The recent Northumberland Gazette article ‘Rail group voices concerns over impact of potential cuts to services and investment on Northumberland‘ of 8th January 2024 has once again shone a spotlight on the issues of local services on the East Coast Main Line through Northumberland.
The ‘through vs stopping‘ problem
The intention of LNER & Network Rail is to introduce one more fast, non-stop service through Northumberland, which results in fewer stopping trains, as fast services are capacity intensive – they need a lot of track clear ahead of them to run at high speeds without being slowed by other services.
This is to make rail travel between Edinburgh and London (or vice-versa) more attractive compared to air travel, with a recent Edinburgh Evening News article hailing ‘Edinburgh trains: LNER to cut Edinburgh-London journey times by half an hour‘, with a proven link between reduced journey times and a modal shift away from highly polluting domestic flights to much cleaner domestic, electric rail travel.
While this is a laudable goal to cut emissions in the face of climate change, it comes at the price of local and regional rail connectivity along the Northumberland Coast (as well as the Scottish Coast), as more fast trains will reduce the opportunity for local trains.
This offsets the cuts in emissions from flights by putting more traffic onto road, simply displacing aircraft emissions for those of cars.
Solution :Better local services ALONGSIDE faster long-distance trains.
The real solution is to have BOTH types of service; more fast services between the capitals of Scotland and England is of course welcomed, but an hourly local service along the Northumberland Coast would be transformative for the area.
The Northumberland Coast has many places to potentially serve, with world-famous castles such as Bamburgh, Alnwick and many more, a fantastic coast (the Northumberland Coast National Landscape parallels the ECML for a good part of its length), as well as the numerous communities en-route.
The local service was also proven to be viable by research carried out by Systra in 2019, and funded between Northumberland County Council, Northern (Arriva Rail North at the time) and with a small contribution from a local rail user group. Please see Railfuture North East: North of Morpeth Local Service for more information on the history of the campaign.
In short, there is a need to get this hourly local service up and running BEFORE increasing the fast, non-stop services that are potentially detrimental to local and regional connectivity. In the longer term, Network Rail needs to be appropriately funded to allow for capacity enhancements to accomodate both services alongside one another, not squeezing out local connections to enable more InterCity trains.
Let’s please have BOTH services, and implement the capacity improvements to enable this.
RH.
The Northumberland Coast Loop 