Who knew? Even while the last issue was being printed, the world for all of us began to change at an increasingly unexpected and worrying rate. By the time it was delivered, just a few days later, we were all being told to stay at home. All those whinges and ramblings about services, seats and the like suddenly seemed irrelevant.
Instead, train services were slashed, in my neck of the woods by 50%, mostly in the early morning and late evening in what looked like a rerun of Northern’s recent strike timetables. On the Esk Valley line, this meant the early morning and later evening services introduced only last December were the early casualties, having run for just three months. True, initial usage had been low – hardly surprising in the early weeks since there had been no such services for 30 years and absolutely nothing had been done to promote or even advertise them, the only contribution being a poster promoting ‘four additional trains a day to Middlesbrough’ which had to be withdrawn because there were in fact only two – one in the morning and one in the evening, and now both withdrawn.
But the immediate withdrawal of these morning and evening services while others during the day continued to run …
