A new low-fare train service could be coming to tracks between London Euston and Rochdale in Greater Manchester if a recent route application by FirstGroup is successful.
Known for its startup budget train brand, Lumo, and for its Avanti West Coast trains, FirstGroup has now announced plans to operate six return Lumo services a day, between the UK capital and its second city, via the West Coast mainline.
Station stops are set to include Eccles, which would join up with Metrolink light rail to serve the “BBC’s home in the north” at Salford’s Media City. Other proposed stops are Newton-le-Willows, giving access to St Helen’s and Merseyside; Warrington Bank Quay; and Manchester Victoria.
Open access routes
The cost and impact of new high-speed rail links between the UK’s north and south continue to cause controversy and ever-changing plans to create a “northern powerhouse” through infrastructural boosts to the north of the country have come in for criticism.
But more recent government policy to develop transport networks through the proliferation of new so-called “open access” rail has so far yielded eight routes. Lumo currently operate one of them, launched in 2021 between London King’s Cross and Edinburgh.
Open access routes are funded without any subsidies from public money, with operators taking on all the risk – a mode of business in which CEO Graham Sutherland says FirstGroup has “extensive experience”. The group, which is the UK’s leading open access operator, has achieved 96% customer satisfaction in surveys. It added: “We want to bring our successful Lumo service to this new route that connects Rochdale and London.”
A modal shift for 1.6 million people?
The Lumo services could, FirstGroups says, mean that up to 1.6 million people in the North West of the country have access to “convenient and competitively priced direct rail service to London from stations that are more local to them.”
Using new British-built electric and battery-powered rolling stock, the service “will help to drive a modal shift from road to rail between the North West and London,” FirstGroup has said, adding: “We will be working closely with stakeholders as we build our application and our case for this new service.”
The UK’s Office of Rail and Road must now consider the case for the new Lumo service, which, if given the go ahead, could be gracing stations from north to south and back again by 2027, giving Rochdale a London link again for the first time in over a quarter of a century.
