Improved beyond recognition...

(...but that's why we were so angry)

The last WBRUA Members' Newsletter related a whole series of horror stories describing the operation of the Borderlands Line train service between Wrexham and Bidston. In particular we criticised the attempts to operate the basic hourly service of our hour-long journey by just two trains and the consequent non-existence of recovery time in the timetable. This is an accusation that we have been levelling at all operators of the line since the early 1990s.

The whole situation was exacerbated, however, by Arriva Trains Wales (ATW) allocating to the route class 153 railcars which often failed to complete the journey in 60 minutes. Day after day the timetable would start to slip for no other reason than passengers using the trains in significant, but not large, numbers. Several successive journeys would run just two or three minutes more late than the previous one and by lunchtime there would be no hope of running to schedule.

Arriva Control in Cardiff would then recover the timetable by ordering a late-running unit to abandon its next northbound journey on reaching Shotton. This would inevitably result in the next southbound journey also being scrapped north of the Hawarden Bridge and, on the Wirral, passengers being held up by an hour in both directions.

We were also having to report that advertised Merseyrail connecting trains were being held at the signal outside Bidston station while the train for Wrexham departed without its intending passengers. Just a three minute delay had been enough to prompt a dogmatic insistence by Arriva that their train should take precedence despite an hour's delay for their own passengers again being the consequence.

In the case of the evening commuter connection from Liverpool, the Arriva train would be out of the way in the Bidston siding only to be directed into the one available platform - even on occasions when its departure from that platform, loaded with commuters, could still have been achieved on time.

Our opinion of Arriva could not be expressed in polite company.

After making ourselves very unpopular over the last year, things have improved. It needed, however, a very sustained campaign to get something done. Civilised discussion through the designated channels would be our chosen route, but, this having failed, we had to adopt a meanness that does not come at all naturally to the genial members of the WBRUA Committee.

Action was mainly taken by email. The internet has live railway information on it and we were able to bombard the powers-that-be with evidence that the passenger-abuse described above was happening almost daily.

A key factor with email has been that with just a click of a 'mouse' we have been able to include the top managers, directors and officers in the circulation: face-to-face meetings with lesser mortals have generally proved fruitless in recent years. Originally our email list was created just for the representatives who had attended our Liaison Meetings of local authorities and rail companies, but once we started a 'copy-to' list of their bosses things definitely started to happen!

Firstly, the problem of the missed connections at Bidston has been greatly reduced. Merseyrail's performance - always pretty good - improved so much that the integrity of the connections was rarely tested. However, the Wirral line tended to run a little late before Christmas and we were relieved to observe that the key commuter link at Bidston (1740 arrival, 1745 departure) was being maintained even if the Merseyrail train was six minutes late leaving Birkenhead North.

The only blip that we have observed in recent months was on January 3rd when Merseyrail had been disrupted more dramatically. This resulted in the train prior to the official connection for the 1745 running 17 minutes late from Liverpool Moorfields. It is, of course, a 15-minute frequency on that line and only the passengers who are in the habit of catching the earlier train to secure their connection would have realised how late it was. The others would have perceived the train to be their usual one, running just two minutes late.

Unfortunately, Sandhills Control seem not to have chosen their words very carefully when explaining the situation to their Arriva counterparts in Cardiff. Once again the Wrexham unit shunted into the Bidston platform and blocked the connecting train - another instance when the diesel's departure would not have been delayed at all if the Merseyrail electric had been allowed through first.

There is still, therefore, a little considerate management required to make things completely satisfactory regarding co-operation between the TWO companies who provide the implicit Borderlands service which is not "Wrexham - Bidston" at all, but is between Wrexham and Liverpool.

Secondly, ATW's infuriating method of recovering the timetable after delays is not completely a thing of the past, but it now happens quite rarely. Since December, the Welsh Assembly Government has been putting extra money directly into the Borderlands Line to pay for its operation by two classy class 150 two-car Sprinters.

Where the slippage of the timetable was previously a normal occurrence, with the 150s it simply does not happen. The 'new' trains - actually they are quite old but refurbished - have better acceleration and, most importantly, two sets of double doors in each carriage. No longer are passengers, with all their prams, bicycles and luggage, forced to filter off and onto the trains in single file. This makes a great difference on a line with so many stations in its southern half.

It doesn't seem right that it took extra cash to make Arriva Trains Wales provide the service for which they were originally contracted. Let us hope that the increased investment is not a penny more than the difference in the leasing costs between the class 150 and 153 units, otherwise ATW will have profited from the disgraceful service they had previously been inflicting upon us.

