Platform 15 and 16 project at Manchester Piccadilly.

[Camden]

Let's cut all bar Manchester direct airport trains, including Liverpool as of course Liverpool does have it's own airport and thus does not need a direct link to Manchester as all Liverpudlians should use Liverpool airport, just as all those from Newcastle should use their own airport.

Dedicated links to major city airports - rather than national railway services - is exactly what is needed, for Manchester and Liverpool both.

 

[mmh]

And yet they pull their oversized suitcases through the elevated tunnels to the terminals quite happily. What gives?

That's simple. There's no alternative. They've reached the airport and because they're told to arrive a silly amount of time before their flight aren't stressed about missing a connecting train at an unfamiliar and quite likely confusing station. Being an airport it'll be step free for their enormous cases, unlike the interchange station.

They have an alternative to the train - road.

In general people don't like changing trains, more so if they're laden with luggage!

 

[mmh]

Dedicated links to major city airports - rather than national railway services - is exactly what is needed, for Manchester and Liverpool both.

Neither Liverpool or (especially) Manchester are "city airports", their catchment areas are enormous and they should both be as well connected to their users by public transport as possible. The alternative is people using the famously empty north west motorway network.

If you made Manchester Airport just a shuttle from Piccadilly you'd reduce the number of people using public transport to it from Manchester itself. Imagine you're in Bolton. You might be driven to the station or get a taxi, then you don't need to worry about anything til you get there. Replace that with a fun change from platform 13 to the terminating platforms and you might just go the whole way by road.

 

[B&I]

I can't express strongly enough how important direct trains to the airport are. As a regular user of TPE trains, I get into conversations with people from Leeds, York, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Preston, etc., etc. and unfailingly they are extremely grateful for the direct services to the Airport.
When you see the amount of suitcases/hand luggage they have, you can understand that crossing Manchester or even just trying to get from 13/14 at Piccadilly to one of the terminal platforms often with two kids in tow is stressful and can be the difference between driving and getting the train.

And do you speak to the infintely greater number of people commuting daily to other destinations throughout the north, and ask them whether they think the availability of direct trains to the airpirt from towns 100 miles away justifies the disruption they suffer to their journeys every day ?

 

[HowardGWR]

And do you speak to the infintely greater number of people cimmuting daily to other destinations throughout the north, and ask them whether they think the availability of direct trains to the airpirt from towns 100 miles away justifies the disruption they suffer to their journeys every day ?

This reply is a non-sequitur IMO. Trains keeping time is the responsibility of railway employees. No train needs to be late if the timetable planners do their job properly. Clearly the latter are trying to get a quart into a pint pot.

 

[B&I]

Let's cut all bar Manchester direct airport trains, including Liverpool as of course Liverpool does have it's own airport and thus does not need a direct link to Manchester as all Liverpudlians should use Liverpool airport, just as all those from Newcastle should use their own airport.

Manchester airport for Mancunians!

If the choice is between serving Manchester Airport with direct trains to everywhere, and having a functioning railway network for the north of England, the choice is, or should be, simple

 

[B&I]

This reply is a non-sequitur IMO. Trains keeping time is the responsibility of railway employees. No train needs to be late if the timetable planners do their job properly. Clearly the latter are trying to get a quart into a pint pot.

Maybe we've simply.reached the point where the available line capacity can't serve the number of services certain people want to run on it. Do you think that railway staff have all become less competent since 20th May ?

 

[Bletchleyite]

Maybe we've simply.reached the point where the available line capacity can't serve the number of services certain peopl want to run on it. Do you think that railway staff have all become less competent since 20th May ?

It started to go wrong in the North West with the 1998 timetable change - a punctual, reliable network running trains of reasonable length went to a 2-car railway of far less punctuality.

We need a dose of SBB style realism, not to keep cramming lots of short trains in.

