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Manchester Victoria has been the worst of Britain’s busiest railway stations for cancellations so far this year. About one in 10 of 10,506 scheduled stops were cancelled between January and November 2024, according to National Rail figures collected by train data website On Time Trains.
This contributed to the north-west of England being the region with the highest rate of cancelled railway stops across Britain at 6.5%, with 611,047 cancellations.
Meher, 22, a recent graduate from Bolton, has experienced regular cancellations at Manchester Victoria. She said as a student in Preston, she had probably missed hundreds of hours of university because of train cancellations.
Daniel, 19, who also commutes to university via Manchester Victoria, said he usually aimed to arrive an hour early in anticipation of cancellations disrupting his journey.
More than three million train stops in Britain have been cancelled from January to November this year – 3.8% of the nearly 83 million scheduled.
Liverpool Lime Street had the 11th highest cancellation rate of any station in Britain, with 12,062 trains (5.9%) cancelled between 1 January and 30 November this year.
Of the 100 railway stations in Britain ranked busiest by the ORR, three of the five worst for cancellations were in Manchester: Manchester Victoria (9.5%), Manchester Oxford Road (8.1%) and Manchester Piccadilly (6.7%).
Michael Solomon Williams from transport charity Campaign for Better Transport said passengers in the North had “suffered for far too long”, with “far more” investment made in the South.
Northern, which manages Manchester Victoria and Manchester Oxford Road stations, said it had been working hard to address train crew availability issues, to improve reliability.
The Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that she was concerned by the figures on train cancellations. She said: “I’m not happy about the performance of Northern Rail at the moment.”
She added that the issue with Northern “is related to the availability of train crew specifically on a Sunday”.
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