Northern Rail to cut Christmas timetable to improve reliability

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The UK’s largest rail operator outside London is preparing to cut its Christmas timetable in an attempt to stabilise services. 

Northern Rail was issued with a breach of contract notice by the rail regulator in July after a spike in cancelled services and a string of weekend “do not travel” warnings to passengers.

In order to improve reliability over Christmas and New Year, a reduced timetable will now be required in order to “give a level of certainty to customers”, northern leaders were told at a meeting with the rail operator on Wednesday.

The operator has been battling a range of local issues in recent months, including a historic lack of Sunday working requirements for train conductors in the North West. 

Northern Rail officials said a temporary four-month Sunday working agreement had been reached in principle with the RMT union and will be put to its members. 

Chief operating officer Matt Rice told regional leaders that if the RMT voted for that proposal there should be a “significant” stabilisation of Sunday services, particularly in the North West.

An overtime agreement struck with Aslef earlier this month has already resulted in a drop in cancellations. 

Nevertheless, there is still a “need to remove some services” over the festive period in order to stabilise performance, leaders were told.

Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, chair of Rail North, said that the situation remained “unacceptable”.

Northern, a particularly large and complex operator running thousands of daily services across the north of England, was brought under emergency government control in March 2020 due to failures under its previous private operator. 

While performance initially improved, this year a lack of voluntary overtime agreements with trade unions, combined with historic terms and conditions anomalies, has caused performance to nosedive. 

The operator breached its contract three times between April and July due to the high number of cancellations.

However, Rice said that Northern’s problems dated back much longer, noting that performance figures “have not been positively trending since around 2015”.

“They’ve been gradually getting worse,” he said, and in turn would now only “gradually get better”.

Getting performance to where it should be — including the desired drop in cancellations — would take until 2027, he added, due to the need for co-ordination with reforms to the rest of the national rail system.

That timeframe was a “pretty tough thing to hear”, said Burnham, given how long Northern’s problems have persisted.

Rice’s comments come as the government looks to gradually bring all operators in-house as part of a manifesto pledge to nationalise the railways.

Rice suggested that Northern, which was cobbled together from three historic train operators, may need to be broken up under that process.

In the meantime, regional leaders remain particularly frustrated by a lack of blanket ticket acceptance by other operators when Northern imposes last-minute cancellations.