Hull Trains keen to open up new markets

Part two of Andy Comforts’s focus on Hull Trains looks at the company’s recovery from the pandemic, and at its ambitions to run more services.

In this article:

• Hull Trains faced severe financial challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic, suspending services three times without government support.
• Refocused on leisure travel and returned to recovery, running longer trains and increasing weekly services.
• The company is planning future expansions, including a potential new route between Sheffield and London by 2025.

“You must stay at home.”

The words of then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, announcing the first national lockdown on March 23 2020 due to COVID-19, would have a profound effect on the entire rail industry - not least of all on an open access operator such as Hull Trains.

The company had begun the new decade in buoyant mood, with the first of its new bi-mode Class 802 Paragon trains having entered passenger service in December 2019.

By January 2020, the second unit (802302) was carrying passengers, and HT’s Class 180 fleet was gradually being transferred to East Midlands Railway.

A revised timetable had been swiftly brought in on the Friday before that first lockdown announcement, comprising just two services a day in each direction between Hull and London with just one return journey on Saturday and Sunday.

The company said this move would provide greater reliability and resilience in the network timetable. Government advice to stop non-essential travel and limit social contact had led to a dramatic reduction in the number of passengers travelling on Hull Trains. On-board catering was withdrawn, and an enhanced cleaning regime was introduced.

Despite that revised timetable, passenger numbers declined significantly. The company’s business model meant that it had to survive purely as a commercial operation. As one of three open access operators in the country, Hull Trains had not been offered any financial support from the government - unlike the franchised operators.

Hull Trains had no choice. All services were suspended from Monday March 30 2020.

Steve Montgomery, then-managing director of the rail division for FirstGroup plc, said: “We are very sorry to all Hull Trains passengers that we will be suspending services. In line with the entire rail industry, passenger volumes at Hull Trains have reduced substantially since mid-March, and even with the steps we have taken to reduce the timetable we’re operating, current passenger numbers make it impossible to maintain the ongoing level of losses we have seen.”

Unlike franchised operators, Hull Trains had to furlough most of its 130 staff - a decision described by then-managing director Louise Cheeseman as “difficult and heart-wrenching”.

And with trains parked up, there were fears that the lockdown could put the UK’s smallest operator out of business.

Conservative MP David Davis and Labour’s Diana Johnson, whose respective constituencies of Haltemprice & Howden and Hull North lay on Hull Trains’ route, wrote to the government asking for support for the company. They claimed there was “genuine doubt about their commercial survival”.

To help key workers, LNER reinstated its Hull to London return service (which it had temporarily withdrawn because of the pandemic) and introduced an extra service between Hull and Doncaster.

It was ironic that Hull Trains had its trains sitting in sidings and most of its staff at home furloughed, when independent watchdog Transport Focus named the company as one of the best for passenger satisfaction, with a 92% overall satisfaction rating. In comparison, the UK average for long-distance operators was 84%.

At the end of July 2020, Hull Trains announced that it would resume a limited service to and from London from Friday August 21, nearly five months after it had been forced to leave its trains in the sidings.

Tourist attractions in the capital were beginning to open up again, and the train operator hoped that people would want to make the most of weekends away and the late summer Bank Holiday.

Leisure travel was now the company’s main focus, business travel having declined sharply following the move to home working and online meetings. So, the temporary timetable provided three return services on Sundays as opposed to just two each way Mondays to Saturdays.

However, this was to be relatively short-lived. November 5 of that year was a date to remember for all the wrong reasons.

Once again, Hull Trains suspended all its services after the government announced a second national COVID-19 lockdown. As with the first lockdown, the company missed out on financial help offered to the franchised train operating companies (TOCs) through the Emergency Measures Agreement.

Thankfully, this proved to be a shorter stoppage than the previous one, and within a few weeks Hull Trains had started selling tickets for travel from December 3 2020.

Again, it was a reduced timetable with two return services a day but three on Saturdays. The company reported that tickets were selling quickly in the run-up to Christmas - a sign that people wanted to get out and about again.

Tea, coffee and snacks were introduced back into First Class, but not Standard Class (a situation which would continue for over three years, much to the irritation of some customers).

But if anybody thought the New Year would offer some much-needed cheer for Hull Trains, they were sadly mistaken.

A third COVID lockdown sparked a third suspension of all the operator’s services for three months from January 9 2021, with trains not running again until April 12 that year.

