What will it take to end rail misery for Yorkshire’s passengers? - Andrew Vine

Waiting on the platform is the supporting cast – usually dozens of people heading home from work, augmented in term time by children who have finished school.

All of them, young and old alike, will somehow cram on, with no hope of a seat and the 16.18 sets off looking from the outside rather like one of those world record attempts to see how many people it is possible to squeeze into a telephone kiosk.

At Meadowhall, its next stop, even more people will somehow get on, usually laden with shopping bags, and the train is so jammed that often there are no ticket checks because the conductor either can’t push through the corridors or more likely doesn’t want to be berated yet again about the overcrowding.

It really is a pantomime, and it’s been going on for years, day in and day out, the same unfunny joke perpetrated on hapless passengers which encapsulates much of what is wrong with Yorkshire’s railways.

The problem isn’t only that we don’t have enough reliable or frequent services. It’s also that the ones we do have are so appallingly managed.

I long ago lost my sense of humour about the 16.18, which I use on a regular basis. Looking back through emails, I find my first complaint to Northern about it was in the summer of 2016, couched in polite and reasonable terms, making the straightforward suggestion that a couple more coaches are added because passenger numbers are consistently higher than two can accommodate. Common sense and perfectly achievable, I thought, a viewpoint shared by many other passengers with whom the enforced intimacy of the 16.18 had encouraged conversation. The reply was the usual shoulder-shrugging corporate drivel about valuing customers, which completely failed to address the points and amounted to sticking two fingers up at us all.

In the seven-and-a-half years since then, I’ve emailed a few more times, as other passengers must have, including with renewed hope when Northern was nationalised in 2020 and improvements promised.

Yet the crowd at platform one still watches with sinking hearts as the two-coach train trundles in, despite what must be data from electronic ticket checks telling Northern that the number of people aboard routinely far exceeds the seats available.

I don’t suppose the 16.18 is the worst service in Yorkshire. That badge of shame probably belongs somewhere among the trains across the Pennines, where the battle-scarred veterans of commuting nightmares from Slaithwaite, Huddersfield or Dewsbury have a list of nominations longer than even that of cancelled services.

Every one of the stories they could tell is an indictment of what is currently a Government-operated network which is failing to run what services are available with anything resembling efficiency, resulting in trains that are horribly overcrowded or which are still being cut at the last minute in continuing cynical attempts to massage the cancellation figures.

That much was proved in the run-up to Christmas when Huddersfield gained the unenviable distinction of becoming Britain’s worst station for cancellations, which will come as no surprise to anybody who travels from there regularly.

The latest performance figures, show 27 per cent of Northern services run late and 10 per cent are cancelled.

A couple of weeks before the figures came out, rail minister Huw Merriman turned up in Ravensthorpe with a flourish for a bit of political theatre in which he announced £3.9bn for improvements across our region which should mean faster and more reliable trains.

Thanks minister, we’re glad of the money, but a lot of the improvements won’t be seen for a decade or more and we’d really like to know what you’re doing to ensure services that vast numbers of Yorkshire residents are obliged to use today, tomorrow and next week are fit for purpose.

If Mr Merriman and the executives responsible for running Northern and TPE spent an hour or two at Leeds, Sheffield or Huddersfield watching what happens when trains with too few carriages arrive, they might well ask themselves the same question that passengers do: Why isn’t this sorted out?