It has never been anything but WBRUA policy that the line should be operated by three units and our instinct is that three 153s would have been a sounder financial option than the two 150s; the leasing cost would be much less, for a start. Consequently, more staff could have been allocated to the service for a half-hourly peak service, restoration to Birkenhead North, spare time to accommodate not just timetable recovery, but also co-ordinated connections at all three rail interchanges and the construction of new stops en route.

Our constantly advocated new station at the bottom of the Swan hill in Birkenhead is now a full fifty years overdue: it should have been built as part of the development of Woodchurch Estate. The villages of Prenton and Oxton have spread as non-stop surburbia right down to the other side of the station site while a stream of buses links it to one of Wirral's busiest destinations about a mile away: the super-hospital at Arrowe Park.

However, it appears we will have to wait until the electrification of the line before the station is built because even the two 150s leave no slack to allow for an extra stop to be inserted into the Wrexham-Bidston timetable.

The busy 1632 from Wrexham Central nearly always arrives at Bidston a few minutes late and at other busy times a unit may run a couple of minutes behind schedule over several successive journeys. This means that increased passenger numbers could actually threaten punctuality once again. We have all been on a platform and waited for the door to become 'openable' because the guard is in the middle of a ticket transaction with a passenger. This inevitably happens if there are ten mostly unstaffed stations in a half-hour journey from Wrexham to Shotton.

We do welcome the fact that the present service suddenly has a punctuality record that would be the envy of any operator but then again, it always should have done. We knew from decades of experience that our uncluttered route was capable of such dependability. That is precisely why we got so angry when it was not being achieved. Operationally, the line has the tremendous benefit that it only has to filter in between quarter-hourly trains at Bidston where trains can run almost every minute thanks to short signal sections to the east and west. South of Dee Marsh, where the occasional freight train comes into the picture, the headway between signal boxes is about fifteen minutes, leaving the line relatively free for the hourly passenger trains most of the time.

Our instinct is that three 153s would have been so successful at attracting passengers that overcrowding would have soon become a problem and we would then have got the three 150s that would allow the line to reach its full diesel potential (short of a half-hourly service). As it is, we are surely stuck with just the pair until the third rail arrives.

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Liaison Demise

If we didn't seem to be making better progress without them, we would be very angry about the demise of our 21-year-old series of Liaison Meetings.

We were the first to bring representatives of all our local authorities together to discuss the Wrexham - Bidston railway, originally to finance the first full-scale professional study into its potential. After the publication of the study, it was decided that it would be useful to keep the dialogue going and the WBRUA set about organising the Liaison Meetings not just with the local authorities, but with British Rail too. The first exploratory one took place in December 1985.

About 12 years later, the Borderlands Line Community - Rail Partnership was established. This involved a Steering Group of most of the same people meeting regularly but without the WBRUA. Soon afterwards, in order to save the professionals' time, we agreed to arrange our Liaison Meetings on the same day and in the same place as the Steering Group ones. 'Our' meetings, however, always seemed to take place after 'theirs'.

This meant that our meetings were becoming little more than an opportunity to learn what had been decided without us. In order to give the Steering Group an immediate opportunity to discuss our input, we suggested at our penultimate encounter that it would be better if the WBRUA-organised meeting were to take place first.

Alyn Jones of Wrexham County Borough Council, who were hosting the following meetings, arranged them in the order that we requested. He is definitely one of the more amenable people that we deal with.

Sadly, though, this gave the professionals the opportunity to conspire amongst themselves to change the format of the original WBRUA meetings without affording us the most basic courtesy of seeking our opinion regarding their plan. We really did not see that coming!

The first we knew of it was a letter stating that from then on, a single person would represent all the authorities. Not a single person from each body, that is: one individual who would represent all of them. This would no longer allow all the authorities to hear our opinion simultaneously; it was no longer "Liaison". We would have to rely on one person delivering our comments, accurately and conscientiously, to the others. Although there were some people whom we could trust to do this, there were others about whom we would have severe doubts.

We have always been dogged by certain council officials or rail managers being "auto-dismissive" of much of our input, but in the past there had usually been others who counter-balanced this by actively speaking up for us.

We would single out two people for special mention: Adrian Banfield and Martin Robertson.

Adrian Banfield...
... represented Cheshire County Council and would have all sorts of figures in his head with which he could verify our more instinctive assertions. After leaving the council, he continued to attend our Liaison Meetings, actively speaking on our behalf as our consultant.

One example was when we were, for the umpteenth time, trying to get the authorities to obtain traffic flow figures for the roads that closely corresponded to the Merseyside to North Wales rail corridors. Adrian was able to tell us exactly how these could be projected to predict passenger numbers on frequent through rail services.