And the service may have partly returned, but sadly not all the staff did, with the company making around a quarter of them redundant - mainly onboard staff after catering wasn’t re-introduced into Standard Class.

The pandemic had a dramatic and well-documented impact on the UK rail network, with the smallest operator - Hull Trains - especially badly hit. With three complete suspensions of service and no financial help from the government, it is to the credit of the company, its management and staff that it came through that period and began to look to the future.

It became apparent that business travel had ‘fallen off a cliff’, so the operator concentrated on the leisure market. This trend has continued for a number of TOCs, and Hull Trains reports that services are busier on Fridays and at the weekends, with Monday one of the quietest days on its trains.

By December 2021, Hull Trains was clearly bouncing back, running 94 weekly services, compared with its previous record of 92 services a week. The timetable was strengthened to provide six return services between Hull and London on both Saturdays and Sundays, with seven return journeys again on weekdays.

With Louise Cheeseman departing for Transport for London, having steered the business through the pandemic, a new managing director took the helm.

David Gibson, a former senior Hull City Council officer, described the December 2021 timetable as “a significant milestone for Hull Trains as we grow back to recovery and beyond”. He said his task was to return the business to profitability and to drive it forward.

Hull Trains has developed a reputation for doing things differently from some of the more established TOCs, and over the years the company has looked for opportunities to develop and grow.

In 2013, FirstGroup proposed a plan to electrify the 35 miles of railway between Hull, Selby and Temple Hirst Junction, where Hull Trains’ services join the East Coast Main Line. The scheme was estimated to cost around £100 million in 2013, and had support from East Yorkshire MPs and various business groups.

In 2016, the government rejected the FirstGroup electrification proposal, saying the introduction of bi-mode trains would render the scheme unnecessary.

In a letter to the region’s MPs, Rail Minister Paul Maynard wrote: “The passenger benefits can be delivered without the significant disruption of electrification.”

Successive Prime Ministers, including Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, have promised electrification to Hull as part of the Northern Powerhouse proposals, although no start date has been given for any work to start.

It is a bone of contention among the business community in East Yorkshire and the local MPs, who often press the case for the line to be electrified.

The Transpennine Route Upgrade (TRU) includes electrifying the main line from Manchester via Huddersfield to Leeds and York, but it makes no mention of wiring the section via Selby to Hull.

Hence Hull Trains has its fleet of five Class 802s, which normally switch between diesel and electric traction on the move, on the section of the ECML just to the south of Temple Hirst Junction. The Class 802s provide an average energy reduction of 62.3% over the Class 180 fleet they replaced.

But even if the main line to Hull was electrified, Hull Trains would still need bi-mode trains to continue its Beverley services, which were started in 2015 and extended in 2019.

Beverley, nine miles to the north of Hull city centre, is the market town of the East Riding of Yorkshire. There is a lot of commuter traffic between the two, served by two Northern trains per hour each way on weekdays on the line between Hull, Bridlington and Scarborough.

There was some initial resistance from the franchised operator to Hull Trains’ plans to run to Beverley, but HT’s managing director at the time, Will Dunnett, said that they had worked closely with the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) to get the new services started. Two trains a day run each way between Beverley, Hull and London King’s Cross.

The recovery after the pandemic has seen the operator run longer trains, with more ten-car trains introduced in January 2024 in what HT described as its biggest timetable transformation in 23 years. This provides 4,000 extra seats per week, compared with the previous five-car trains.

Also in January 2024, the company commissioned independent research into how customers felt about the service.

The survey of around 1,000 passengers returned a score of 96% satisfaction for the overall journey experience. The researchers from the TAS transport consultancy firm, who worked with market research specialist MRFGR, aligned the questions with wider rail industry surveys to compare Hull Trains with other operators around the country.

There have been numerous initiatives to try to achieve a better gender balance in the rail industry overall, and Hull Trains says it is proud of its diverse workforce.

The latest figures show that 49% of the company’s employees are female, with 27% of the train drivers being women. That compares with the national industry average of 6.5%.

Every one of those drivers was promoted internally, with some starting as on-board catering hosts and progressing on to become OBMs (on-board managers) and then drivers.

At the age of 23, Claire Sonley became the youngest female train driver in the UK. She joined Hull Trains when she was 19 as an on-board host. Now, some 20 years later, she is driving the Class 802s up and down the East Coast Main Line.

