There are many things wrong with the north of England’s railway network: 11th-hour cancellations, dilapidated Victorian infrastructure, two-carriage trains that ought to be six.
To this list, we can now add: mispronunciation of stations. It is a problem that Northern Trains has promised to remedy – with passengers’ help.
The operator recently had to re-record all of its onboard announcements so that they were compatible with its new fleet of trains. With 500 station names to read out, it is perhaps inevitable that its new announcers – a conductor and cybersecurity manager by day – mangled a few.
Now, Northern has vowed to record again the names of any stops it has got wrong. On the Cumbrian side of the network, it has so far pledged to put the “e” back in Burneside (currently, wrongly, silent); put the Ass into Aspatria (currently said with too much emphasis on ‘spa’, Northern believes); and pronounce Cark & Cartmel more casually, as local people do – Cark-n-Cartmel.
In Northern’s defence, the spelling of some placenames bears only the scantest resemblance to how they are pronounced by residents. How could any stranger know, for example, that inhabitants of Slaithwaite in West Yorkshire call it “slou-wit”? Or that Euxton Balshaw Lane in Lancashire should be pronounced “ex-ton” and not “euston”, like its London cousin?
Irked passengers have until the end of the month to provide feedback before two Northern employees head to the studio to re-record the placenames for the network’s onboard announcements.
Many of the names will no doubt be hotly contested. Keen-eared passengers have already asked them to restore the “s” into Ashburys, a no man’s land stop outside Manchester city centre. The pronunciation of Mossley Hill in Liverpool is a more complicated matter: on Monday this week, Northern was planning to change it to Mose-ley Hill, from Mozzley-Ill.
A furore ensued. Many Liverpudlians were adamant Northern was still on the wrong track. It’s actually Moss-ley-Ill, they insisted. The matter was deemed sufficiently important for a BBC Radio Merseyside phone-in, with one caller suggesting that Northern had gone too posh (“who did they get to record it? Hyacinth Bucket?”).
The fact there is another station on the Northern network called Mossley ( on the Greater Manchester/Yorkshire border) complicates matters further: most locals there think they live in Mozzley.
A Northern spokesperson said that it welcomed the debate, and that the most contentious pronunciations – where to put the emphasis in Aspatria, whether Ilkeston in Derbyshire is Ilk-e-ston or Ilk-ston, as well as the battle for Mossley Hill – would be settled with the help of local station staff.
“In terms of the final decision – we’ll definitely be speaking to colleagues on the ground at the local stations where there has been ‘debate’,” he said.
Northern said residents were keen to reiterate full placenames rather than shortened versions that have been adopted over time. Barrow will be given its Sunday name of Barrow-in-Furness, with Dore, just outside Sheffield, being restored to Dore & Totley.
Tricia Williams, chief operating officer at Northern, said: “We manage 467 stations across our network and some of them are pronounced very differently to how they appear in writing.
“That said, some corrections are, quite rightly, a request that station names be announced in full rather than shortened versions that have been adopted over time.”
The new onboard announcements are being recorded by Peter Corley and Laura Palmer, two of Northern’s employees, who were chosen for having “nice voices”. Corley is a conductor based in York with a ripe Yorkshire accent. Palmer is also based in York as Northern’s cybersecurity and compliance manager, but, more controversially, is actually from Essex. “That makes her a northerner by choice, which is always nice,” said a Northern Trains PR person.
Complaints will still follow, warned Danny Vaughan, head of Metrolink, Manchester’s tram network. “Everyone has an opinion. The woman who recorded ours did them all again in 2012 to correct mistakes. People now still disagree on how she pronounces Altrincham, with the c sounding more like a g, or the fact she now says Besses O’Th Barn with ‘of the’ in full.”
• This article was amended on 13 July 2023. The rail operator is called Northern Trains, not Northern Rail.
