Summary.
For decades, Manchester’s trains have felt like a world apart from our buses and trams—fragmented, confusing, and often overpriced. But the countdown is officially on. We are now not far away from the biggest shake-up to our local railways in a generation. we’re looking at the Bee Network’s move to take over the tracks.”
Our View
This is something that is needed to help the network work together, however we believe that it is something that is far from possible speaking within the network, With many rail stations and services cut back years ago to save costs as many was closed by the Bleeching cuts a few was saved by the Ghost trains of Manchester. There are many which run to save closing the formal closing of a line. This was applied all over the UK. The best example that is in relation to this is the Station in Denton which is located nowhere near Denton Town center. And Reddish South. This line stopped normal operation in 1992 due to many factors however to prevent them having to formally close the line and go though all the red tape that government has in place the service was decided to carry on with one train a week on a Saturday in one direction. However the route remains used by Freight trains and the closure of the line would mean they can’t hold freight trains on the line for the timetable. Also the other services that use the line is the West Cost Services those that are hauled by Steam trains, These services use Denton to take on water and coal, This is due to it having good road connections as well as while sitting on the line it really isn’t in the way of any of the normal services.
The Details:
Andy Burham would like to bring the railway network within the Greater Manchester area back into the control of the local authority rather than the big operators for example Northern Rail. One of the things he wants to do is change the fare to make rail travel more affordable which for a long time has been very expensive with lets be honest a rather poor service level. His goal is to bring 8 commuter lines with 64 stations into the Bee Network by 2028 and all the stations in Manchester all 96 of them by 2030. The first phase of this has already started to rolled out with the famous Manchester to Glossop line and the Stalybridge line being the first to enter into the Bee Network this being on 13th Decemeber 2026.
Other things that Andy Burham wants which is all fairness to the man has worked on the buses is the Tap in and Tap Out introduced to the rail network, making it easy to change between Rail, Bus and Tram.
All these changes aim to make public transport within Manchester more affordable and better integration on the different systems including live train times in the app. So rather than having lots of different apps it should all be on one Bee Network App. The Trains as the buses did will change into the Yellow Bee Network livery to match the buses and Trams. The tap in and tap out will make switching between the different services much better and should give you the best price on the day. The Glossop line is a rather interesting line in its self as the trains as do the buses cross a boundary into Derbyshire leaving the TFGM area, Something that has been confusing with tickets for a long time now, Hopefully with the changes this should become more simple with the changes to the way fares. However this will only been seen in time to come.
In my opinion these changes are need to improve the network but more than ever to lower the fares on trains however I do have some thoughts, The Tap in and Tap out on the trains is a very good idea but London has a problem with in to which they have to employe people to protect the revenue and investigate fraud on the network, Can this cost be met with the way the system will work, He has already reindroduced some bus routes that was withdrawn as they didn’t see economic sense to run Is he planning on doing the same on the railways if so can the additional fees be met?.
Other points is for the Buses they own the vehicles and infrastructure that runs the services however the Track and stations belong to Network Rail and a lot of delays etc are down to Network Rail is this something that he is going to address or attempt to take over.
I do think it is possible for Andy Burham to achieve what he wants but is he doing it to quick like London are we the tax payers going to be expected to bail the system out each year. It will be very interesting to see how this will progress in the years to come as the network is slowly taken over.
Check out the Video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8zLiMD4PpY