Absolutely agree with your comment regarding Conisbrough. The Sheffield to Doncaster stopping service has been reduced by two thirds. The gap is not 90 minutes but 2 hours in some instances, no trains into Doncaster between c 07.30 and c09.30, first and last trains cut and it applies to Mexborough and Conisbrough, Rotherham and Swinton have also had Doncaster services slashed. These are towns not villages. Pre Covid Swinton had more passengers than all the stations from Grindleford to Edale inclusive.
Today, partly due to the weather, there was no service from Sheffield to Doncaster by any operator from 16.05 to 18.05 even though the line itself was not effected. Not surprisingly the 18.05 was rammed, left passengers behind and lost ten minutes due to station overtime.
I was on the (Super) trams yesterday and I think that the TramTrains were cancelled at one point due to issues at Rotherham, which will have compounded things
Mexborough feels like it could sustain a fifteen minute service to Doncaster/ Sheffield but it's one of many "local" stations on lines with non-stop services, so feels left behind
I wish that we paid more attention to stations like these though, instead of all of the predictable stuff about rural hamlets
Of course, the freight paths aren't really 'random', they are largely a reflection of the fact that freights tend to travel to/from all over the place through numerous passenger bottlenecks such as Sheffield station, Dronfield and Guide Bridge (let alone further afield) and have to present themselves in narrow windows given the lack of looping opportunities en route. These then reflect back on the timings at Dore or Chinley and so on.
True, I should have been clearer in terms of the freight not being one simple clock face hourly path (i.e. the handful of freight trains a day don't seem many in number but they don't all run at the same time of the hour so can stop multiple paths where an hourly passenger train could run
But there are some people who think that they can just be moved around by a few minutes with timetable margins and headways ignored or fudged and then criticise "incompetent" or "clueless" timetablers, controllers, signallers and managers when their train gets a yellow signal or the timetable at their local station is less than a perfect even interval.
Yeah, it's a problem - I like to come on here and learn about how complicated situations are, rather than assume that those in charge "can't be bothered" to fix everything
When there's a change, passengers are so far down the list, they can't even be bothered to replace some of the stops with some of the other services.
This whole thread has become an explanation why the industry can't help the passenger.
Yeah, Rob, that's it, they just can't be bothered to put Edale stops in the other services, that'll be it
Nothing like, y'know, the three minute time penalty of an Edale stop meaning that a train would then miss it's path over the single track chords at Dore/ Hazel Grove, or not getting a slot through Castlefield/ Brightside - it must just be that they can't be bothered
Away from the Hope Valley EMR have recently made another round of random temporary timetable cuts. This leaves Mansfield, with a population of over 100,000 with a 2 hour gap without a train in the afternoon. Not only Mansfield, but lots of other large towns and villages between Nottingham and Worksop. As has been reported elsewhere EMR cut the timetable from half hourly to hourly last June and now even one of the remaining hourly trains has been cut.
The big difference between Mansfield and Edale is that Mansfield does at least have buses. However, what concern is there for the passenger when cuts like these are made. Would a town with a population of over 100,000 in the South East be left with a 2 hour gap in the timetable between 3pm and 5pm in the afternoon?
That's another place missing out that isn't getting much attention (whilst we have various threads about the Far North/ Conwy Valley etc
I think that Mansfield's problem is that the railway re-opened - before that happened it got a lot of attention from a certain type of enthusiast (the kind of "biggest place in Europe without a train station"), but now that it has a station they've moved onto caring about places like Bakewell and don't care that the passenger numbers at Mansfield are fairly underwhelming or that it has long gaps in its service (they'll only care if they get to suggest a direct London service!)
But then one could argue: do we really need to provide through trains from everywhere to everywhere? Such things add constraints to an already-congested railway: for example I do wonder whether Manchester Airport would be better served by a high-frequency dedicated shuttle from Piccadilly.
The main flow is Manchester to Sheffield presumably so isn't it best to put on a 30-min high-capacity service from Manchester to Sheffield, or onward destinations with sufficiently long platforms (Nottingham?), and get everyone else to change onto connecting services, rather than try and cram more than two fast trains an hour on this already congested line (as you mentioned, freight is also a consideration on this line).
Of course I recognise platform capacity at Sheffield may be an issue (I don't know Sheffield station, I will admit) in the sense that through trains may be desired to reduce platform occupancy. But one could choose the through destinations to be destinations without platform length issues. Or, for short platform destinations, use selective door opening or even split at Sheffield so only 3 cars go forward? (once again I don't know Sheffield station so don't know how easy splitting and joining would be).
I agree about the problems with the "linking everywhere to everywhere" approach - people talk on here about linking places hundreds of miles apart as if there's some particular reason why Liverpool has an hourly train to Norwich rather than it just being operationally convenient for the railway and the result of various services being linked together (but no train from Liverpool to Cambridge or Norwich to Blackpool or Skegness to Morecambe)
A shuttle to Manchester Airport has a lot of merits, given that the attempt to provide direct services from Llandudno/ Liverpool/ Blackpool/ Barrow/ Windermere/ Glasgow/ Edinburgh/ Newcastle/ Middlesbrough/ Scarborough/ Hull/ Cleethorpes (etc!) means clogging up railways in northern England to try to accommodate all of these demands
Sheffield station is a tricky one - it looks deceptively simple - five through platforms and a couple of bays at each end. BUT not all of the through platforms are bi-directional (so terminating/reversing services can't use them) and platform 1 is the only way of accessing the Northern fuel/sidings so nothing can clog that up for long - plus one of the southern bay platforms (2C) was fine to accommodate a short Pacer on the Hope Valley stopper but can't take a four coach 195, so if we want to run longer trains for places like Edale then something needs to be done (and, if the weather changes then we might have a hundred more people wanting to go to Edale on a Saturday morning which the railway sometimes struggles to cope with at short notice!)