the small number of peak hour weekday extras run by Northern may be, and connecting services between Stalybridge and Victoria will also be affected.

SMART takes no view on the merits or otherwise of the positions taken by the RMT and by Arriva Northern in this dispute.

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Marsden Platform 2

Posted on June 4, 2018 by admin

When SMART was consulted about the timetable changes we specifically asked whether westbound trains would be using platform two. It hadn’t been in the information supplied by the train companies, but we had been tipped off by a railway industry insider to ask. Sure enough, we were told that most westbound trains would use platform two, the reason given was that it saved 1½  minutes compared to going into the platform three loop.

We strongly recommended against this, but it went ahead anyway.

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Lateness and Cancellation Data, First Two Weeks Of New Timetable

Posted on June 4, 2018 by admin

Here’s a spreadsheet showing the late running, cancellations and part-cancellations at Slaithwaite and Marsden over the first two weeks of the new timetable.

Red is cancellations, and there’s quite a bit of that. Blue is part cancellations, in the form of trains terminating at or starting at Stalybridge. Not possible to pick these up from the week of 20-27 May, so it’s actually worse than shown. Yellow is late, by various amounts.

Green is on time. There’s very little green showing.

Two of the supposed advantages of the new timetable were reduced journey times and the ability to put in stop orders on other TPE trains so that Marsden and Slaithwaite passengers were not stranded for hours on end.

Neither of those have materialised. A typical delay of 15 minutes wipes out any reduction in journey time, and where there should have been perhaps 30 stop orders over the last two weeks, it appears there have been just two.

msn_swt_performance (5)

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Northern Rail’s emergency timetable

Posted on June 1, 2018 by admin

Following the New Timetable Debacle, Northern Rail has come up with a recovery plan which involves planned cancellations of upwards of 150 trains per day.

No trains which call at Slaithwaite or Marsden are affected.

During the daytime between the peaks, the service between Stalybridge and Victoria is reduced to hourly, so that will mean extended connection times at Stalybridge for the trains calling at Marsden & Greenfield (westbound, connection time increases to 38′) and Mossley & Slaithwaite (eastbound, connection time increases to 53′). Note that at peak times there is still planned to be a half-hourly service between Stalybridge and Victoria.

Whether Northern will be able to operate even the reduced timetable remain to be seen. Their handling of their driver shortage over several months doesn’t inspire confidence.

It’s possible that Northern’s reduction in the number of services may reduce congestion at key points and enable TPE to run a service which more closely resembles their published timetable. We’ll find out from Monday onwards.

Link to revised Northern timetable (main service operated by TPE is unaffected but not included in this timetable) is https://be803fe5c416e39d38ae-aa21086260d3bd4e072d597fe09c2e80.ssl.cf3.rackcdn.com/images/disruption-timetables/2018-06-04/Huddersfield—Manchester-04—08-June.pdf

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