Rail passengers in the north have been warned of fewer services and potentially more crowded trains after TransPennine Express said it would cut its timetable further in December.
About 20 services a day between Leeds and Manchester will be taken out of the schedule as the firm seeks to “reset” its struggling operations.
Passengers will now have three trains an hour instead of four across its core intercity line at off-peak times, reducing overall seat numbers by 5%.
TransPennine Express (TPE) was taken into public ownership in May, when FirstGroup was stripped of the contract because of poor performance, although the government said the move was unlikely to improve services overnight.
TPE, which runs trains across the north of England and into southern Scotland, cancelled roughly one in four services in January and had been warned by the regulator for the extent of late-notice cancellations.
The train operator’s managing director, Chris Jackson, said it had reduced cancellations by 40% and resolved many of the local disputes. He added that TPE knew there was “a lot more work to do” and admitted there were “perpetual training challenges” in trying to bring on enough drivers, including long-term sickness.
While some of the issues that plagued TPE earlier in the year, including a ban on rest day working by the drivers’ union Aslef, have been eased, its efforts to train more drivers have been further stymied by additional route learning for diversions because of long-term engineering works to upgrade the line.
TPE has said it is aiming for “stability” first as part of a long-term plan to restore the service to an acceptable level.
Jackson said the timetable changes in December was an “opportunity to restore reliability and stability to our service” and “give everyone greater confidence in TPE”.
He said he expected the full schedule to be restored by December 2024, but hoped the move would be “a step forward in addressing some of the issues that have impacted on our reliability and ultimately delivering a more stable and resilient service for customers”.
