While Northern have been cancelling services due to staff shortages for some time, they do seem to have got much worse in the past few days.
Today is the first day I've noticed they've deleted Sunday Mid-Cheshire services from RTT (what they will be claiming is a short notice change to the timetable). When this happens they don't advertise the cancellation on Journey Check and won't organise a replacement bus service. This means 4 hours gaps in service without any replacement buses requested.
Yesterday evening the 21:40 Manchester to Chester was deleted from the timetable and the 22:40 was a short notice cancellation due to staff shortages. While the advertised the 22:40 was cancelled they just added a note saying 'passengers should travel on the next service'. The 23:40 was a 2 carriage service, so not only did Northern make no attempt to arrange replacement transport, they made no attempt to strengthen the last service after the previous two had been cancelled. There was also an instance of a short notice cancellation being the service after a deleted service during the week.
I know that these issues have been going on for months and some lines, such as the Stoke route, have been affected more than others. As Northern are actually running a reduced service on the Glossop line due to an infrastructure problem, why are they having issues staffing so many other services out of Piccadilly? I notice the Wilmslow route is also being affected.