Parliamentary train

Parliamentary trains in the United Kingdom were passenger services required by an Act of Parliament passed in 1844 to allow inexpensive and basic rail transport for less affluent passengers. That legislation required that at least one such service per day be run on every railway route in the UK. Now no longer a legal requirement (although most franchise agreements require such trains), the term describes train services that continue to be run to avoid the cost of formal closure of a route or station but with reduced services often to just one train per week and without specially low prices. Such services are often called "ghost trains".^[1]

Nineteenth-century usage

GWR open passenger car

In the earliest days of passenger railways in the United Kingdom the poor were encouraged to travel in order to find employment in the growing industrial centres, but trains were generally unaffordable to them except in the most basic of open wagons, in many cases attached to goods trains.^[2] Political pressure caused the Board of Trade to investigate, and Sir Robert Peel's Conservative government enacted the Railway Regulation Act, which took effect on 1 November 1844. It compelled "the provision of at least one train a day each way at a speed of not less than 12 miles an hour including stops, which were to be made at all stations, and of carriages protected from the weather and provided with seats; for all which luxuries not more than a penny a mile might be charged".^[3]

In popular culture

Parliamentary Train: Interior of a third class carriage (1859)

The basic comfort and slow progress of Victorian parliamentary trains led to a humorous reference in Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera The Mikado. The Mikado is explaining how he will match punishments to the crimes committed:

"The idiot who, in railway carriages
Scribbles on window-panes
We only suffer
To ride on a buffer
On Parliamentary trains."

Legacy of the Beeching closures

In 1963 the nationalised British Railways produced a report, The Reshaping of British Railways,^[4] designed to stem the huge losses made by the railway industry. The chairman of British Railways was Richard Beeching, and the report became known as the Beeching Report. It proposed very substantial cuts to the network and to train services. The Transport Act 1962 included a formal closure process allowing for objections to closures on the basis of hardship to passengers if their service was closed. As the objections gained momentum, this process became increasingly difficult to implement, and from about 1970 closures slowed to a trickle.

In certain cases where there was exceptionally low usage the train service was reduced to a bare minimum, but the service was not formally closed, avoiding the costs associated with closure. In some cases the service was reduced to one train a week, and in one direction only.

These minimal services had resonances of the 19th-century parliamentary services, and among rail enthusiasts they came to be referred to as "parliamentary trains", or more colloquially "parly" trains (following the abbreviation used in Victorian timetables) or "ghost trains". However, this terminology has no official standing. So-called Parliamentary services are also typically run at inconvenient times, often very early in the morning, very late at night, or in the middle of the day at the weekend. In extreme instances, rail services have actually been "temporarily" withdrawn and replaced by substitute bus services, to maintain the pretence that the service has not been withdrawn.

Examples of extant "parliamentary" trains

Some current examples of lines served only by a "Parliamentary" train are:

Two trains call at Pilning each week

Example Parliamentary Train 07:59 Woodgrange Park to Willesden Junction, London Overground using Gospel Oak Junction^[10]

A station may have a "parliamentary" service because the operating company wishes it closed, but the line is in regular use (most trains pass straight through). Examples include:

• Teesside Airport, which serves Durham Tees Valley Airport in Country Durham, lost most of its services due to its relatively long distance to the terminal as well as competition from buses which offered more reliable services (which in turn were withdrawn due to the airport's sharp decrease in air passengers). The current service is operated only on Sundays and comprises the 10:29 from Darlington-Metrocentre via Hartlepool with a return at 12:19. Operated by Arriva Rail North.^[11]
• Pilning in South Gloucestershire, near Bristol – only two trains per week, both from Cardiff Central to Taunton. These departures are on Saturdays only at 08:35 and 13:34. Formerly one train each way per week, but the bridge to the down platform was removed in November 2016. Operated by Great Western Railway.^[12]
• Barry Links and Golf Street in Carnoustie, Scotland. These are served by the 17:03 Glasgow Queen Street–Carnoustie service (17:11 Saturday) and the 06:00 Carnoustie–Dundee return. Operated by Abellio ScotRail.
• Shippea Hill in Cambridgeshire and Lakenheath in Suffolk (between Ely and Brandon on the Breckland Line to Norwich). Shippea Hill is served at 07:23 Mondays–Fridays (07:25 Saturday) Eastbound and 09:27 Saturdays only westbound. Lakenheath, however, is served by 7 trains on a Sunday. There are no services Monday–Friday and just a single journey in each direction on Saturdays.
• Polesworth has one train per day Mondays–Saturdays, northbound only at 07:23. After major works on the West Coast Main Line, contractors neglected to replace the footbridge which they had removed, leaving passengers unable to access southbound trains.

One train every Saturday is scheduled to call at Bordesley; however, the station remains open for use when Birmingham City Football Club are playing at home.

In the mid-1990s British Rail was forced to serve Smethwick West in the West Midlands for an extra 12 months after a legal blunder meant that the station had not been closed properly. One train per week each way still called at Smethwick West, even though it was only a few hundred yards from the replacement Smethwick Galton Bridge.^[13]

A variant of the "parliamentary" train service was the "temporary" replacement bus service, as employed between Watford and Croxley Green in Hertfordshire. The railway line was closed to trains in 1996, but to avoid the legal complications and costs of actual closure train services were replaced by buses, thus maintaining the legal fiction of an open railway.^[14] The branch was officially closed in 2003. Work is to begin to absorb most of the route into a diversion of the Watford branch of the Metropolitan line into Watford Junction.

The "temporary replacement bus" tactic was used from December 2008 between Ealing Broadway and Wandsworth Road^[15] when CrossCountry withdrew its services from Brighton to the Northwest, which was the only passenger service between Factory Junction, north of Wandsworth Road, and Latchmere Junction, on the West London Line. This service was later replaced by a single daily return train between Kensington Olympia and Wandsworth Road operated by Southern until formal consultation commenced and closure was completed in 2013.^[16]

The "replacement bus" tactic—on a long-term basis—is being used to cover Norton Bridge, Barlaston and Wedgwood stations on the Stafford–Manchester line, which had their passenger services withdrawn in 2004.

See also

• Closure by stealth
• Bustitution
• Hikyō station

References

Bibliography

• Billson, P. (1996). Derby and the Midland Railway. Derby: Breedon Books.
• Jordana, Jacint; Levi-Faur, David (2004). The politics of regulation: institutions and regulatory reforms for the age of governance. Edward Elgar Publishing. ISBN 978-1-84376-464-9.
• Ransom, P. J. G. (1990). The Victorian Railway and How It Evolved. London: Heinemann.
• Calder, Simon (2011-04-02). "Missed the bus? The route that runs only four times year". BBC.

External links

• Railways Archive: An Act to attach certain Conditions to the Construction of future Railways 1844
• Passenger Train Services Over Unusual Lines
• Unusual Routes in Timetable, gensheet.co.uk
• London Underground Obscure Workings
• On board a real life ghost train