What we want this Christmas

THERE was good news this week when Merseyrail announced that passengers could soon enjoy travelling on a brand new fleet of trains.

Journey times between Southport and Hunts Cross will be cut by nine minutes, while the new trains will also allow Merseyrail to extend its operations beyond the current network, potentially including services to Skelmersdale, Warrington and Wrexham.

Once again though, Southport is left out on a limb through our location, on the edge on Merseyside, but not quite in Lancashire.

If £460m is being spent to improve rail services in the region, what we really want to see is the reopening of the Burscough Curves and the reintroduction of direct rail services between Southport, Preston and Ormskirk.

We’d like to see our town connect not just with Liverpool in the south but with areas to the north and east of our town.

We desperately need better trains on the Southport to Manchester line, and a muchimproved Meols Cop station.

We want to see faster, more frequent services to Manchester city centre and Manchester Airport, at a time when these services look like they are being eroded.

In a perfect world we would also have a main railway station in Southport that wasn’t the ugliest building on the Merseyrail network. As the gateway to a booming holiday town, it doesn’t give visitors the warmest of welcomes or the greatest of first impressions.

New trains are great news for passengers – but if we were writing our railways Christmas list, all these would be on it.