Very useful meeting today with Graham Meikleljohn of TPE, which inevitably focussed on what can only be described as the disastrous launch of TPE services at Morpeth on 15th December 2019. The meeting was constructive and open with no attempt to cover up the scale of the problem and difficulties customers across TPE’s network experienced. More positively, 10 of TPEs scheduled 16 services each way per day at Morpeth were re-launched from today and so far, things are going well. TPE are expecting to launch the remainder from 17th February but please continue to check their website in case of further unforeseen problems. The only exception is that the 09:29 southbound from Morpeth will not run through to Manchester Airport until 30th March. Before that, it terminates at Newcastle and a different TPE service leaves for Manchester Airport 5 minutes later. But because the connection is less than 8 minutes, you can not buy a through ticket for this connection.
