For Biraja Ghosal, traversing Britain’s rail network has been an almost-daily burden for the past nine years. The 46-year-old data scientist, from Barnet in north London, travels across the country five days a week as part of his job. He is no stranger to smelly loos, late trains or missing plug sockets – and that was just Wednesday morning.
As he stepped from Virgin’s London Euston to Manchester Piccadilly service shortly before 10am on Wednesday (cost of a single ticket: £169) Ghosal was enraged to learn that prices would be rising another 3.2% from January.
“It’s not fair, already they’re too high,” he said. In recent months, he said, his train services have “got much worse”.
Of the 12 trains due to arrive at Manchester Piccadilly at 9.45am on Wednesday, only one was running on time. A service from Newcastle was cancelled and other busy trains from London Euston, Sheffield, Nottingham and Liverpool were all late. A long queue of day-trippers formed at the information booth, below a departures board that showed delays for a number of Northern, Transpennine and East Midlands trains.
It has become a familiar story for commuters across the north of England since May, when more than 9,000 Northern Rail services were cut from the schedules after the bungled introduction of a new timetable. The entire Lakes line was closed at one point, prompting a heritage rail firm to step into the breach and offer a free service during the run-up to the holiday season.
Thousands of passengers are still waiting to receive enhanced compensation for the disruption, which George Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse thinktank believes cost the north of England’s economy at least £38m and up to £1.3m a day at the height of the crisis.
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