Parliamentary train
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A Parliamentary train is, nowadays, a British English term for a train that operates a Parliamentary service - that is to say a token service to a given station, thus maintaining a legal fiction that either the station in question or, in some cases, the whole line is in fact open, whereas in reality the train operating company in question has almost completely abandoned the station or line.
Originally, however, the term stems from the Railway Regulation Act 1844. Working people were increasingly travelling long distances to find employment in the growing industrial centres. Such third class facilities as there were consisted usually of open wagons, often without seats, nicknamed "stanhopes". The Act was an attempt to make train travel available - and safe - for those who could ill afford it. The Act set minimum standards for passenger accommodation, and was influenced by the Railway accident at Sonning Cutting of Christmas eve 1842 when nine stonemasons were thrown from open wagons and killed.
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[edit] Methodology
A typical parliamentary train will serve its stations or line as little as once per week, and never a time where the service would actually be useful to any passengers (parliamentary services will typically be either very early in the morning or very late at night or in the middle of the day at the weekend). Quite often the service will run in one direction only.
The reason why these services are run at all is because rail transport is heavily regulated in the United Kingdom and it is therefore considerably cheaper for a train operating company to run a parliamentary service than it is to go through the full legal process of applying for a station and/or line to be permanently closed.
[edit] Origins
This act bound the various train operators to provide third class passengers with a minimum standard of service (specifically that at least one train per day must have adequate facilities in third class including a covered carriage with seats. Furthermore trains so equipped needed, on any given day, to serve every route and station in the rail company's area (across the whole day's service) each day. Finally all this had to cost no more than a penny per mile in third class. The reaction of train operating companies, fearing the loss of revenue of increasing or improving third class facilities (i.e. that those who could afford second class would choose the cheaper option if it became bearable) was to follow the absolute letter of the law and no more - thus running just one train with decent third class facilities per, at a useless time, such as very early in the morning or very late at night, and (because only one train like this was run) that one train really would stop at every station and halt on its line thus making the journey times exceedingly long.
These services became known as parliamentary trains, and, reflecting upper class attitudes of the time, even got a mention in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado as follows:
"The idiot who, in railway carriages,
Scribbles on window-panes,
We only suffer
To ride on a buffer
On Parliamentary trains."
[edit] Examples
Some modern examples of lines served only by a Parliamentary train include:
- Chester to Runcorn (Mainline) has one service per year, (a summer Saturday), using the uni-directional Halton Curve.
- The Ellesmere Port to Warrington Line
- The Stockport to Stalybridge Line where just one train per week runs in one direction.
- The Cleethorpes to Sheffield Section of the Sheffield to Lincoln Line where three trains per week run, all of them on Saturdays.
- It is interesting to note that one of the stations on this line, Gainsborough Central, posted in 2006 lower passenger figures than Watford West - a station that is actually closed.
- The Great Yarmouth to Norwich Line via Berney Arms. A Rarely used section of line that is served only once or twice per day.
Alternatively, an individual station may get a parliamentary service, because the operating company wishes them closed, but the line itself is still in regular use (i.e. most trains speed straight through). Example of such stations are:
- Tees-side Airport railway station in Teeside.
- Coombe railway station in Cornwall.
- Pilning railway station in South Gloucestershire, near Bristol
- Barry Links railway station and Golf Street railway station both in Carnoustie, Scotland.
In an interesting example, British Rail was forced to serve Smethwick West in the West Midlands for an extra 12 months in the mid-1990s after a legal blunder meant that the station had not been closed properly. This meant that one train per week each way still called at Smethwick West, even though it was only a few hundred yards down the line from its replacement Smethwick Galton Bridge.
[edit] References
- Ransom, P.J.G., (1990) The Victorian Railway and How It Evolved, London: Heinemann
- Billson, P., (1996) Derby and the Midland Railway, Derby: Breedon Books
