Clogging up the ECML

I read a most inter­est­ing art­icle recently, by a timetable expert, on the pro­posal to add dir­ect ser­vices to/from Sun­der­land on the ECML to Kings Cross. Basic­ally, he was say­ing that the Office of the Rail Reg­u­lator (ORR) which was sup­port­ing the pro­posal, didn’t have a clue about what they were doing. They had, he sug­ges­ted, no under­stand­ing of the true com­plex­ity of the exist­ing timetable, born of his­tor­ical demands and com­prom­ises, and should await a total recast­ing of it before recom­mend­ing addi­tional access for a pos­sible fly-by-night (inter­est­ing concept!) new oper­ator. An addi­tional point was that this would pre­vent GNER enhan­cing their Leeds ser­vices, an import­ant of their busi­ness plan when renew­ing the fran­chise last year.

What is needed, he sug­gests, is a proper reg­u­lar inter­val timetable like the Swiss model. (South­ern Elec­tric has been run­ning a ver­sion of this for about 60 years too, and a lot of Ger­man rail­ways run this way — why can’t the Brit­ish rail net­work ? [I’ll tell you — the stu­pid­ity of rail privatisation]).