Passengers make fewer journeys on Northern
PASSENGERS are making fewer journeys with troubled rail operator Northern, new figures show.
Northern services descended into chaos in May when the franchise introduced significant changes to its timetables. Large numbers of trains were cancelled while many of the services that remained running suffered long delays, spurring MPs to call for Transport Secretary Chris Grayling’s resignation.
Northern was also affected by strikes in December 2018 and ran a reduced service on Saturdays in the run up to Christmas, leading to a reduction in passenger journeys last year.
Passengers made 101 million journeys on Northern services in 2018, according to figures from the Office of Rail and Road. That’s a decrease from the 105.8 million in 2017.
It is the second successive year in which passenger journey numbers have dropped, having previously grown strongly from 91.1 million in 2012.
A spokesman for Northern said: “Last year was very difficult for many customers for well-known reasons including the delays to infrastructure upgrades and unprecedented autumn conditions. The resulting disruption and the ongoing RMT dispute caused significant problems for our customers and, undoubtedly, resulted in fewer journeys being made.
“We are very sorry for not meeting our customers’ expectations last year and are working very hard to win back customers during 2019 with the introduction of £500m of new trains, and further investment in refurbished trains, additional services and better stations. Customers are also benefiting from Delay Repay 15 – providing compensation for delays over 15 minutes.”
There were fewer passenger journeys on other UK rail franchise operators too.
South Western – which was hit by strikes in November and December – had 1.1 million fewer passenger journeys in 2018 compared to 2017.
East Midlands Trains was down by nearly 500,000 passenger journeys.
Great Western Railway had 3.8 million fewer passengers journeys – although that was largely because Transport for London took over some of the company’s services out of Paddington in May.
Overall, though, the number of UK journeys by train went up by 25 million to a total of 1.74 billion in 2018.
Among the operators seeing the biggest growth was Govia Thameslink Railway, which had 335 million passenger journeys in 2018, up by 17.8million compared to the 317.2 million the previous year.