Transport talks on ‘sardine specials’

TRANSPORT secretary Lord Adonis is to meet Greater Manchester’s MPs before Parliament returns to discuss Oldham’s growing train overcrowding crisis.

The MPs are furious that the Department for Transport (DfT) has reneged on a promise to allocate 182 new carriages to relieve Greater Manchester’s “sardine specials” and is planning instead to send 102.

Two of the North’s congested routes pass through Oldham at Greenfield and Mills Hill between Manchester and Leeds and local passengers have long complained of overcrowding. Up to 90 second-hand railway carriages will start arriving in the area over the next few weeks but Lord Adonis has promised to make no final decision on how many more will come in a second phase in the autumn until he has listened to the MPs’ appeals.

Lord Adonis made the pledge in a telephone conversation with Manchester central MP Tony Lloyd, the chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, following a meeting between the MPs and a delegation of local transport leaders. The first phase of 90 will relieve only half of the problem routes —where rush-hour trains are among the most overcrowded in Britain — and talks will continue during the summer between officials before the Transport Secretary meets the MPs.

Greater Manchester Integrated Transport Authority chairman Councillor Keith Whitmore said: “Our figures are way out of skew with the figures the DfT are working on.

“They claim that it is not an exercise in saving money but their assessment of what we actually need. It is not just a slight difference, we are poles apart.”

At the same time, the two sides are also arguing about five Pacer trains which will no longer be needed on the Oldham loop line when it closes for conversion to Metrolink in October.

DfT officials want to send the trains to another part of the country rather than allow them to be used to relieve overcrowding in Greater Manchester.

Councillor Whitmore added: “I thought it was a joke at first but they say that if we are going to keep them, we have to pay for them. It is staggering.”