‘Strip Northern Rail of its franchise’, demands Metro Mayor
Liverpool’s Metro Mayor has called on the Government to strip Northern Rail of its franchise.
The demand was issued after Friday’s Liverpool City Region Combined Authority meeting when Steve Rotheram learned that Northern Rail was, again, planning to run no services from Liverpool to Manchester airport on Sunday October 6.
He said: “Earlier this morning we have been advised by Northern Rail that they will not be providing services from Liverpool to Manchester Airport at all this Sunday.
“So once again there will be misery for passengers on our railways this weekend.
“There will be no direct alternatives from Liverpool and no linked Northern Services from Manchester Piccadilly to Manchester Airport.
“To compound this there are no rail replacement buses planned by the company.
“This is simply unacceptable and to find out with minimal notice only makes the situation worse.
“I have made the company aware of my displeasure at the situation and asked that they reconsider the decision not to provide bus replacement services.
“I will be meeting with the managing director of Northern on Monday and I will be leaving him in no doubt of my feelings on the poor performance of the company.
“Instances like this only reinforce my belief that the franchise has to be removed from Northern and I will continue to press government to do so.”
Since his statement he issued an update, saying that Northern had confirmed that, despite them not running Express services they would run stopping services. Mr Rotheram said: “This is still inadequate for long-suffering passengers and is why I believe their franchise should be removed.”
A spokesman for Northern said: “Each week, we are having to adjust our Sunday timetable and as a result, our on-board crew rosters, on a small number of routes in the north west.
“There are a number of factors impacting on our ability to run these services, including engineering work and being able to match employees’ availability within their working agreements.
“We do not cancel services lightly and routes with cancelled Sunday service are chosen carefully to minimise the impact on customers.
“On each of the affected routes, our customers will have a range of alternative options available to them including other Northern services, trains run by other operators or rail replacement road transport. All routes with pre-planned cancellations are advertised via the Northern website each Friday.”