We will always be grateful for the contributions made by Adrian, who continues to take an interest in the Association's activities via our former Chairman, Rod Fairley, who is still a WBRUA member.

Martin Robertson...
...was the leader of the passenger transport team at Clwyd County Council, and on its demise moved on to the same rôle successively in Cumbria and Hampshire. While at the latter, he became Chairman of the Association of Transport Co-ordinating Officers but tragically died following a short illness soon afterwards.

He made a hugely positive contribution to our cause from 1991 to 1995, despite being new to the area. At an early private meeting with Rod and our present chairman about something else, it soon emerged that they all liked the idea of joining the North Wales Coast main line to our route, west to south, at Shotton. In fact, he reached down into his desk drawer and flourished an aerial photo - later reproduced in our Border Line Bulletin - of the disused but unobstructed part of our freight branch to Connah's Quay. This is what makes the idea not just possible, but relatively cheap.

When we suggested at a Liaison Meeting that the group would function better if everyone had seen the line's possibilities on site, it was agreed that we would arrange a coach tour. Martin was the one who said "I have a councillor who would like to come too".

This was much to the horror of the Merseytravel reps of the day who actually tried to prevent us taking the politicians along. Could you imagine any of those particular officers reporting to their counterparts in other authorities on our behalf?!

Martin, however, caused the coach trip to overrun on the day simply because he was taking such an active interest in what we were showing to him and the other participants. This happened everywhere - even in Chester, where we started the tour.

When we got to Wrexham, we pointed out how combining the two rail lines through the former Exchange Station would, back then, have released a corridor for a new road into the town centre - but would dramatically improve the railway options at the same time. Martin positively bounced with excitement when he realised that such a development could be made using, mostly, the 'roads' budget.

We all had to wait as he paced up and down the aisle of the coach, then off the coach and on again, in order to get the best view of the site from our vantage point. Finally he was satisfied that our scheme was absolutely possible and expressed his utter disbelief that no-one had thought of it before.

He subsequently sent copies of our handout diagram to everyone he could think of but, frustratingly, Clwyd County Council was abolished before the project could materialise. No-one at Wrexham County Borough was interested in it, despite our long-running and expensive legal campaign to preserve the possibility.

Our present Chairman takes up the next part of the coach tour story:

After getting stuck in traffic in Shotton and Queensferry, time ran out for the tour at Neston. The Merseytravel rail leader had asked to address the coach party before we dispersed. When he did so, however, he said not one word about what he had seen that day, except to point out that the future station that was labelled on one of our handout diagrams as Birkenhead Market would actually be called 'Conway Park'. Otherwise he was just revealing Merseytravel's plans elsewhere.

Martin Robertson stood up, asked if he could say something too and paid a glowing tribute to our efforts, citing the "exciting possibilities" that we had shown them. Later, when we contacted him for permission to put what he had said into Border Line Bulletin he admitted that he had only spoken himself because he had heard someone else being dismissive. What a great guy!

It has to be said in 2007, however, that a new regime in Liverpool has turned Merseytravel's view of our line through 180 degrees to become as positive as we could ever hope for. On the other hand though...

In recent years, Arriva's contingent at our Liaison Meetings have been downright rude in deriding WBRUA suggestions, even those ideas that have since been proved to be practicable. Faced with such brusqueness, it is difficult for other professional delegates to become confrontational on our behalf, however much they may support us in conversations away from the table.

Stabling our units at Birkenhead North depot was one instantly dismissed suggestion. This was our solution to the terrible Saturday night connections at Bidston, but it would also permit late-night journeys out of Wrexham and earlier starts for the southbound service, every day of the week.

Our two Saturday evening trains leave Bidston five minutes before the arrival of half-hourly trains from Liverpool, a situation caused by the need to get the unit back to its Chester depot before the Wrexham - Saltney stretch closes for engineering...

...even if no engineering is actually planned for that night. Yes, you read that right: this is called "rules of the route" and is particularly galling since the rules for our own line state that it is "open continuously".

However, engineering did actually happen between Chester and Shrewsbury one Sunday in December and there was no alternative except stabling our line's unit at Birkenhead North the previous night. We later discovered that Arriva had also chosen this option voluntarily when they put on an earlier-starting service for the final Sunday of the British Open golf tournament at Hoylake last July.

Yet stabling at North had previously been dismissed reflexively by the main Arriva representative within about one second of our suggesting it to him at a Liaison Meeting.

We were not prepared to perpetuate our Liaison Meetings in the form that was dictated to us, so, for now, they have come to an end. As we have already written, it has proved far more effective to email simultaneously all the former delegates (and their bosses) throughout the year instead of occasionally meeting them all together in person.

