AFTER a faltering early start to services on Britain’s £9 billion modernised West Coast Main Line on 15 December, the new timetable showed its positive benefits with many trains reaching their destinations on time or early during much of the rest of the day.

At the start of the first weekday’s operation of the new timetable — which will see more than 1,000 extra trains running every week — several early morning trains had to be cancelled and others were delayed arriving at or leaving London Euston.

Network Rail’s Operations and Customer Services Director Robin Gisby, overseeing the morning rush hour at Euston station, explained there had been a “power blip” affecting signalling at Bletchley, Bucks, and a track circuit failure at Willesden in north west London.

A Railtrack spokeswoman later said that there were no further problems on the route following the Willesden incident. The track circuit failure occurred at 0730 GMT, and engineers had fixed it by about 0840 GMT, she said.

After this, the new timetable — based on a top speed of 125 mph (200 km/h) along much of the route, with Virgin Pendolino trains able to tilt at high speeds around bends  — proved to be resilient despite an increase of up to 50 per cent in the number of trains being run by both London Midland and Virgin Trains compared with the week before.

A Railnews correspondent, who had travelled on the new non-stop 07.30 service from Birmingham to London — due to take only 72 minutes, but which ended up arriving over nine minutes late at Euston because of the power ‘blip’ at Bletchley — went on to travel on the 09.40 Virgin Pendolino service from Euston to Manchester Piccadilly.

The Manchester train ran non-stop to Crewe exactly in its scheduled time of 90 minutes — an average speed of over 105 mph (169 km/h) — and reached Manchester Piccadilly in two hours and five minutes, three minutes less than schedule.

Our correspondent returned from Manchester to London on the 12.35 Virgin Pendolino from Piccadilly … and reported its arrival in Euston in just two hours — seven minutes early. 

This train made three stops — at Stockport, Macclesfield and Stoke-on-Trent — but traversed the route in only two minutes longer than scheduled for the morning ‘flagship’ service from Manchester to London stopping only at Stockport.

However, later in the day (15 December) there were further delays of up to one hour after “a signalling problem in the Long Buckby (Northants) area” and “because of a broken down train between Lockerbie and Carlisle,” according to National Rail Enquiries’ web site.

•  Despite early delays to West Coast Main Line services on 15 December, passengers fared better than many drivers using the M1 motorway. Train passengers looking out of the window of Virgin trains speeding past Watford Gap at 125 mph saw three lanes of southbound motorway traffic at a standstill.

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