Political editor and aspiring train correspondent Liam Thorp shares his thoughts on an up and down year for the region’s rail operator
On board a Merseyrail train(Image: Colin Lane/Liverpool Echo)
For those who have been lucky enough to avoid my transport-themed musings over the past year, you may not know that I am a regular user of the Merseyrail network and commuting by train each and every day of the working week.
As such – and as the powers that be at the transport operator well know – I take a keen, some would say obsessive, interest in how the network performs and its ability to serve the fine people of this bustling city region. As someone who wants the region’s public transport to work well, I like to think of myself as a critical friend, but the team at Rail House may have a more withering description for this particular correspondent.
As we come towards the end of 2024 I feel compelled to give an honest review of where Merseyrail currently finds itself as a rail service and to look ahead to what 2025 will bring. I think it is important and fair to point out that for a long time Merseyrail has been one of the most reliable rail operators in the country.
Sure we could do with trains more regularly than every 15 minutes but for a long time there were very few issues around cancellations and delays and the fact that no other operators run on the network always put us at something of an advantage.
But over the past few years something has changed. We have seen the trusty old Class 507 trains, which had started to fall apart, transferred out of service and replaced at a frustratingly glacial pace by a £500m fleet of Class 777 new trains. It is safe to say this has been a very bumpy ride.
The rollout of the trains, which was already significantly delayed, caused huge problems in 2023 – as passengers were hit by countless delays and cancellations, particularly after the chaotic opening of the Headbolt Lane station in Kirkby, with problems blamed on a new battery technology being used to reach the station. Things got so bad the Liverpool City Region Mayor Steve Rotheram felt compelled to offer refunds for those who had been most badly affected.
There have still been problems with delays and cancellations
But that was 2023, so was this past year any better? Well the short answer is yes, even if it hasn’t always felt like it. Merseyrail’s performance numbers have certainly got better, rising from a figure of roughly 90% of trains arriving on time or within five minutes in 2023 to 92% now – although transport bosses admit this is still some way of where they want to be.
There have still been plenty of problems with cancellations and delays, particularly for those travelling in the vicinity of the Headbolt Lane station. Colleagues at the ECHO who travel on that line tell me they head to their local stations each morning expecting some kind of disruption, which is never a good sign and something that must improve as the new fleet really settles in going into 2025.
The other issue right now is capacity. The previous fleet was made up of either three-car or six-car trains and the larger versions would always be deployed on busy commuter services at peak times. Thus far, the new Class 777s have largely been run as four-car trains and this can cause issues on those rush-hour services. This reporter can often find himself nestled into the sweaty armpit of a fellow passenger, which is not an ideal place to be before a morning coffee has even been consumed.
Hopefully in 2025 we will see a key change that will make such unedifying scenes a thing of the past. This August, testing of the new fleets eight-car trains got underway on the Southport line, which has brought with it changes to services between Southport and Hunts Cross and Ormskirk and Liverpool Central. Once in operation, this will double the capacity on these busy morning routes on the network’s hectic northern line. The ECHO understands this should start to happen fairly early in 2025 – we hope.