https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-51298820
Here's their mailout to their poor customers:
"We can confirm that today the Secretary of State has announced that the operation of all Northern services will transfer from Arriva Rail North to Northern Trains Limited, a subsidiary of the Department of Transport’s Operator of Last Resort Holdings Limited (DOHL).
Following this announcement, we would like to confirm that Northern services will not be affected and tickets will remain valid.
All Arriva Rail North passengers can also expect operations to continue as usual, during the transfer period.
For further information about the transfer, please refer to the website available on the link below.
Find out more"
A friend of mine is a driver for Northern, hopefully his job is safe, no doubt the bigwigs in Deutsche Bahn who ran this apology for a railway are very safe in their jobs. Efficiency in the private sector? German efficency? More Tory balls than you can shake a stick at.
Is anyone planning to travel tomorrow? Perversely it was a Spring day in London earlier.
For anyone up north, TPE have a £1 sale on advance tickets,
https://www.tpexpress.co.uk/sale?utm...ontent=BookNow
Excellent, thanks for that. Booked York and Newcastle once I finally got through to the booking site- it was down for hours this evening due to the overcapacity.
I imagine that most trains are running pretty empty at the moment, but a look at a variety of dates does not show any fare reductions. Perhaps operators would be lambasted for encouraging people to travel..?
I may have struggled to resist a jaunt to, say, Derby, for a fiver or so...
I'd imagine that train operators would be more likely to reduce the number of services they run or to reduce the number of carriages per train while fewer people are travelling.
I was on several trains yesterday and they were all emptier than I would have expected. On one I was the only person in the carriage.