Northern Rail passengers hit out at ‘rubbish’ service

Northern Rail has vowed to improve performance as customers hit out at its “rubbish” service.

The rail firm, which was nationalised in 2020, cancelled more than 1,000 trains during the recent half term.

A senior manager said the firm was “sorry” for its recent performance, which has “not been good enough”.

Transport secretary Louise Haigh said an improvement plan the firm has proposed would “reduce cancellations and improve reliability for passengers”.

Northern Rail has been trying to turn around its poor service for a number of years.

It runs services across northern England and into the Midlands, including to stations in Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, and Nottingham.

Passenger Clare Harland said her experience of Northern was “absolutely rubbish”.

Trains are “either rammed, [or] they’re cancelled,” she said.

“You try to leave [work] early, to get an earlier one, or you wait until you get one after about half past six, which you don’t want to do, obviously,” she said.

Another passenger said Northern was “absolutely diabolical”.

“I catch this train every single day,” he said. “It either doesn’t turn up on time, or doesn’t turn up full stop,” he said. “We’ve got dirty old rolling stock. It’s a sham, it really is.”

Passenger Lisa Greenhalgh said she gets to the station 20 minutes early, and has then waited an hour and forty minutes for a train “on a number of occasions in the freezing cold, and you’ve had no update, so you don’t know what’s happening, and by then it’s too late to drive into Manchester, so you end up spending two hours out of the house and actually getting nowhere.”

Some businesses also complained about Northern services.

Norman Wallis, owner of Southport Pleasureland, said: “We are a tourism destination, and basically, Northern [is] killing us.”

“Not just our business, but the hotels, the retailers, the restaurants. Everything in the town is being killed off, because we haven’t got the lifeblood, which is the people – they haven’t got an easy way to get into Southport,” he said.

“It’s extremely difficult, and on a Sunday, there are no services whatsoever, so we can’t get the staff in, we can’t get the people in.”

The firm was brought under government control in 2020, but problems dogging the network continued.

In July, Northern Rail was issued a “breach notice” by the Department for Transport for cancelling too many trains, which required it to work on a plan to fix the problem.

The firm has said one of its main problems is train crew availability, pointing to high levels of sickness, and also that Sundays are outside contracted working hours.

Between 13 October and 9 November this year, fewer than half of its services ran on time.

Matt Rice, Northern’s chief operating officer, said the firm was “sorry for our recent performance, accept it has not been good enough and understand the impact this has on our customers”.

He added that Northern Rail was “working hard to address issues with traincrew availability so we can improve reliability for our customers”, including agreeing a new rest-day working agreement for train drivers.

It has also offered conductors a new deal to work on Sundays, he said, adding that the leadership of the RMT union will look at the offer before putting it to members for a vote.

“We realise there is more to be done to address issues with performance and are now focused on delivering our improvement plan,” Rice said.

In its latest improvement plan, Northern said that by 2027 it wanted 90% of its trains to be on time, with only 2% cancellations.

It said it would improve its service by getting Sunday and rest day working agreements in place and by bringing in a “sickness action plan”.

Northern said it was still dealing with problems sparked by a timetable change in 2018 that persists in putting together timetables and “challenges facing colleagues”.

It wants to make its timetable less complex and also make sure its “aging” train fleet has targeted maintenance.

Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, said there was “chaos throughout the day” in Manchester stations.

“We’re in the busiest time of the year in Manchester. We say we want growth, but we’ve got a rail service that’s actively working against us getting that growth and bringing people into the city,” he said.

“It needs to be sorted out now,” Burnham added.

Transport Secretary Louise Haigh said the North has been “let down for too long by poor rail services [and] unacceptable levels of cancellations and delays”, and that theses were “holding its economy and its ambition back”.

She said the firm’s improvement plan would “generate higher revenues for the taxpayer and boost the entire region’s economy”.

Haigh added that the government was “modernising working practices”.

The RMT union will ballot members about conductors volunteering for Sunday working and use a passenger assistance app to help customers.

The firm will make more on extra revenues than it will spend on extra staffing under this agreement, the government said.