Rail group slams non-stop trains (BBC News)
 

The number of trains calling at some stations in Nottinghamshire has been cut by up to half, a group complains.

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A spokesman for East Midlands Trains defended the changes.

"We have improved the service overall. Those stations which are getting fewer services have very small numbers using them. ....................

And the numbers are never going to increase if the trains don't stop there anymore.:(

Chicken and the egg if you ask me. They cut the trains, so the numbers go down, so they cut the trains more, so they go down more, so they cut the trains more until you end up with an Ardwick situation where the average passengers per day is 0.5 and the station is shut.

Pretty daft, promoting rail services rather than cutting them is the way forward.

Is this a symptom of our overcrowded network?

There is no longer space for the stopping train. With the need to keep time, slow trains just get in the way. Rationalisation has removed many loops and slow lines. For example the track was removed from the slow line platforms at Duffield (North of Derby on the Midland Mainline) long ago. The line is now upgraded to 100mph running.

The only trains that stop at the station is the Matlock Branch Service (2 hourly). It is going to be interesting to see how they fit in an hourly service to Matlock in the Autumn. It is already a very busy line. It is not uncommon to see 3 or 4 trains go through on the briefest of visits to the Ecclesbourne Valley Railway's Platform, disconnected from Network Railway since the 100mph upgrade.

Only one train per hour stops at my local station throughout most of the day now, whereas we used to get two or three before. This is a direct consequence of the so-called 'upgrading' of the West Coast main line which has resulted in the severing of the link to Coventry across its tracks at Nuneaton.

Ironically, the upgrading of the signalling between Nuneaton and Leicester has effectively doubled the line's capacity!

Local passenger services are suffering so that Cross-Country and Inter-City trains can be speeded up in order to compete with the airlines. However there's no need to worry because in the not too distant future the age of cheap air travel will come to an end and the railways can revert back to providing a service for everyone. That's my theory anyway:D

...but don't hold your breath ;)

Of course, long distance trains are indeed competing with airlines but shorter distance trains help to take traffic off our over-crowded roads.

In the case of Nuneaton, they now want to drastically reduce the number of London-bound trains that call there (from 14 to 5, I think), thereby making it less convenient to plan a journey to the capital - especially, if you've also got to rely on the one train per hour connection to my local station, say. So you can see the spiralling-down effect taking this once-busy mainline junction station down to an un-manned halt (OK, a bit of an exaggeration, but the privately-owned railways have to make money and they'd have to look at cost-cutting measures).

They blame EMT, but isn't the timetable another problem created by the DfT (who made the VHF timetable!). Surely they should be getting all of the stick, even if EMT did propose these ideas, it would have had to have gone by the DfT who could have said no no no, so really there is no common sense anymore. Why not just have every EMT train going non stop from Sheffield to London and not actually serving the East Midlands :D ! Again, if the DfT had handed a local service franchise to another TOC (leaving EMT with the original MML franchise) they would speicically target local passengers/commuters and not look for airline competing express services.

...... and you expect common sense from government, this or any other?!

True, thats what we get for putting people in charge who probrably never even use these services ;)