One of the problems that bedevils the current politically controlled railway is that it’s subject to pressure to deliver superficially attractive but sometimes quite damaging ‘headline’ improvements to the timetable.
One of the first of these was the 05.40 Edinburgh – King’s Cross ‘Flying Scotsman’: a brave attempt to capture a bigger share of the Edinburgh – London business market. But 05.40 is far too early for most business travellers – indeed when the new sleepers are introduced later this year, the Caledonian Sleeper may be more attractive – and the train uses a morning peak resource, as well as putting time into other, almost certainly busier trains to get them out of the way.
At least the slow and even more sparsely loaded Blackpool – Euston services don’t impact on the timings of other trains; instead they are stuffed full of recovery time. But these trains, and the open access Blackpool services yet to be introduced, will inevitably impact on West Coast main line performance just by being there. The time taken by Network Rail to repair infrastructure faults isn’t going up, but knock-on delays have progressively increased as the network gets busier.
Next in line are the 90-minute Norwich servi…
