How Hull Trains opened the door

Before the year 2000, people in Hull and East Yorkshire really didn’t need a timetable to work out how to get to London. The daily train left Hull at 0700 and returned from King’s Cross at 1720. The service, pared back over the years by British Rail, served to reinforce Hull’s undeserved reputation as the buffer stops at the end of a very long siding.

However, the city was growing. A population of 243,595 in the 2001 Census placed it as the 12th biggest city in England - larger than the likes of Stoke-on-Trent, Bournemouth and Derby, all of which had a regular train service to and from the capital.

For passengers in East Yorkshire, the choice was either to pay the often-premium fares to travel on that one through service (the business-orientated ‘Hull Executive’) or to travel on the stopper to Doncaster and change. That would often involve an hour-long trip on a Pacer or a Class 158, at best.

It was no coincidence that many people chose to drive to Doncaster and catch one of the fast direct trains from there. The new dawn for Hull’s much improved links with London can be traced back to 1997 and the birth of the appropriately named Renaissance Trains. Created thanks to rail privatisation, the aim was to promote the formation of private sector companies on the UK rail network, starting with open access passenger operations. Renaissance Trains was formed by two former British Rail managers - Mike Jones and John Nelson.

Jones had spent much of his career in the freight sector, including senior roles at Speedlink and Railfreight, while Nelson had been in charge of British Rail’s Eastern Region (then about a quarter of the national rail network), before becoming Managing Director of Network SouthEast, running London’s commuter trains. Renaissance Trains identified Hull as a clear gap in the market, with its one train a day, run in the late 1990s by GNER. The return service, operated by an InterCity 125, was a requirement of the East Coast franchise, but there was seemingly no desire by GNER to run any additional services.

To be fair to the operator, its HST fleet was in heavy daily use on services between London, Aberdeen, Inverness, Harrogate and Skipton. As the new kid in town, Renaissance had to almost muscle in to gain paths on a busy East Coast Main Line - but muscle in it did. Just before the turn of the millennium, the company secured a track access agreement to run three daily return services between Hull and London King’s Cross.

By the summer of 2000, plans were in place for Hull Trains to pioneer open access rail operations in the UK, with the new company 80% owned by GB Railways (formed to operate new open access services) and 20% by Mike Jones and John Nelson. Services started in September 2000, using three-car Class 170 Anglia Railways Turbostar trains. While the new company recruited and trained its own staff, many of those initial services were crewed by Anglia Railways drivers based at Liverpool Street.

As a presenter and journalist at BBC Radio Humberside at the time, I blew the whistle to set the first northbound train on its way on September 25 2000.

The fact that the BBC Local Radio station covering Hull and East Yorkshire chose to broadcast its entire Breakfast Show from King’s Cross that morning shows what a big deal this was for the city and the wider region. Hull Trains carried 80,000 passengers in those final few months of 2000. By way of contrast, from October to December 2023, 300,000 people used the company’s trains. That’s not to say that the Hull Trains journey has always been a smooth one. Who could have foreseen (20 years later) a global pandemic which would force the operator’s entire fleet into the sidings?

Long before that, one challenge was how to grow the business and speed up the service. The Class 170 trains were limited to 100mph and services between Hull and London typically took up to three hours, compared with the fastest time of around 1hr 50mins from King’s Cross to York, a journey which is only eight miles shorter. The timetable change of May 2005 saw Hull Trains replace the Class 170s with a fleet of four Class 222 units - to be named Pioneers, a reflection of the pioneering nature of the company.

For the first time, Hull Trains services could travel at up to 125mph, shaving around 20 minutes off the end-to-end journey time and making it easier to find paths for the trains on the East Coast Main Line. No longer would Hull Trains passengers sit just south of Grantham in the Up Slow loop at a red signal, while a couple of faster passenger trains sped by on their way to London. By now the company was operating five return weekday services, and that increased to six in the May 2005 timetable. It was also in this year that the operator carried its one millionth passenger. Behind the scenes, GB Railways was bought out in July 2003 by FirstGroup, the multi-national transport operator. Hull Trains continues to be part of First’s UK rail portfolio to this day.

