tenthofjune

Following my posts on Blackrod Station being treated as a poor relation to Lostock Station, it now appears that, as a category E station, Lostock could be set to lose its ticket office.

Oddly, a category E station is classed as one that is staffed and handling more that 250,000 passengers per annum. By contrast, Blackrod is classified as category F1 (unstaffed with fewer than 250,000 passengers). With 388,000 passengers served, this classification justs makes the lack of a ticket office even more ludicrous.

A full list of stations and their categories can be seen here.

A new website has launched today, from the creators of TheyWorkForYou and FixMyStreet, comes FixMyTransport which as well as letting you report issues, allows you to open up an issue for wider support/discussion.

Further to my post about how Blackrod Station is treated as Lostock’s poor relation, I have created a page about the lack of service and amenities at Blackrod Station.

If you feel the same way, please support it.

I see that Blackrod Station is finally getting better access to both platforms, but I can’t help feeling that this is only being done because they are obliged to under DDA regulations.

Below are the passenger figures for Blackrod, Horwich and Lostock for the past six years¹.

Can someone please explain why, when Blackrod handles almost double the passengers handled by Lostock, Blackrod Station has no ticket office (or even a simple ticket machine) and no live information signs yet Lostock has both of these and enjoys twice as many calling services as Blackrod.

[1] Office of Rail Regulation – Station Usage Data

Today, with the beautiful weather, we took a trip to Hollingworth Lake near Littleborough and Smithy Bridge, somewhere I had never been before.

Rather than jumping in the car, however, we decided to take the train. At £5.80 return for two adults and one child with a family railcard (under fives still free) that wouldn’t even cover the current extortionate cost of the diesel, let alone wear and tear and the pay and display parking at the lake. It is of course a little slower but that was not an issue today.

Hollingworth Lake is actually a reservoir built in 1804 to feed the Rochdale Canal but later became a tourist attraction for the Victorians and I realised that today, by choosing rail, we were following in the tracks of the same Victorians who would have visited by rail in the latter half of the 19th century. After closure in 1960, Smithy Bridge was reopened in 1985 and is fairly well served with a half-hourly service between Manchester Victoria and Leeds; a pity the same cannot be said for our local station, Blackrod.

6201 ‘Princess Elizabeth’ steams through a rainy Blackrod Station on the return leg of the Cumbrian Mountain Express railtour today.

According to the Bolton News, six railway station in Bolton have been identified by Network Rail as those most in need of improvement. Not surprisingly, once again, Blackrod station is missing from that list. (Full National list here)

Can someone please explain why Lostock station, which has both a ticket office and live train information screens, is on the list of six stations earmarked for improvements, when Blackrod with neither of these basic facilities is not? I’m not saying Lostock should not receive investment (particularly in reinstating the Wigan platforms short-sightedly removed in the past) but surely Blackrod station is in more need.

Given the lack of respect Blackrod station is given on the timetabled service, the cynic in me would guess that secretly Network Rail will be thinking “Why spend money on a station we’re trying to close down by reducing the service?”.

Network Rail are running a survey about station improvements. If you feel Blackrod (or an other station) deserves better, go to www.networkrail.co.uk/actionstations and make your views known.

Commuters at Blackrod Station are having the proverbial excrement dropped on them from a great height: From 14th December, Northern Rail are switching Manchester bound trains which currently stop at Deansgate, Manchester Oxford Road and Manchester Piccadilly to Manchester Victoria.

Not surprisingly, this causes problems for those reliant on the service to get to work, according to comments on Phil Morgan’s Blackrod Station website, with increased journey times, inconvenient changes that were not previously required and in some cases, additional childcare costs because the commuter can no longer get to work on time after dropping her daughter at school.

Many also question the apparent discrimination against Blackrod when more trains stop at Lostock. Why is Blackrod treated in this way? Being so close to the GM border, is it a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’? Could this be the start of the rot? How long before the number of trains are run down as low as Clifton?

Ironically, these are the one set of commuters (city centre workers) who would actually benefit from the TIF proposals, yet GMPTE see fit to allow Northern Rail to ride roughshod over them in this manner.

It also highlights the fact that when you become dependent on public transport, you put yourself totally at the mercy of the transport operator who won’t hesitate to put their interests over the paying passenger.

This is the so-called ‘world class’ system we are being promised by Richard Leese – No thanks.