What I don’t understand is the quotes of an additional ’700 train services through the region each day’.

How can that be, if I understand correctly this bit of line will enable trains to go from Piccadilly, through Oxford Road via the Castlefield Link to get to Victoria. Isn’t there already an overcrowding problem on the section between Piccadilly and Oxford Road?

Also how does this work ‘Sources say it will cut journey times between Manchester and Leeds by 14 minutes. Average journey times in the region will be cut by 30 minutes’.

Now maybe I’m misunderstanding how this will work, but many of the Mancester to Leeds services start in Liverpool, Blackpool or even further north. To take advantage of this new stretch of line they will have to reverse at Piccadilly (or Oxford Road and cut out Piccadilly) and retrace their route?? OK, the ones from Manchester Airport will now be able to avoid the reversal, but a 14-minute saving?

Average journey times cut by 30-minutes??? I’d love to have that explained.

Don’t get me wrong, I welcome any addition to our rail system, but this seems to be being oversold.

Even though the northbound services from Holmes Chapel are not timed well having two helps in the event of cancellations and overcrowding.

For those reasons I don’t think it’s right to look at extra Holmes Chapel services during the day until other stations like Knutsford, Northwich, Hartford and Winsford get better services.

We may have 2 trains an hour in the day, but they are too close together, and because 1 goes via the airport and stays a long time, you may just as well say we have 1 train an hour.

The frequency is terrible. There should be more options.

It’s been really awful since the new Virgin services ran more often and our local service has suffered.

Thanks for your interest.

Mike – We’ll be considering the report soonish, then be deciding whether to submit a response. I’m sure that if we can see it could influence the outcome, we will submit a formal response.

Steve – We know they looked at the Western Link in some detail. It was mentioned at meetings a number of us went to.

We know the Western Link could bring a lot of benefits in terms of reducing congrestion, and indeed Manchester Airport station was designed in such a way as to facilitate a western link. We also know the cost of the link would be very high with the tunnel that would be required under the Cargo Centre and the taxiways and apron in front of Terminal 2. I suspect these costs will have made it difficult to put a good business case together. We’ll see if we can get more information at further “Northern Hub” meetings we are invited to.

I just felt that in the report, when they spoke of…
“- Northwich could get twice as many trains throughout the day, with a train to Manchester every 30 minutes
- Knutsford could see two trains every hour, one a semi-fast service to Manchester throughout the day”
…it would have been relatively easy to give a reference to the Middlewich branch – ideally that some or all of the additional trains could run via Sandbach and Middlewich.

As a matter of interest, are MCRUA planning to submit a formal response to the report?

The Manchester Hub / Northern Hub study is concentrated on relieving the congestion and substantially improving transit times between city regions in Northern England.

As such, I wouldn’t expect to see the Middlewich Branch mentioned, as using it wouldn’t relieve rail congestion in the Manchester area.

There is potentially good news re Middlewich though, as there is a discussion in the report about one of the services that currently arrives from Manchester and terminates at Crewe continuing on instead to Stoke. This frees up platform capacity at Crewe which provides a greater opportunity for a service to/from the Mid-Cheshire Line via Middlewich.

Indeed, the Middlewich line is shown on one of the diagrams in the report.

I didn’t see anything about Baguley, though.