The Rail Minister has announced that the Government is investing £ 2.5m into improvements to CrossCountry trains, including 20,000 extra seats a week.
Passengers travelling from Birmingham to Nottingham, Leicester and Cardiff will start to see longer trains on CrossCountry services from May 2020.
Additionally, 15,000 seats per week are planned to be in place from mid-2021, including to/from Cambridge and Stansted Airport to support the region's commuters.
More passengers are to benefit as plans are finalised between the Department for Transport and CrossCountry. The plans will see thousands of seats added to services on long-distance routes from December 2020.
Longer trains will operate on some services on Mondays to Thursdays on the routes from Scotland, the North East and Manchester to the South West and the South Coast.
The £2.5 million government funding was agreed by the DfT and CrossCountry to help tackle overcrowding.
Work is underway on further improvements in the years to come when more rolling stock is available, especially for long-distance routes that Cross Country serves.
Investment will also be made to expand CrossCountry's seat reservation service to allow passengers to reserve a seat on most services.
Three recently established Community Rail Partnerships (CRPs) are also being supported. The CRPs for Worcestershire, Heart of England and Bolton will receive financial support to deliver initiatives to benefit local communities, stations and train services.
The funding from the government follows an agreement to extend the CrossCountry franchise last summer to October 2020.
What did the officials say?
Rail Minister Chris Heaton-Harris, said:
“Investing in transport is essential to levelling up the country, as we look to modernise our rail network and restructure the industry to put passengers at the heart of the railway.
“But we want to fund benefits to address pressing needs and improve journeys for passengers in the short-term, as well as in the future.
“More seats mean more people can travel, increasing access to opportunities and better connecting our regions.”
Tom Joyner, CrossCountry's Managing Director, said:
“We are delighted to now be able to get on and deliver these benefits for our customers, with improvements to the journey experience and three new community groups to bring our train services closer to the places we serve.
“Most importantly, many of our trains have become increasingly busy as more and more people choose rail for their journeys.
“This delivers the biggest increase in seats for our services in more than 13 years, helping customers enjoy a relaxing and comfortable journey every day. These improvements will deliver an immediate boost for rail users in the Midlands, with the promise of even more to come on other routes in the near future.”
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Where are these longer trains coming from?
Will they be redundant HSTs or Mark 4s or Pacers 😉
Centre cars from the WMT 170/6s to extend the XC 170/5s to 3 cars.
Perhaps Crosscountry could inherit Class 221 from Avanti West Coast once the Class 8xx IETs have been delivered and are in service. And to inherit few extra Class 43 HSTs+Mk3 and Class 170s from TfW (previously cascaded from Greater Anglia) and some from ScotRail. So that CrossCountry can boost their capacity on longer journeys and to introduce new services as well retaining their existing long distance services.