SOME?! SOME TRAINS ARE OVERCROWDED?! Every train I get on nowadays seems to be bursting at the seams with people! The transport secretary needs to screw his head on because he is living in the clouds. The train service in this country has gone from bad to worse but mainly in the often deprived North because they seem to be perfectly happy about investing bucket loads of money in London services but for us its tuppence or less! The fares we pay on the trains seem to increase almost monthly but do the services get better? NOOO they don't! The Manchester Piccadilly to Bolton service is one of many where the trains are always very old and dated and Northern Rail seem to be in love with the old 80s RailBus. These trains do have a high capacity but the seats are so close together you can bearly breathe. Also the services seem to be few and far beyond with train times being spread out further rather than increase service. I hope somebody does something about this foul problem in our country before we have to take after the Indians and cling onto the side of a train with fear of death!!!

I alway feel let down on stories like this for the simple questions that are not asked. Like: What number of passengers are you allowed carry safley, How many are you insured to carry?

i got atrain from urmston to lime street in rush hour to watch england at anfield, what a joke i had to get off to let other people on, why not hold back on some council tax, why pay for passenger service thats a discrace, two carriges, what a joke.

Safe or not, surely as important is the fact that we are being asked to pay high fares for the priveledge of STANDING on a train to and from work every day. What sort of service are they providing to their customers. No wonder so many choose to drive even though it costs more.

Increasing capacity on the railways would take time, even if we had a government that wished to do that. However, there is something that Northern Trains and Central Trains could do quickly - they could train their staff to use a thermostat. If they did that, then we might not have to suffer a free sauna while we're standing and packed like sardines.

And B-Liar & Co wonder why we choose to drive instead! If the trains are already overcrowded how would they cope if we all took the green's holier-than-thou advice and dumped our cars? I'll stick to my car or motorbike thanks.

I travel to and from work everyday on Northern's service from Newton-le-Willows to Manchester piccadilly everyday, and it seems clear to me that the Service manager mentioned in this story has never traveled on one of these trains. I get the 4.15 service from manchester everyday, and everyday it's very very overcrowded with people traveling home. Especially on fridays when students are going home from uni for the weekend.
Had he taken the time to travel on his trains he would see it can't possibly be safe. Fair enough, the over crowding might not affect the trains performance, causing it to be unsafe, but what if there was a situation such as a fire, or a collision where the train would have to be evacuated. Last friday the train was so overcrowdedthat i could move an inchand i had to stand nose to nose with the person stood infront of me. If there was an evacuation situation, there would be panic and a rush for the doors, causing people to be crush and trampled on. How on earth is that safe??
There is also the matter, as poeple have pointed out before, that train fares have gone up and up and up in recent years, but the service we have received has gone right down.
Unfortunately, i don't see things changing until tere is a major incident and lives are lost. It's a shame people have to die before people will change things to make them safer.

we had better get used to overcrowding, when we read stories about an unjustified ??5.2 bn spent on the high speed channel tunnel link. figures for transport investment in london and the south east are always quoted in billions whereas away from there we all have to make do and mend. a whole fleet of 5 year old trains is being laid up down there just because the letters on the info screens are a couple of millimetres too small. all our money is now allocated to the london (not great britain) olympic infrastructure which is surprise surprise already asking for more than budgetted.

Everybody loves to jump on a bad news story and say how poor the railways are. Well try these for size. Punctuality is improving continually and has now recovered to beat pre- Hatfield statistics. More passenger services are being run year on year. (and not just a few more either)For the last two years over 1billion passengers have been carried and the figures are increasing all the time. Spad figures are down as are accident statistics. In the North of England a new order of trains is currently being rolled out which will serve major towns and cities on Trans Pennine routes, Bolton included, on Windermere/Barrow/Blackpool services.
This may well allow some of the present rolling stock to cascade down to Northern to strengthen services or replace railbuses. To suggest that the service between Piccadilly and Bolton is sparse is ridiculous, there are trains at around six minute intervals on this line.
The railway has suffered from under investment since the 'fifties and it will take a lot to get it absolutely spot on. As it is Railway workers are striving harder than ever to move more people than it has done for fifty years on a network that has been brutally cut back by all political parties in the recent past. The railway companies are making a concerted effort to encourage people to travel off peak now, to help ease the problem. Finally I would like to ask how many accidents have been caused by overcrowding on trains? And to say that on safety grounds you would travel by road is possibly the most stupid thing anybody could come up with. If you studied the figures for accidents, fatalities etc between road and rail you would never get in a car again. The railways are at present victims of their own success but they will overcome the present problems this is causing.

I travel on the Blackpool North train every day between Horwich and Manchester. I cannot believe how overcrowded the trains are. People are truly crushed into the trains.

Regularly they send 2 carriages on my usual train when they know they will fill 4 during rush hour.

I think the transport minister should pay us a visit and see for himself.

A simple solution would be to buy more carriages, obviously the demand is there. Additionally they could have more frequent trains at peak times.

If its safe to travel on packed train, then why last week did the train I was traveling on had to reduce speed and miss one stop on the way in.

The train as always been full each day from Greenfield to Manchester. The drive last week said he was sorry he could not find anything bigger.

I am lucky I get on at Greenfirld not Ashton.

Chris, of Urmston - there's no point in withholding Council tax as a protest against poor train services.

The Tories privatised the train companies, so now the Council has pretty much no say in what happens on the railways. It's the train companies you need to tackle.

As a daily commuter on the Wigan - Manchester via Atherton line I can say that the problem is the same on that line.
As regards how many people are allowed to stand, a look at the Passengers' Charter for Northern Rail, section 1.6 states "Where customers do need to stand, the number doing so should not exceed 35% of the seating capacity."
Is this not a guide on safe numbers to carry? By the way, if this were enforced we may never get to/from work!
It's about time something was done!

I was forced to take the train from Disley to Manchester return yesterday 3rd May, how people put up with that, day in day out i do not know, i caught the 1637hrs train from Manchester back home and people were literally crush against each other, it has put me off traveling by train ever again.

My response is, in the event of a derailment and a carriage going on it's side - you are looking at multiple casualties and crush injuries a la Liverpool fans at Hillsborough. There is an upper limit to the amount you can get on a bus, but not most types of trains. And that cannot be good customer service!

The Virgin Pendolinos have an on-board computer that will refuse to allow the train to move if there is too much weight in one coach - which must be incorporated in all new designs.

Unlike the cretins who wrote the reply from Northern Rail, I actually work on board and see these situations all the time.

Sadly at peak times there is a problem with supply and demand. Maybe work places and industry could help the problem and stagger finishing times for work. Open shops at 10am and close at 6.30?

I used to pay for a monthly ticket from Ashton to Manchester, but was sick and tired of having to fight my way onto a carriage just for the privilege of standing. Admittedly, I'm more fortunate in that I didn't have to travel for long, but the simple fact is there aren't enough carriages. The train I usually got was supposed to be 4 carriages, but more often than not arrived with 2. No word from the station staff, no explanation from the guards. If you've got up to get into Manchester early for work, you are left frustrated and more importantly late for work. Do Northern Rail realise that its peoples livliehoods at stake here. As for the overcrowding, does this not make it impossible for the conductor to check tickets? Yes it does, so the rail companies are actually losing revenue by not providing enough coaches. I no longer get the train. The unreliable service meant that I couldn't commit to a monthly ticket and a daily ticket is now (after fare increases) just as much as my car parking in town ??4.