The aforementioned Arriva man told us that he was so fed up with our constant emails that he deleted them as soon as he saw that they were from us. Others, however, asked us to keep them coming in order to increase their leverage in getting something done. Although it was unbelievably tiresome to have to do it, we did as they asked.

Hence, the arrival of the 150s, the breathtaking improvement in the reliability of our line's service and the likelihood that the Liaison Meetings will not take place in the flesh again.

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Mersey Dee Alliance

Actually, other developments are happening that may well have rendered our Association totally unnecessary had they happened thirty years ago. This is from the website of the Mersey Dee Alliance:

We have been preaching, since our foundation, the need to regard what was then MANWEB territory as a cohesive socio-economic region. (It was Crosville territory too). Our line's sorry state in recent years has probably been caused more than anything else by the decision of civil servants in London which, in 1974, left our line on the edges of one Welsh and two English Counties.

We were absolutely delighted, therefore, to learn that Flintshire, Wrexham and Denbighshire will soon be joining the MDA too. Not mentioned above is that Merseytravel is a funding partner like all the other bodies and that the Wrexham - Bidston railway is now regarded as one of the most important elements the region's development strategy.

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Wrexham - Marylebone News

The launch of the service has been postponed until at least December. A no-competition clause in Virgin's franchise contract is causing a problem at Wolverhampton. Arriva are very hostile, but the new company's directors remain determined to make their Wrexham to London trains happen.

Two of our Committee met a couple of them at Marylebone to ask if some of their London trains could be extended to Bidston. In response they simply reached for their projected timetables and indicated the journeys for which it would be practicable. They are very aware of our line's potential but nothing will happen, at least until the part south of Wrexham is up and running.

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Above is an on old photo from the winter 1992/93 edition of our Border Line Bulletin which showed why the removed barrow crossing at Caergwrle station had been a lot safer to use than the official alternative of the footpath under the bridge. (You could see scrape marks on the stonework where the drivers of articulated vehicles had failed to judge the right-angle bend)

This topic was often discussed during our Liaison Meetings around that time. At one of them, when British Rail's representative said that the safety of their passengers was not their concern as long as they were unsafe off railway property, the usually unflappable WBRUA Secretary of the day stood up, slammed his fist on the table and shouted in a way that took us all by surprise. He did, of course, slam the table and shout for all of us by doing so.

Arriva's midnight dumping of their passengers outside a deserted Bidston station reflects much the same attitude from them towards the wellbeing, and maybe the safety, of their customers.

Our last train each way is often replaced by a tortuous bus journey that, in the northbound case, reaches the ultimate interchange point after all the Merseyrail trains and staff have gone. (We avoid the word destination to describe Bidston because while it is the destination of the train, very seldom is it that of the passenger). The station is less notorious as a drug addicts' rendezvous than it used to be, but it is still not a good place to find yourself maliciously stranded by Arriva.

Another safety issue came with journeys aborted at Shotton. We certainly would not like to be any guard who has to break the news to the passengers that they are to be ejected from the train.

Some our fellow travellers are less than pleasant company these days: one result of deterring nearly everyone who had enough sense to find an alternative was that those of us left using Borderlands trains included among our number a higher than normal percentage of social inadequates. It is entirely possible that the safety of the train staff was jeopardised by their obligation to expel passengers at Shotton. The little-valued customers got delayed by an hour, sometimes when their train had been running as little as 10 minutes late. Who could blame them for getting angry?

Most would not have got violent, but could we have been sure that none of them would? The dramatic improvement in performance with the introduction of class 150 Sprinters has come not a moment too soon.

In the case of the midnight dumping by the buses at Bidston, however, something must be done. All the journeys affected by engineering recently have been among those paid for by the Welsh Assembly and Merseytravel. That is, the last two round trips on weekdays and all journeys on Sunday. (Incredible that these are not part of the franchise, but that's another story). Since, at these times, our line has effectively been restored as part of the Merseyrail diesel network, we would like Merseytravel to insist as part of their contract for these journeys that replacement buses run as far as Liverpool if they arrive at Bidston too late to make the last train connections.

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Bidston Engineering Confusion

It is not only the engineering on our line that affects our passengers, of course. Here are a couple of our Chairman's email essays which were sent to the comprehensive Liaison Group mailing list last Autumn.

ATW's Stakeholder Liaison Manager (North), Ben Davies, did act on the first email and attempted to get the train crew informed of the situation in time for the following week, but the chain of communication failed.

