At the end of July, the Government and Transport for the North were at odds over proposed timetable changes in Manchester to improve performance.
The changes, targeted for December 2022, are the output of the Manchester Recovery Task Force (MRTF), set up to look at how services around Manchester and the congested Castlefield Corridor could be reconfigured. TfN’s Rail North Committee met on 14 July and declined to unconditionally endorse the proposed timetable, following which Rail Minister Chris Heaton-Harris wrote to TfN saying that unless it agreed to the preferred option by 6 August the current Covid timetable would continue for the medium-term. TfN said it could not confirm if an agreement had been reached by this deadline, but in the meantime it is understood background work is continuing towards a timetable change in December 2022.
The MRTF consulted earlier this year on three options to reconfigure services around Manchester. Subsequent to this, it has developed a modified version of Option B, dubbed ‘Option B+’, whi…