 

[B&I]

That's simple. There's no alternative. They've reached the airport and because they're told to arrive a silly amount of time before their flight aren't stressed about missing a connecting train at an unfamiliar and quite likely confusing station. Being an airport it'll be step free for their enormous cases, unlike the interchange station.

They have an alternative to the train - road.

In general people don't like changing trains, more so if they're laden with luggage!

In fact, if you drive to Manchester Airport and are willing to pay top whack for parking, your journey on foot is much shorter. So people's choice of transport mode to the airport influences how far they have to walk once they get there

 

[B&I]

If I had to ask you one question, it would be do you hate flats being made available to prospective residents in the Manchester city core area more than rail service provision to Manchester Airport?

If I had to ask you one question, it would be, do you think building flats over land which is needed for railway expansion, and providing direct trains to Manchester Airport from towns 100 miles away, is more important than having a functioning rail network in the north of England ?

 

[B&I]

How does that work?
What you are saying is double the size, half the frequency and thus reduce the demand?
Of course, nothing greater than 6 coaches can stop at Oxford Road, we need the reconfiguration to solve that problem.

"There's a hole in my bucket...."

Yes, I am saying that having long-distance services every 15 minutes is an obsession of city boosters and is unlikely to attract people to trains who would not have used them anyway

 

[Greybeard33]

And yet they pull their oversized suitcases through the elevated tunnels to the terminals quite happily. What gives?

What gives is having to do it one more time, with added risk of a delayed connection. And it is more stressful for a family to have to navigate the concourse of an unfamiliar major station, with other travellers hurrying in all directions, and 13 platforms to choose from, than to just choose the tunnel to the correct terminal (out of only 3), amidst a crowd of other passengers all heading for check-in.

 

[Xenophon PCDGS]

If I had to ask you one question, it would be, do you think building flats over land which is needed for railway expansion, and providing direct trains to Manchester Airport from towns 100 miles away, is more important than having a functioning rail network in the north of England ?

Glad to oblige. Manchester in recent years has seen a change that city-dwelling which was seen as being a part of a vibrant modern city life and depressed areas such as Ancoats have benefitted from the new flats in the Northern Quarter. If, as you say, the land was required in the inner city core for " a functioning rail network" then one must ask the question as to why those charged with such railway works had not already purchased the required land in advance, which would then have been known in any legal requirement for land developers wishing to build flat developments on the said land.

 

[B&I]

Glad to oblige. Manchester in recent years has seen a change that city-dwelling which was seen as being a part of a vibrant modern city life and depressed areas such as Ancoats have benefitted from the new flats in the Northern Quarter. If, as you say, the land was required in the inner city core for " a functioning rail network" then one must ask the question as to why those charged with such railway works had not already purchased the required land in advance, which would then have been known in any legal requirement for land developers wishing to build flat developments on the said land.

Because either there was no spare land round the railway in the first place, or BR was pressurised into selling off spare land. And because until very recently.the idea of expanding railway capacity anywhere, particularly in the north, seemed fanciful.

Meanwhile, vast tranches of inner city Manchester, enough to house many times over the flats installed on vital sites alongside railway lines, sit empty.

 

[notlob.divad]

I can't express strongly enough how important direct trains to the airport are. As a regular user of TPE trains, I get into conversations with people from Leeds, York, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Preston, etc., etc. and unfailingly they are extremely grateful for the direct services to the Airport.
When you see the amount of suitcases/hand luggage they have, you can understand that crossing Manchester or even just trying to get from 13/14 at Piccadilly to one of the terminal platforms often with two kids in tow is stressful and can be the difference between driving and getting the train.

If you've got 2 kids and luggage in tow,then they should be driving. 3/4 people in a car 1 return journey to the airport, is a better use of finite resources and smaller carbon footprint than the 3/4 people who could have had those seats driving separate cars to home and back everyday, going to work.