It’s a pattern replicated across the company. Former Managing Director Louise Cheeseman moved to the railways from working in a bank, when she spotted a newspaper advert for conductors on the local services out of Hull.

Cheeseman recalls that there were no female toilets in the staff mess room in Hull when she first began as a guard. Fast forward to this year… and Hull Trains ran all female-crewed services to mark International Women’s Day.

The rail industry has clearly changed over the years and there is more work nowadays to involve local communities. Ask for a packet of crisps on a Hull Trains service and it will come from a supplier somewhere along the route. The operator even has its own beer, brewed by a Hull brewery called Atom.

Many schoolchildren in East Yorkshire will have benefited from a trip to London on board Hull Trains, thanks to a partnership with the Hull and East Yorkshire Children’s University, which works with children growing up in disadvantaged areas.

For some of these children, it will be the first time they have been on a train, their first trip to the capital city, and possibly even their first trip outside of Hull.

Next year, the UK’s first open access train operator will celebrate 25 years on the tracks, and Hull Trains has a plan to branch out from its core East Yorkshire to London route.

Many passengers use the company’s services from places such as Doncaster and Retford, with some choosing to travel from Sheffield to board a train on the East Coast Main Line.

In January of this year, FirstGroup submitted the first part of an application to the ORR to run a new open access service between Sheffield and London King’s Cross. It would give the South Yorkshire city its first direct rail link to King’s Cross since 1968, and FirstGroup clearly believes there is demand for such a service to return to the network.

Hull Trains Managing Director Martijn Gilbert says the company has identified Worksop and the surrounding area as somewhere underserved by rail.

He cites a new nearby business park and plans for an atomic energy plant between Worksop and Retford as examples of how that area might need its first direct link to London since the 1960s. Gilbert believes the FirstGroup plans would give passengers more choice and would keep fares competitive.

The first services on this new route are planned to start running in the second half of 2025, although plans for the type of train to be used are still vague.

The Sheffield route proposal documents have an illustration of a Class 222 diesel train, branded ‘Sheffield by Hull Trains’.

Ideally, the operator would like to use bi-mode trains such as the Class 802s, but there isn’t a practical option to have trains built and ready in time. That remains an aspiration, and it seems more likely that any new service would use trains such as the Class 222, a throwback to when they ran in Hull Trains service as the Pioneer fleet.

After some turbulent times owing to the reliability of the Class 180 fleet and the COVID pandemic, it does seem that Hull Trains is now able to plan for future expansion.

As well as the Sheffield proposal, the company would like to run an eighth daily return service between Hull and London. And HT claims it has enjoyed the best recovery of any inter-city operator since the pandemic.

Punctuality is an area which could see some improvement. Some 81.6% of trains arrived within ten minutes of time at their destination in the 12 months to the end of March this year, but the target set by the regulator is 85.8%.

Hull Trains has worked closely with Network Rail to minimise disruption during planned engineering works. Some services have diverted via the Midland Main Line into St Pancras, using conductor drivers alongside the company’s own drivers.

Wherever possible, the operator likes to avoid using rail replacement services. On one recent engineering possession, fellow First-owned open access operator Lumo ran a train from Edinburgh to Doncaster to connect with a ten-car Hull Trains service to King’s Cross via Lincoln.

Increasingly, Hull Trains and Lumo have been working more closely together, with some joint back-office roles such as marketing and public relations. Gilbert splits his time between the two operators.

The General Election had only been called a few days before a planned visit to Hull by then-Shadow Transport Secretary Louise Haigh to officially open Hull Trains’ new training academy and driver simulator.

She spoke of what a Labour government might mean for open access operators, saying they would play an important part in providing choice for passengers.

So, what would Labour support look like? Haigh said ot would reform the way applications are made for open access operators, so it wouldn’t take as long for decisions to be made, such as serving additional stations.

To speed this up, Labour says it would plan a single point of access to the railways through the planned independent arms-length body, Great British Railways.

These words from a senior Labour politician may give some hope to open access operators that they will have a long-term role on the UK rail network.

Nobody has a crystal ball to see what the future holds, but it seems certain that Hull Trains will be celebrating its 25th anniversary next year while still running its distinctive blue trains up and down the East Coast Main Line to Hull and back - and possibly Sheffield as well.

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