One of the great success stories in urban transport during the 1970s and 1980s was Barbara Castle’s celebrated 1968 Transport Act, which enabled the establishment of the West Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive (PTE) in 1974. For the first time, locally elected councillors were in charge of our trains.
Transforming West Yorkshire’s commuter rail networks
Within a decade, there were massive transformations on West Yorkshire’s hitherto declining commuter rail networks. Substantial investment was made in new rolling stock, stations, and new sections of track – even the belated electrification of parts of the urban network, including the Airedale and Wharfedale lines north of Leeds and Bradford, financed not by the UK government but by the European Regional Development Fund, primarily to help Bradford as a depressed part of Europe.
Metro became the standard brand for all local trains, and carriages were painted in attractive maroon livery, which was also used for timetables, posters and other publicity. Colour-coded Underground-style maps were prepared for the 12 lines under PTE control, so that interchange between lines at key nodal stations was easy to understand. Service frequencies were augmented with half-hourly services on most commuter lines – hourly in the evenings and on Sundays.
Monthly or annual multimodal MetroCards were issued, and fares simplified with Continental-style standardised fares between bus and rail systems. Cheap off-peak fares were introduced for pensioners, as well as a range of popular ‘Day Rover’ fares to offer unrivalled leisure trips by bus and train throughout the county.
Marketing the rail and bus networks
Marketing of both rail and bus networks was superb. As well as printed leaflets and brochures, local television advertising was used (these were the days before internet) with imaginative schemes to entice people back onto the trains. This included a cartoon fox known as ‘Squicka’ in British Rail uniform, pointing out how much ‘quicker’ Metro Train was, compared to congested roads.
This marketing was highly effective. Passenger numbers soared, and what had been a sorry Beeching era of decline in rail use, was reversed. This in turn encouraged investment in new infrastructure. Between 1974 and 2000, a total of 23 new stations were opened in West Yorkshire.
Privatisation and decline of our transport network
But from the late 1980s, starting with the infamous 1985 Transport Act, which led to disastrous privatisation of largely municipally owned or nationalised bus networks, followed by the privatisation of British Rail between 1994 and 1997, the Metro success was, step by lethal step, put into reverse.
Things worsened markedly after 2014, when West Yorkshire PTE lost many of its reduced operation and marketing resources during austerity and became a mere committee of the new West Yorkshire Combined Authority (WYCA). Many people consider the WYCA to be a top-heavy bureaucratic organisation with little interest in marketing, beyond self-promotion. Printed timetables were totally dispensed with, despite the fact that many older people and other minorities who depend on public transport, rely on print as their prime source of information – something the best transport operators understand very well.
Predictably, passenger growth stagnated, but still (pre-Covid), about 70 million trips per annum were made by rail within West Yorkshire.
By 2020 and the calamity of Covid, when heavy government messaging warned travellers not to use public transport, it was clear that the rail network was in trouble, as passenger numbers plummeted. Although the situation has improved, particularly for buses with the imaginative £2 maximum fare strategy, the railways have seen no such upturn.
Poor marketing and crippling restrictions
However, passenger numbers have largely recovered, especially into Leeds, where traffic congestion and high parking charges are an incentive to use public transport, but also for many leisure journeys. Yet Day Rover and other off-peak leisure tickets are not marketed in any way but are subject to crippling restrictions.
This is true even in the school holidays, with travel embargoes between 4pm and 6.30pm, the very time most families need to return home, thus negating the value of the ticket. The pathetic excuse that this is because of potential overcrowding, belies the fact that most return journeys are contraflow: heading from outlying tourist destinations into urban centres.
Even though local train operator Northern is now nationalised again, the company is far removed from local control and passenger involvement. Users of local train services and stations have come to learn that their local elected members no longer have any effective control or even a say on issues such as service levels or fares. Only four new stations have been opened in West Yorkshire since 2000, compared to 23 in the previous 26 years. A fifth, White Rose Centre near Leeds, has been mired in a nightmare of mismanagement and overspend that should be the subject of a public inquiry.
Bradford transport woes
In the City of Bradford, which will be the UK City of Culture in 2025, matters have come to a head. Unsurprisingly, the city that will be hosting a wide range of events, not just in the city centre but also in outlying towns within Bradford District, most especially in the Aire and Wharfe valleys. This includes Keighley, Saltaire and Ilkley, where off-peak train services were slashed by 50% between 9.30am and 3pm during Covid as a ‘temporary’ measure but have not been restored.
This has led to a massive reduction in services, especially at Shipley station to and from Wharfedale and Airedale, with connections now sometimes requiring 50-minute waits. Baildon, an important commuter station on the Bradford-Ilkley line, has also suffered a significant drop in passenger revenue after the line was closed for five months due to a landslip, with no attempt made to boost numbers by marketing even the partially restored services.
Things have clearly come to a crunch when the leader of Bradford Council and chair of WYCA, Cllr Susan Hincliffe, surely a major figure of authority on West Yorkshire’s rail network, formally calls for the restoration of the off-peak services from Bradford along the two key lines for 2025. So far, however, this request has been ignored by both Northern and the Department of Transport, on the grounds that this would increase costs. Clearly, Bradford’s needs are not a priority, not even to support a major cultural event that is so vital to its economic recovery.
Great West Yorkshire train robbery
It is all too clear that unelected bureaucrats now control what happens on the West Yorkshire Rail network on the grounds that declining passenger numbers, a result of their own failures, justify further cuts. Curtailments to Sunday and evening services could soon follow.
Meanwhile, traffic congestion in both the Aire and Wharfe valleys grows to horrific levels, with local bus services becoming synonymous with unreliability. This itself fuels ever-greater dependence on cars and runs counter to all pretence of reducing pollution and climate emissions in the face of catastrophic climate change.
Bradford, of all UK cities, deserves support. Once again, our London-centred government is damaging the North. So much for ‘levelling-up’.
In West Yorkshire, away from Leeds, we seem to have returned to the Beeching era of closures by stealth: a spiral of decline as services deteriorate even on some routes with shorter peak-hour trains, compounded by poor information and a total lack of marketing, leading to further reductions. The recently published (2024) West Yorkshire Combined Authority Rail Strategy is full of pious hopes and wordy generalisations, but mostly reads like a work of fiction that is very different from the realities on the ground.
The brutal truth is that control of West Yorkshire railways has been taken away from the people of Yorkshire through various acts of political subterfuge and handed back to faceless bureaucrats in Whitehall. The Great West Yorkshire Train Robbery.
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