Discouraging airport travellers from the railways is not be a problem if in doing so you are providing a more reliable service for intercity passengers and commuters. And if you are improving the intercity and commuting rail connections, you will also remove traffic from the motorways, thus improving that families journey to the airport for their holiday.

 

[notlob.divad]

How does that work?
What you are saying is double the size, half the frequency and thus reduce the demand?
Of course, nothing greater than 6 coaches can stop at Oxford Road, we need the reconfiguration to solve that problem.

"There's a hole in my bucket...."

Simple, don't stop them at Oxford Road. No other city in the country seems to need every intercity train stopping at 3 mainline stations in the city centre.

 

[notlob.divad]

Dedicated links to major city airports - rather than national railway services - is exactly what is needed, for Manchester and Liverpool both.

Agreed. 100%

 

[Camden]

Neither Liverpool or (especially) Manchester are "city airports", their catchment areas are enormous and they should both be as well connected to their users by public transport as possible. The alternative is people using the famously empty north west motorway network.

If you made Manchester Airport just a shuttle from Piccadilly you'd reduce the number of people using public transport to it from Manchester itself. Imagine you're in Bolton. You might be driven to the station or get a taxi, then you don't need to worry about anything til you get there. Replace that with a fun change from platform 13 to the terminating platforms and you might just go the whole way by road.

It's very hard for me to imagine ever finding myself in Bolton... but I think the notion of a single and simple change (which it is) being even slightly off-putting for the journey in question is a bit silly. Especially in the event of more reliable journeys to/from Bolton, coupled with the knowledge there is a train to the city's airport every 10 minutes or so when you arrive at Manchester Piccadilly.

As someone else pointed out, when it comes to catching a flight, solid reliability trumps direct service every time.

 

[HowardGWR]

Maybe we've simply.reached the point where the available line capacity can't serve the number of services certain people want to run on it. Do you think that railway staff have all become less competent since 20th May ?

Timetable planners are railway staff and it was to railway management I was referring. The plans were hatched long before May 2018, as Bletchleyite pointed out.

 

[mmh]

It's very hard for me to imagine ever finding myself in Bolton

Oh dear lord.

Especially in the event of more reliable journeys to/from Bolton, coupled with the knowledge there is a train to the city's airport every 10 minutes or so when you arrive at Manchester Piccadilly.

Where is the train from Bolton going to go if not to another inter-city destination (as others have called anywhere other than Piccadilly). Has to go somewhere, it can't sensibly terminate at Piccadilly.

Victoria? Hmm.

 

[AndrewE]

If you've got 2 kids and luggage in tow, then they should be driving. 3/4 people in a car 1 return journey to the airport, is a better use of finite resources and smaller carbon footprint than the 3/4 people who could have had those seats driving separate cars to home and back everyday, going to work.

Discouraging airport travellers from the railways is not be a problem if in doing so you are providing a more reliable service for intercity passengers and commuters. And if you are improving the intercity and commuting rail connections, you will also remove traffic from the motorways, thus improving that families journey to the airport for their holiday.

Are you serious? I suspect almost everyone will disagree with you, I do for one.
What makes you think that their car won't add to congestion or pollution? Where would all the cars be parked if people didn't go to the airport by train? Why should people who live near the airport put up with yet more traffic when there is a perfectly good rail service - or the potential for there to be one.
My experience of driving to Manchester airport and using the parking and shuttle buses has been enough for me to look only at flights that I can get to or back from by train, or use other airports, even using hotels at other airports if the fares are cheaper by a big enough margin.

 

[edwin_m]

I'm talking a 260m train (say) every half hour in preference to a 70-something-m train every 10 minutes. It'd get filled. I'm unconvinced that half hourly on the core would scare people off; it doesn't in countries like Switzerland that operate exactly the kind of services I'm proposing - long trains on a half hourly base which allows for adequate layover for quality connections and a high level of punctuality. And down here on the south WCML the smaller stations basically operate on a half hourly base with long trains, and we cope.

