The answer is that it will be one of only two counties in the UK without a direct train service to London. The other is Rutland County, a very small county with only one station and a population of 41,000, just over half that of Shrewsbury County.
Avanti West Coast’s once-daily weekday service will be discontinued this summer. The Department for Transport (DfT) said “very low” passenger numbers mean the service is currently losing £1.4m a year and is not prepared to spend money to keep the service running. He said he has not been able to do so.
Let’s take a look at the DfT’s claims.
The Avanti flight to Shrewsbury is said to carry between 40 and 60 passengers. The DfT has urged taxpayers to “maintain historically high levels of financial support for the industry indefinitely” as “changes in travel patterns mean railways are no longer earning the same income as before the pandemic”. It states that it cannot be asked to do so.
But passenger numbers are coming back.
Figures released by the Office for Rail and Road (ORR) show that between July and September 2023 (the latest data available), there were 397 million passenger journeys in the UK. This is a 14% increase compared to the same quarter in 2022 and represents 88% of the 448 million trips made in the same quarter in 2019. Total passenger revenue from July to September last year was £2.6bn, up 10% on the same period last year. Adjusted for inflation, it hit $2.4 billion in the same period in 2022.
Avanti passenger numbers reached 8 million during this period, an increase of 25% compared to the same quarter in 2022, with people sometimes traveling further afield. ORR also said passenger travel increased in eight of the past 10 quarters.
So it is hardly going away, as the government and the DfT have repeatedly suggested. Ridership and revenue are on track to return to pre-pandemic levels.
But trains are supposed to be a public service. We still fund the network to some extent through tax, so it would not be unreasonable for some of our services to include London direct trains, protected by franchise agreements. As a result, the DfT was unable to run the plug-in just by looking at the spreadsheet, and was forced to shut down the service without any government funding.
From June onwards, people within Shropshire who wish to travel by train to Shropshire will need to either change trains or drive to a station with a direct service. Indeed, changing in Wolverhampton is relatively easy, often easier than in Birmingham New Street. But is it fair for a county to have no direct link to London? Even a simple change like the one in Wolverhampton is more work than no change at all.
The DfT has looked at its balance sheet and has made a decision that does not appear to take into account other political, business and social perspectives that could allow it to defeat the county’s position. Isn’t it strange that there is one train a day at such an early hour, but people don’t know about its existence or have never used it?
Regular service
Shropshire’s connections to London over the past 60 years have often been hampered by decisions made by train bosses, politicians and civil servants.
Decades ago, when steam locomotives were in common use, trains ran between Paddington and Birkenhead in London, including Wellington (there was no Telford Central then), Shrewsbury, Gobowen, There were several trains a day to Chirk and other towns. These services began in 1967 when Dr Richard Beeching’s British Railways Reorganization Report deemed the Birkenhead route to be, in effect, a duplicate of the London Euston to Liverpool service which operated via Crewe. Most of the six daily trains between London and Euston have been reduced. Wirral, Wolverhampton.