The MD of Northern has said there will be no pacer trains in passenger service from Monday.
Nick Donovan was speaking at the Transport for the North’s Rail North Committee, which met virtually to discuss the Northern trains review and the post COVID-19 rail recovery.
He co-presented a presentation with Richard George, the chair of the holding company DOHL, which took ownership control of Northern in March.
Mr Donovan said: “From the 18th of May there will be no pacers in passenger service, although there will be one running as a staff train, rather than them using taxis.
“We’ll be keeping a small number of pacers – 142s and 144s – that are currently in storage and will be a contingency fleet until the end of the year, although we’re hoping not to use those, but to keep in such a form to use as a contingency.”
Northern is currently operating a key worker timetable, which has been added to and tweaked to respond to requests and local requirements. Train performance is currently a best ever at 96%, something Mr Donovan says they have to build from when the number of services is increased from Monday.
He said: “There is a significant amount going on ahead of stepping up services from May 18th, and there has been a lot of Union engagement discussing some detail points about social distancing and uplifting capacity.
“We are looking to uplift from 45% of our base timetable to about 63%. It will be a social distance communication led approach, with less than 10% of stations staffed from the first train to the last train.
“It is critical that we remain nimble and agile to be able to respond to a developing situation. We are ready to roll. This is a resource led timetable and we have been stressing internally, the resilience and reliability of the timetable as we build it is paramount.”
The new team running Northern was give 100 days to produce an improvement plan.
Giving an update on how that was going, Richard George said: “We are not as far forward as we would like, but never-the-less the team has worked hard and a lot of work is going on in the background.
“COVID-19 has changed the short and medium-term landscape – far less certainty. It makes the creation of a traditional business plan very difficult. Inevitably it has become less of a business plan and more of a prospectus for moving forward.
“We are looking at what is it that the timetable needs to look like and does it need to alter in any way.
“We will restructure the timetable fully to have a performance-led timetable. There will be some changes planned to help improvement performance in December 2020, with a performance led timetable implementation by December 2021.”
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