Portion working would be an excellent way to do it; TPE might for instance have a fleet of ~130m trains, and would for instance run a pair of units hourly from Liverpool to York (the busier stretch) where they'd split for Newcastle(->Edinburgh) and Middlesbrough.

Given the considerable distance between Manchester Airport station and the airport's terminal buildings (10 minute walk), with little escalators, the slow lifts, the confusing layouts and the long corridors, what part of a less than 2 minute numbered platform interchange at Manchester Piccadilly do you think would confound most members of the public heading there?...

I think a lot of this is about having confidence in the reliability of the train service. It has historically been perceived as poor and recent events haven't helped. A lot of people will worry about missing a connection and therefore a flight and perhaps an important business appointment or a holiday, even if it is explained to them that there are actually frequent trains from Piccadilly so whenever they arrive there they won't have to wait for long. Having a through train removes this concern (although they may still find themselves changing at Piccadilly if the train is terminated short, and this is probably a big risk to ridership and revenue if it goes on long enough for people to start noticing it).

If this was Switzerland then the service would be, and would be perceived to be, as reliable as a Swiss watch and a connection in the timetable would be seen as a cast-iron guarantee that the two trains would actually connect. But this isn't Switzerland. For similar reasons combining portions of trains approaching the Manchester bottleneck is probably unacceptable operationally because of the risk of one of them being severely delayed.

 

[Killingworth]

If I had to ask you one question, it would be, do you think building flats over land which is needed for railway expansion, and providing direct trains to Manchester Airport from towns 100 miles away, is more important than having a functioning rail network in the north of England ?

Logical planning should take account of both, ensuring flats are built above the railway tracks to achieve both trains to the airport and a functioning railway system - a revised cut and cover operation!

A radical long term plan would be to shut down all the lines through south Manchester for about 5-10 years, demolish all the Victorian viaducts, and start again from scratch, including commercial property above the new rail layout.

Tunnelling options could probably be as extensive without shutting down the whole system for anything like as long.

I haven't identified a money tree to achieve any of this, so we'll just have to manage what we have - and that has to involve rationing the numbers of trains.

Anecdotally I can report that air passengers are parking at smaller stations where free or cheap parking is available nearby. They then go abroad on business or holiday for up to a fortnight.

 

[B&I]

I think a lot of this is about having confidence in the reliability of the train service. It has historically been perceived as poor and recent events haven't helped. A lot of people will worry about missing a connection and therefore a flight and perhaps an important business appointment or a holiday, even if it is explained to them that there are actually frequent trains from Piccadilly so whenever they arrive there they won't have to wait for long. Having a through train removes this concern (although they may still find themselves changing at Piccadilly if the train is terminated short, and this is probably a big risk to ridership and revenue if it goes on long enough for people to start noticing it).

If this was Switzerland then the service would be, and would be perceived to be, as reliable as a Swiss watch and a connection in the timetable would be seen as a cast-iron guarantee that the two trains would actually connect. But this isn't Switzerland. For similar reasons combining portions of trains approaching the Manchester bottleneck is probably unacceptable operationally because of the risk of one of them being severely delayed.

That's all fair enough, but we are reaching the stage where the direct services are becoming so unreliable that people will lose confidence in them too, whether as a way of getting to the airport or elsewhere

 

[edwin_m]

That's all fair enough, but we are reaching the stage where the direct services are becoming so unreliable that people will lose confidence in them too, whether as a way of getting to the airport or elsewhere

I agree.

 

[keith1879]

It started to go wrong in the North West with the 1998 timetable change - a punctual, reliable network running trains of reasonable length went to a 2-car railway of far less punctuality.

We need a dose of SBB style realism, not to keep cramming lots of short trains in.

