The fiasco of the Castlefield corridor will be well known to regular readers, but in brief we spent £100 million building the Ordsall chord to allow trains from lines into Manchester Victoria to reach Manchester Airport. The short section of track between Deansgate and Piccadilly is now choked with trains, almost all of which are delayed, causing reactionary delays all over the North. Network Rail’s report recommends taking out some trains, yet we are only talking about a total of 15 trains per hour, which in normal circumstances would be easy. Thameslink was designed around 24.
FLAT JUNCTIONS
There are five flat junctions in the corridor, which could be remodelled but at great cost and probably taking years to complete. One thing we can do now is to occupy them for as short a time as possible. The same goes for platforms and indeed signal section overlaps. One train cautiously easing up on a red signal will slow down others behind it and others waiting to cross flat junctions. Much of the track is either 15 or 20mph, and the Network Rail report into the problems (Castlefield Corridor Congested Infrastructure Report capacity analysis, referred to below as ‘the report’ – see ‘Railtalk’, November 2019 …
