And finally… Yorkshire’s train-wrecks
It’s the league table that no city wants to come top in – this year’s winner of the ‘most cancelled services in Yorkshire’ award goes to Sheffield Station, crowned in the week of the 200th anniversary of the railway itself.
During the 12 months leading to August, nearly 7,000 trains waved a fond farewell to timetables and skipped their stop at Sheffield, equating to more than 4% of all scheduled services.
Leeds and York also made the list of Yorkshire stations among the 100 busiest in the country with the most cancellations, according to the Office of Rail and Road data.
Leeds, the 16th busiest station in the country, clocked in a 3% cancellation rate.
York, which ranked 50th in terms of busyness, kept cancellations to a more modest 2.7%.
Meanwhile, smaller stations like Bradford Interchange, Halifax, Rotherham Central, and New Pudsey had more than 5% of services cancelled.
Somewhat depressingly, this shows an improvement across Yorkshire in recent years – including the dark days of 2023, when TransPennine Express was cancelling 40% of services due to staff driver shortages.
Northern and LNER are currently the two best-performing train operators, with cancellation rates hovering around 3.3% and 2.1%, respectively.
The Department for Transport is now directly running LNER, Northern and TPE while CrossCountry and East Midlands Railway remain privately operated, although both will be brought under public control soon.
