Trans Pennine Services
I’ve crossed the Pennines several times so far on a train. Sometimes I used the smart Trans Pennine expresses and at other times the slower trains of Northern Rail.
It would appear that a word of advice is not to use any of the expresses that go anywhere near Manchester Airport without a reservation, as they are generally overcrowded with both people and luggage. I first experienced the problems on Day 3, when getting from Horwich Parkway to Manchester Piccadilly. There also on that train seemed to be a surfeit of obese people sitting in more than one seat. A guy I talked to who was on his way to Prague for business says it was always like that.
But the line from Leeds to Preston is very pleasant as it winds its way through Bradford, Burnley, Accrington, Blackburn and other places, at a fairly leisurely but purposeful pace. On one trip two freight drivers said that the driver of our train was going a bit slower than he might. So do freight drivers think themselves the Kings of the Rail?
And of course there is the Tyne Valley line that I took from Carlisle to Newcastle, which winds through almost spectacular countryside, stopping at stations, straight out of film sets for Victorian melodramas.
How much pressure could be taken of the West Coast Main Line, by doing a small amount of evelopment on these lines? The expresses need more carriages and the slower services need modern units with an extra carriage or two.
Until the 1980s, if you had done the journey I’d done from Morecambe to Newcastle, you’d have just had one change at Leeds, rather than two at Lancaster and Carlisle. Go back even further and it was electrified all the way from Leeds to Heysham. Now the electrification ends at Skipton. Such is progress!
But then on another trip across the Pennines, I sat with a guy, who used to commute on the old Woodhead electrified line from Manchester to Sheffield. A lot of that line doesn’t even exist any more.
All of this just illustrates one of the real problems of railways all over England. East-West routes have not been developed as they should have been. Try to do a journey like Ipswich to Shrewsbury or Hereford?
The Anonymous Widower 
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