It was great to catch up with Graham Meiklejohn of TransPennine Express today, our first session since the company had moved in to government control. My key concern was train reliability and Graham was able to assure me that the Recovery Plan is now essentially delivered. Reliability levels on all services, but specifically on the Newcastle \u2013 Berwick is now at pre-covid levels. Nevertheless, noting that our service is less frequent than hourly, we did discuss arrangements for stranded passengers if a TPE service, such as Morpeth\u2019s 09:36 to Edinburgh, is cancelled. The answer is that since there is no other TPE service within an hour, TPE will arrange ticket acceptance on other operator\u2019s services, or alternatively road transport. However, getting hold of TPE, particularly if Morpeth\u2019s ticket office is unstaffed, is quite a challenge.<\/p>\n
Next up was getting TPE trains to serve additional stations such as Cramlington, along with my aspiration that the Edinburgh \u2013 Newcastle service be re-connected to the Newcastle \u2013 Liverpool service, as originally promised, both by TPE and DfT, for December 2019. Re-instating these through trains to Liverpool, apparently, is significantly more challenging, but SENRUG will continue to campaign on this front.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was great to catch up with Graham Meiklejohn of TransPennine Express today, our first session since the company had…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chairmans-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.senrug.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.senrug.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.senrug.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.senrug.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.senrug.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2121"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.senrug.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2122,"href":"https:\/\/www.senrug.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2121\/revisions\/2122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.senrug.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.senrug.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.senrug.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}