In all these arguments that we are running too many short trains you (and others) seem to miss the fact that running more (shorter) trains appears to have increased patronage ...in the case of TPE to the point where they are now introducing new longer trains to deal with that increase. To argue that "it all started to go wrong in 1998" is extraordinary when you look at the growth in actual passenger usage since that time - how does more people using the trains equate to going wrong?. There must come a point where the network is full (and it looks like we have reached it) but there is no evidence from anywhere else that we would have increased passenger usage by making the same number of trains longer - it just doesn't work that way.

 

[keith1879]

Yes, I am saying that having long-distance services every 15 minutes is an obsession of city boosters and is unlikely to attract people to trains who would not have used them anyway

And yet the services which have been increased in frequency (most notably cross-country, trans pennine and West Coast have all seen substantial increase in patronage - an increase which was expected and actively planned for.

 

[Greybeard33]

Simple, don't stop them at Oxford Road. No other city in the country seems to need every intercity train stopping at 3 mainline stations in the city centre.

The TPE Glasgow/Edinburgh trains no longer stop at Oxford Road. Now passengers who (like me) used to use that station have to cram on to the inadequate P13/14 at Piccadilly, worsening the overcrowding and dwell times. P15/16 are desperately needed....

 

[Killingworth]

Simple, don't stop them at Oxford Road. No other city in the country seems to need every intercity train stopping at 3 mainline stations in the city centre.

I know travellers from Sheffield go to the University in Manchester and use the East Midlands trains because they stop at Oxford Road. Many wanting to travel back to Sheffield from other parts of Manchester used to catch the train at Oxford Road when space is available after a lot have left from Liverpool. That way they get a seat to Sheffield that they may not get at Piccadilly! Currently the East Midlands service is so unreliable they must be in despair. More seats on the route are needed.

 

[notlob.divad]

Are you serious?

Very serious.

I suspect almost everyone will disagree with you, I do for one.

As is their and your prerogative. It will not stop me making the point. Just because the majority on here have an opinion, doesn't make it the only opinion or even the correct opinion.

What makes you think that their car won't add to congestion or pollution?

I never said it wouldn't, I said that the congestion and pollution price of 1 car on the road taking a family on a return trip to the airport, os a price worth paying, if the benefit is the removal of 4 cars from the road everyday (of people who would take the train to work and back if the commuting and intercity connections were more reliable). The fact that you are taking 3/4 people on one car rather than 3/4 people in 3/4 cars, or the fact that it is 1 return journey in the week rather than 5 return journeys in the week, really should be obvious, even on this forum.

Where would all the cars be parked if people didn't go to the airport by train?

Manchester airport is surrounded by a) fields and b) flat surface car parks. If private company wants to attract passengers it should start by spending its own money turning some of the flat surface carparks into multi-story carparks. The alternative is we have to continue providing huge amounts of car parking in the city centres where there is less space and the land could be put to better use.

Why should people who live near the airport put up with yet more traffic when there is a perfectly good rail service - or the potential for there to be one.

That logic can apply to anywhere. Why should the people who live near the port of Liverpool have to put up with yet more traffic, when there is the potential for an expanded freight rail service.
Why should the people of Fleetwood put up with more traffic when there is potential for there to be a good rail service.

My experience of driving to Manchester airport and using the parking and shuttle buses has been enough for me to look only at flights that I can get to or back from by train, or use other airports, even using hotels at other airports if the fares are cheaper by a big enough margin.

Your experience does not tally with mine. Unlike other airports I have been through, I find the park and ride facilities at Manchester Airport to be one of its few redeeming features. Against the stress levels caused by unreliable direct trains to the airport leading to the risk of missing flights, driving to the remote jetparks throwing, bag and me on the shuttle bus is a breeze.

One thing that we maybe able to agree on is that 15/16 should be built to improve flows through the Castlefield corridor. However it should have been built instead of the Chord which is just leading to a domino effect when it comes to rail service disruption.

There are a limited number of paths for rail services across Manchester. It makes no sense in the slightest to use 2 paths for the same train. To then do that for 4 trains an hour using 8 of the valuable cross-city paths in each direction is insanity.