Yesterday (Friday 24 November), the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) gave approval to open access operator Grand Central to run services from Peterborough station.
This will allow two existing Grand Central services in each direction to call at Peterborough each day from Monday to Saturday.
Peterborough, which has recently been awarded ‘levelling up' funding to improve its connection to the city centre, is an important station on the East Coast Mainline, and is also served by local lines and west-to-east lines.
London North Eastern Railway (LNER), CrossCountry, Great Northern, Greater Anglia, East Midlands Railway (EMR) and Thameslink all run services which stop at the station.
ORR's policy is to support new open-access services where this creates competition and benefits passengers, and where the new services can run alongside existing services without causing undue impact on network performance. The Office reports that, in making its decision, it also considered the impact on government funds and the effect on other railway users.
Stephanie Tobyn, Director, Strategy, Policy & Reform, said: “Open access services promote competition on the rail network and give passengers more choice about how they travel. With passenger numbers still not quite recovered following the pandemic, it's important that the network provides options for all as the industry looks to increase passenger journeys.
“ORR plays a crucial role in overseeing competition on our railway, and we'll continue to assess open access applications with the goal of providing greater consumer choice, value and performance.”
Can Hull Trains stop too? This has assumed greater importance since LNER withdrew the Peterborough stop from their direct Hull to LKX service.
One of each route in each direction, if you study Real Time Trains and look for current GC trains at Peterborough you’ll see some GC services are booked to call already but not to allow passenger access to or from them this is to allow non stop faster LNER services to pass. That should give a clue as to which journeys the PBO calls will be on.
So? Which services are going to call? Both to/from Bradford, Both to/from Sunderland, or one of each?? And at what times are they calling???
So the question is, will this be 2 separate services joining at Doncaster on the south and split on the north towards both Bradford and Sunderland?
Would be better if there was more than 2 trains each way ! Plenty of time in schedule for more because they all slow down at Peterborough waiting for LNER to move ! Do we know if its Yorkshire or Northeast bound going North !
I looked at real time trains and there isn’t an indication to which journey is calling at PBO, could be the north eastern to Sunderland which allows the west riding trains to call only at Peterborough on occasions.