The third Friday of this late might disruption, our Chairman drove to Bidston to see what happened and was pleased to find, this time, that the Wrexham train's crew had been successfully instructed to await the arrival of the replacement bus from Birkenhead North. However, there was not one single passenger there to make the connection.

Bad news spreads, unfortunately...

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The Algebra of Borderlands Line Revenue

This essay by the Chairman was sent to the Liaison email
list in November when the Borderlands service was still awful.
Several recipients found it thought-provoking.

In many meetings over the 23 years that I have been involved with the WBRUA Committee, I have heard the phrase "the majority of people who use the Wrexham – Bidston Line". Lately we have had to put up with it being used as one of the reasons for terminating late running northbound trains at Shotton, because this action restores the subsequent southbound journey to time for the benefit of the "majority of passengers". That is, those who are travelling to or from Wrexham.

The amount by which the "minority" passengers (both ways north of Shotton) are delayed - an hour as opposed to a matter of minutes for "the majority" – seems never to be taken into consideration.

There is also another, forgotten aspect to this phrase "the majority of passengers". There is a vast difference between those who use it at present, and those who would use it in the future.

When the trains ran from Wrexham Central to Birkenhead North as part of the Merseyrail diesel network, there were approximately the same number of passengers heading for Liverpool as there were going to Wrexham.

Despite its lesser population, Clwyd stations were generating most of this demand and they do so to this day. Taking Caergwrle as the ‘mean’ station in this area, the day return into Wrexham is now £1.50, but to Liverpool it is £6.90. Which means a passenger travelling to the latter is worth more than four times as much as one to the former.

In the late 1970s, by far the majority of the revenue for the railway was generated northwards and this was despite Birkenhead not having a station near the market, which is traditionally popular with people from North Wales. (Hamilton Square station had been quite convenient for the old market which burned down in 1974).

The new Conway Park station – which the WBRUA asked to be named "Birkenhead Market" - has made a great difference to the fortunes of the West Kirby and New Brighton lines. On many journeys – although perhaps not at peak hours and weekends - most passengers from the New Brighton and West Kirby branches alight at Conway Park instead of continuing on to Liverpool. (A large number also board at Conway Park for Liverpool, should anyone want to use the number of passengers arriving in the city to discredit the importance of Birkenhead as a destination.)

As a result of the new station in central Birkenhead, the Borderlands line should be carrying twice as many people to Merseyside as it does to Wrexham these days…

… but ever since British Rail first tried in 1990 to operate the hour-long journey every hour with just two train units, its terrible unreliability has murdered much of the northbound market, because the need for a less than slick change of trains greatly worsens the passengers’ perception of the performance problem. As for Arriva’s habit of scrapping Merseyside, as catchment area or destination zone, on so many journeys…

…it has left many of our trains carrying mostly fresh air, even when they do run north of Deeside.

Let us assume that, given punctual, reliable trains, for every passenger going from Caergwrle into Wrexham another one would go to Liverpool and one to Birkenhead. The day return fare for the last of these is £4.80. If the value of the Wrexham passenger is called x, then the value of one to Birkenhead is approximately 3x and one to Liverpool is about 4x.

This would make 8x in all - with just an eighth of the revenue generated by those passengers going into Wrexham. Some of the revenue from the remaining passengers would go to Merseyrail who must be losing hundreds of thousands of pounds thanks to Arriva’s antics. Never mind the inconvenience for Merseyside passengers and the loss of custom for the shops, etc., of Birkenhead and Liverpool...

I do hope that Merseytravel representatives will speak up for the people and businesses of Merseyside at the next steering group meeting of the Borderlands Line Community – Rail Partnership.

Malcolm Wright Chairman, WBRUA

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Electrification News

A new study is taking place into Borderlands Line electrification mainly to prove that the findings of the previous study are "robust".

Our instincts, our experiences in fact, tell us that the original study was very cautious in its estimates of how many journeys - 1.2 million annually - would be made on electric Wrexham to Liverpool trains. This is not much more than our diesels were carrying anyway when they had a long history of utter dependability and a terminus at Birkenhead North.

Considering the huge increase in catchment population and other developments such as the Liverpool Loop, Conway Park and industry in Deeside dare we suggest that 2 million might be nearer the mark?

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Timetable changes

Arriva are finally trying to get our second weekday journey in each direction restored to their historic slots fifteen minutes earlier than at present. There is a difficulty with a freight train going north to Dee Marsh before the passenger train in question, but we are quite optimistic that this detail will be sorted out. The number of nine-to-fivers who will then be able to commute on our trains will rocket and we will publicise the change as much as we possibly can.

Hopefully our summer newsletter will arrive on time and we can tell you the good news then.

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