Yesterday was a call with North East Rail User Groups including SENRUG with Northern’s new Regional Director Kerry Peters. These calls are now regular events, and I appreciate Northern giving the time to update us with what is happening, and the challenges they are facing across the network. But I couldn’t get excited about them increasing the service to Saltburn (population 6,000) to every 30 minutes, whilst pleading insufficient resources to improve service at Cramlington (population 40,000) which is currently just one train every 2 hours. I can’t help feeling there is an inbuilt bias against Cramlington and Morpeth deep within Northern – either that or then timetable planners haven’t updated their population figures since the 1960s, since it seems to me that any available resources goes elsewhere, every time. I am planning to escalate this further. Following the call with Northern, I went straight in to a Railfuture North East Branch Committee Meeting, and today it was Transport for the North’s Stakeholder Conference on Zoom. Thanks to those members of TfN’s Panel who took the time to respond personally to one or two comments I left in the Chat about their organisations. It’s good to know that at least our comments were being read – and thought about!
