Manchester Victoria has emerged as the UK’s worst-hit mainline rail station for cancellations so far this year. According to figures from train data website On Time Trains, one in 10 of the station’s 10,506 weekly services did not run from January to November. The north-west of the country ranked top regionally with rates of cancelled stops hitting 6.5% and resulting in over 600,000 lost services. The Department for Transport pledged a major railway overhaul to guide services back into public ownership and reinvest in them.
University student Meher, 22, from Bolton, alleges regular cancellations at Manchester Victoria resulted in her missing hundreds of hours and made her and her classmates more stressed about their travel than their work schedules. Liverpool commuter Amber, 21, claims her train was cancelled 25% of the time, adding: “Cities up north have to just deal with it, because there’s no other option.” However, industry group Rail Delivery Group said cancellations across the UK could result from weather, strikes, track issues, faults and trespassing, stressing efforts towards reliability and punctuality.
Railway stations under asset managers Network Rail, which includes 20 of the UK’s largest, have leases awarded to train operating firms for usage management purposes but the organisations are not responsible for the punctuality of other operators using their stations. Train cancellations are one of the biggest irritants for UK rail commuters and have met with a vocal response from trade unions and politicians who view it as a critical area in the ongoing debate about the role of public and private investment in UK infrastructure.
Transport charity Campaign for Better Transport’s Michael Solomon Williams highlighted a longstanding “economic and social inequality which has been directly related to transport inequality over a number of years” after National Rail and ORR data suggested the prime area for such disparities was the North, with far less investment to support commuter coverage as compared to the South
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