Railtalk
At a recent industry gathering, we asked a senior industry official what he thought was the best way of dealing with the ongoing congestion problems and poor performance of services that cross the Manchester conurbation. ‘Turn the Ordsall chord into a Mancunian version of New York’s High Line’ was the arch reply. Of course, our interviewee was being flippant, but how has it come to the point where anyone could suggest that an £85 million investment in the railway, garlanded with industry awards as a great engineering triumph when it opened two years ago, should be turned into an urban garden?
Manchester’s rail network has been beset by operating problems since the new chord opened, which came to a head in the meltdown after the May 2018 timetable changes were introduced. While some of the problems that caused the adverse headlines in the North last summer have been resolved, others have not: performance through the Castlefield corridor, the two-track section leading west out of Piccadilly station towards the Ordsall chord, remains poor.
In the light of this Network Rail commissioned two studies of operations in the corridor, with the first reporting in September: it lists a number of interven…
