Good morning. Transport secretary Mark Harper went to Manchester yesterday to discuss the crisis in train cancellations across the north. Jamie Driscoll, the North of Tyne mayor, attended by Zoom: the train service was too unreliable for him to make the journey. West Yorkshire mayor Tracy Brabin’s train was cancelled, but she made it in the end. Her train home had only half the carriages it was meant to.
There’s a pattern here: it’s only a month since Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham and Liverpool City Region metro mayor Steve Rotheram were late for a press conference on the same subject because their trains were cancelled. People who live outside the region might have their suspicions about whether these incidents were engineered for maximum political impact: surely trains can’t go wrong this frequently, they might ask. “Lol,” say the residents of the north of England, as they wearily refresh the National Rail Enquiries app yet again.
