Train operator East Midlands Railway (EMR) has announced plans to bring back some of the Intercity services that it cut last month.
On 20 July, EMR – which is operated by Transport UK, reduced its services and implemented a temporary reduced timetable.
It did this because of problems with the performance of Hitachi Rail’s new Class 810 fleet, which meant that it did not have the capacity to run a consistent Intercity service while also maintaining its fleet of Class 222 trains.
From 31 August, EMR will run 92% of its Intercity services, an increase from the 87% that it is currently running.
It has structured the revised timetable around the current availability of the fleet, which has allowed it to reinstate priority services while changing some other services.
EMR will be restoring five weekday services and three weekend services to Sheffield, and three weekday services and one weekend service to Nottingham.
The operator has acknowledged that it still has work to do with Hitachi Rail to improve the performance and reliability of the Class 810 train, and has revealed that Hitachi’s Global Executive Leadership team is directly involved in supporting the integrated action plan that is now in place.
The DfT Operator (DFTO) has also supported EMR in restoring some of the cut timetable.
“The reduced timetable we introduced on 20 July was a difficult but necessary step to ensure we could offer a consistent and reliable service while working through the Intercity fleet challenges with Hitachi Rail, Rock Rail and other partners.
“We are now seeing encouraging signs that the reduced timetable has delivered the stability we were aiming for, and while there is still more work ahead with Hitachi Rail, this stabilisation represents an important milestone.
“It allows us to take this positive step forward from 31 August, increasing our Intercity services to 92% of the full timetable and returning key trains to our Sheffield and Nottingham routes. To make this possible with the fleet currently available, we have carefully rebalanced the timetable, prioritising services where we know they are most important to our customers and communities.
“We know how vital these services are to the communities and regional economies we serve. I would like to thank our customers for their continued patience and understanding, as well as our frontline teams, who continue to work tirelessly to deliver excellent service.”
Neil Grabham, Interim Managing Director at East Midlands Railway
Responses
It’s a pity for Nottingham / London customers that in the short term that bi-mode 800s can’t provide a service from Kings Cross to Nottingham via Grantham. Leave Transport UK with their fleets of basically “not fit for purpose” trains to seek a solution from their supplier …
What is also a great pity is that the pause of MML electrification has resulted in the wires stopping short of Leicester so no option to try and run an EMU only from Pancras to Leicester and change their into a Diesel unit. Was such a option be available then clearly the EMU would have to be something other than out of the fleet out declasified clapped out 360s that EMR deliver a substandard service on to Corby
So that’s it then all the trains that were 2 x 5 cars and reduced to 1 x 5 cars are back to 10 carriages . And seat reservations are back (having been abolished by Transport UK in Dec 2025) and there is to be a full 1st class at seat service with no declassifications ? And every service from Sheffield is going to connect at Leicester into the Nottingham /!London and that is going to connect Everytime at Kettering into a transport UK clapped out declassified 360 and they is not going to break down .. Sounds me like pigs might also fly.
Actually should DfT rather than supporting Transport UK be punishing them financially for failing to run a proper timetable of services.
Anyone from Nottingham going to London most likely gave up with Transport UK a long long time ago and opted to travel via Grantham . Likewise those wishing to travel Sheffield to London may well have discovered the far superior services by going via Doncaster ….
On that topic, I heard that when the 222s start to go to Scotland next January they will be very short of units again and are considering the possibility of pausing direct services from Nottingham, running a class 170 shuttle from there to East Midlands Parkway to connect with the Sheffield services (which would all stop there). The better option might be to run a shuttle to Grantham to let people travel on superior (and cheaper) LNER services. The overall journey time would probably be less.
The 810s are proving a disaster, years late and chronically unreliable. Apart from the well-documented issues with the electronics crashing, requiring a full reboot, one of them suffered some kind of fire the other day at East Midlands Parkway. There’s a picture in the local news of clouds of smoke coming from underneath it.
finest quality .. from Transport UK, the operator you can rely on cancel your train, send a train that breaks down or runs late (konked out engines) and then breaks timetabled connections.