Fury over timetables impasse
NORTHERN POLITICAL leaders have sharply criticised the rail industry after it emerged none of the proposed timetable changes put forward to ease congestion at a key part of the network can be delivered and there was no prospect of an infrastructure fix until the 2030s.
Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham led a series of angry responses at a Transport for the North board meeting on Friday, saying it was “embarrassing” the rail industry had put forward “non-workable options” aimed at relieving pressure on the network in central Manchester for a major public consultation earlier this year.
Pressure on the congested area played a significant part in the massive disruption to services across the North that followed timetable changes in 2018. Burnham said that at a meeting of the Rail North Committee it had been “made apparent to us that the options that we consulted on for the May 2022 timetable were not deliverable options”.
He went on: “We need better than this from the rail industry. In any of our worlds, if we went out to consult on options that weren’t deliverable we would rightly be heavily criticised for wasting people’s time. It just isn’t acceptable to me that, three years on from the chaos of May 2018, we are in a position where there is no clarity about the thinking around a workable timetable, nor is there any clarity still about an infrastructure plan for central Manchester that would actually fix these things. If I were to put together the two elements that were presented to us this morning, from what I heard there is no prospect of a fix for the infrastructure that would actually fix the timetable until the early 2030s.”
ONLINE: Follow latest news at www.halifaxcourier.co.uk