New opportunities
The Planning/Commercial Sub-Committee(P/ CSC), now combined and under London Midland Region chairmanship, gathered for a two-day meeting in late September 1970. Its deliberations focussed on two new major opportunities to further develop the North East/ South West train plan in time for the 1972/73 timetable. The first of these had been presented by the LM’s decision to withdraw the Euston/ Birmingham/Manchester/Liverpool timetable and replace it with an all-day half-hourly service between Euston and Birmingham/ Wolverhampton. The forward pattern to the North West was to be a train to Manchester or Liverpool at alternate hours formed by either a starting train from New Street or the projection of a train from the South West or South Wales, both of which would connect out of the terminating service from Euston. A similar balance of connections was to be introduced in the southbound direction. In both cases a minimum connectional margin of ten minutes was to be applied at New Street.
The second opportunity which also presented a significant train planning challenge, was a general speed-up of services over the route enabled by the laying of continuous welded rail track with a consequent uprating of line speeds. Accelerations of ten minutes between Bristol and Birmingham, five minutes between Cardiff and Birmingham and a further five minutes between Birmingham and the North East could now be factored into the timing equation. In addition, a retiming of East Coast Main Line (ECML) schedules would lead to an Eastern Region requirement for a fifteen-minute earlier arrival in the North East to ensure connection with Anglo-Scottish services.
Achieving service symmetry
However, before the planners could start to plot paths on their graphs, the question as to the balance of services had to be resolved. There was a difference of Regional Commercial views at this time in that the LM wanted services from Manchester and Liverpool to run to Cardiff whereas the Western Region preferred a South Wales–North East axis. This issue was thrashed out at the PSC meeting on 15th January 1971 where a “full and forthright discussion” was alluded to in the minutes. In the event, the absence of hoped-for definitive traffic flow data rather handed the initiative to the P/CSC which had worked hard since its September meeting to produce a list of trains, after consultation with all parties, which it thought would meet both operating
