We’re worst-connected big city for rail services
LEICESTER has been named the worst-connected big city in Britain for rail passengers.
Even a village in Cornwall was found to have a better range of train services than the home of Thomas Cook’s Victorian travel business.
Research by the Independent scored the 12 biggest UK cities outside of London on how easy it is to get from them to other places by rail.
Birmingham came top with a score of 18 – nearly three times that of Leicester, which was last with 6.5.
The score was based on: how many of the other 11 big cities could be reached by a direct service; how many fast trains to London there were each hour; whether trams or a metro service served the city’s main station; and whether there was a transport link to the nearest airport.
Birmingham has direct links to the other 11 biggest cities – Manchester, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Sheffield, Bristol, Leeds, Nottingham, Liverpool, Glasgow, Cardiff and Leicester.
Leicester scored poorly because it only links directly to Birmingham, Nottingham and Sheffield in the daytime, and Leeds can only be reached directly after 8pm.
In its favour, Leicester does have three non-stop trains every hour to London. But it lost a lot of its connections to other cities in the 1960s, when hundreds of branch lines around the country were scrapped based on recommendations made to the Government by Dr Richard Beeching.
Nicky Gardner, co-author of Europe by Rail, told the Independent: “Prior to the Beeching cuts in the 1960s, Leicester had multiple direct daily trains to Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool. The downgrading of the Midland Main Line curbed Leicester’s connectivity, with the closure of the Great Central further depleting the departure lists.”
Scott Knowles, chief executive of East Midlands Chamber, told the Independent: “Rail links are an essential element of the regional transport infrastructure. As major contributors to the UK economy, and being located in the heart of the country, Leicester needs and deserves the best-possible transport links.
“By the Government’s own figures, for many years the East Midlands has received only 60 per cent of the national average per head when it comes to infrastructure investment.
“This has to change if Leicester and the wider region is to realise its fantastic potential.“
The website also reported Leicester has fewer connections than the small Cornish village of Par, even though the population of Leicester is more than 200 times that of Par, which has hourly fast trains to the capital, including sleeper trains six nights a week, and direct links to seven of the 12 biggest cities.
One positive thing for people in Leicester was that St Pancras International, the station where trains between the city and London terminate, is the best-connected of all the capital’s stations, with trains going on to Paris, Brussels, Cambridge, Kent, Brighton, Gatwick and the south of France.
Leicester’s mayor Sir Peter Soulsby said the city was in an unfortunate position in the country’s rail network.
He said: “I read the piece in the Independent with interest. We have excellent connections to London, but Leicester suffers because of where it stands.
“Derby is a smaller city but is on the cross roads of the rail network and therefore has much better rail connectivity.”
Sir Peter said there were proposals with the Government to try to restore the east/west rail link between Leicester and Coventry, which was severed in 2004.