By April last year, Nick Mitchell had reached breaking point.
Like thousands of commuters across the north of England, the Manchester-based software developer had grown exasperated at the frequent delays and cancellations to Northern Rail services, which were made much worse by the botched roll out of a new timetable last summer.
He had tried all the usual routes of complaint, to the extent that Northern Rail actually blocked him on Twitter, so he tried a different tack. Mitchell’s day job involves working on SPINR, a data management platform, and he used the software to pull information about ‘announced’ train cancellations directly from Northern Rail’s website and into an app.
The Northern Fail app took Northern’s countless failures and made them countable – arming commuters with the information about how many times their train had been cancelled that month, or the total number of services cancelled across the whole network.
A year on, the app has been downloaded more than 16,000 times, and the data it has collected reveals the shocking scale of the problem. In the last year, Northern Rail has cancelled 15,800 trains and partly cancelled a further 18,696. Across the entire network, trains failed to arrive or stop at stations more than a quarter of a million times.
This includes only trains cancelled before they depart from their point of origin, so doesn’t account for any services that were cancelled after setting off, or that were later reinstated. It also doesn’t take into account the 47 days of strikes between May 2018 and 2019 – so the fuller picture may be worse.
Almost one in four cancelled services was due to a shortage of train drivers, and five per cent because of a lack of conductors. The problem was doubtless exacerbated by a lack of investment in infrastructure in the north of England compared to London and the south-east. A damning House of Lords report released last week called on the government to scrap HS2 and prioritise northern rail links.
“There has been a doubling of demand for local rail travel into central Manchester in the last 15 years but only a 50 per cent increase in passenger capacity,” says the report. “And many local services rely still on ‘Pacer’ trains, introduced by British Rail in the late 1970s.” Twelve per cent of Northern’s cancellations in the last year were due to faults with the train.
SPINR’s analysis of a year of cancellations show big spikes after the introduction of new timetables in May last year, which caused travel delays across the country. On Sunday, another raft of changes came into force – with 1,000 extra services and 40,000 smaller alterations, so commuters could be set for further delays as they try and make it to work on Monday morning.
“Northern passengers want nothing less than a smooth set of timetable changes that deliver tangible improvements,” says Anthony Smith, chief executive of passenger advocacy group Transport Focus. “They paid a hefty price a year ago for a poorly managed set of major timetable changes. To regain the confidence of passengers, the rail industry must pull out all the stops to ensure these improvements deliver more punctual and reliable services.”
Cancellations have reduced since the big spike last summer, but Mitchell says the number of services running with reduced carriages is on the increase, leading to crowded conditions on an already cramped network. There were 28,198 services with carriage reductions in the last 12 months. The worst affected stations are Manchester Piccadilly, which had more than 5,000 cancellations, and Leeds – which had 3,525 cancellations but more than 10,000 carriage reductions.
A spokesperson for Northern Rail says the Northern Fail data is "unverified," and does not include services which were reinstated. Northern Rail say that more than 96 per cent of Northern's 866,000 services were run as planned, with 1.8 per cent cancelled and 2.1 per cent partially cancelled.
"Our cancelled and seriously delayed rates are below the national average," says the spokesperson. "Many of those cancellations were as a result of the introduction of the new timetable in May last year and, together with colleagues across the industry, we have worked hard to improve performance through the rest of 2018 and into 2019."
Mitchell says he was shocked by how bad the figures were when he looked back at the year. He has had messages from people asking him to build similar apps for other train operators. “It’s just giving people data. There’s nothing crazy or magical about it,” he says. “It makes you think why the government doesn’t have this as a public service.”
Right now, he is thinking of building a tool that integrates the data with the workplace communication tool Slack, so that your colleagues could automatically get a message alerting them if your train has been cancelled.
Few are expecting transport chaos on the scale of last year, and commuters are unlikely to tolerate it. “Passengers will expect someone to be placed in charge of major timetable changes in future, to ensure robust oversight and with the power to hit the stop button when something is not going to work,” says Smith.
But Mitchell won’t be one of them. Soon after building the Northern Fail app, he passed his driving test – and now he takes the car to work.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