Without the backing and support of the parent group, it is probably unlikely that Hull Trains on its own would have survived the various challenges thrown at it. One of those challenges came in the shape of the next class of train to be used on the route. The Class 180s, conveniently in FirstGroup livery (albeit with Great Western branding), entered service in the spring of 2008. This followed a challenging 12 months when the operator had to make do with just three trains for much of that period, after one of its Class 222 Pioneer units fell off a jack at Crofton Depot (near Wakefield), where the trains were serviced.

It would be fair to say that Hull Trains has built up a reputation of doing things differently and finding innovative solutions to problems. This was the case early in 2008, when it hired in a preserved Class 86 electric locomotive and some Mk 3 carriages to run weekend services between London and Doncaster. This freed up a Class 222 for maintenance. However, while the Class 86 operation was popular with enthusiasts, it proved less enticing for passengers who had come to rely on the through service from Hull, but who were once again having to change trains at Doncaster.

In April 2008, the Adelante Class 180s entered service with Hull Trains. These were the longest trains the company had run - five carriages, as opposed to the four-car Pioneers and the even shorter three-car Class 170s. However, the benefits of extra capacity came at a cost - and that was reliability. Having travelled extensively on Hull Trains, I can honestly say the Class 180s were comfortable trains. But I, along with many others, have been inconvenienced by their unreliability. One occasion stands out, when the 1848 London to Hull service, which was gradually falling further behind schedule owing to engine problems, was finally terminated at Retford.  We were told the plan was to stop the last train of the day, the 2030 from King’s Cross, and couple it onto the front. Along with other passengers, I watched as the second Class 180 came to our rescue, reversing gingerly into the platform at Retford and coupling onto the front of our failed train. Back on board, we felt the train struggle to leave the platform, and it became clear that the second Class 180 did not have sufficient power to haul our crowded train. It too failed, and it was the early hours of the morning before a fleet of taxis dropped the remnants of two trainloads of passengers off in Hull. At the time, most Hull Trains passengers could tell you a similar story, and the company’s reputation was taking a hit.

There were stories of people driving to Doncaster to catch a train, rather than risk being stranded by a failed Adelante unit. Ticket acceptance wasn’t always agreed with the franchised operator, and it appeared that the relationship between Hull Trains and the franchised East Coast operators (GNER, East Coast and Virgin Trains East Coast) was at times rather tense. It was the customers who were suffering, sometimes having to travel a longer distance via the Midland Main Line or on rail replacement coaches to Peterborough to pick up a suburban service. All too often, Hull Trains were forced to operate a shuttle service between Hull and Doncaster. The company went onto contingency timetables with only one or two trains available to them on some days.

Then, in October 2018, a fire in a diesel engine under one of the carriages led to a Class 180 train being evacuated at Grantham on the ECML. That left the company with no serviceable trains, and it had no option but to suspend all services. Hull Trains had hit rock bottom.

Emma Hardy, the MP for Hull West and Hessle, described the trains as “not fit for purpose”. She blamed FirstGroup, accusing them of under-investing in the Hull Trains business.

“What FirstGroup should be doing is giving us new trains quickly, not waiting until the end of next year,” she said.

FirstGroup said it was supporting Hull Trains with extra engineers, and expected the service to improve later that week. By this stage, the parent company had put in a £60 million order for five new Class 802 bi-modal trains, but that wouldn’t solve the immediate reliability problems. Louise Cheeseman was Hull Trains’ Managing Director in 2018. She recalls how serious the situation was: “We went down to no trains. My people in the business, they’re all local people. They were all concerned for their jobs - they were all hearing what was going on through social media and in the media about our business, and the rumours that were going around.

“It was awful. Members of my team were walking through a shopping centre and were being shouted at and sworn at because they had the Hull Trains uniform.”

Cheeseman says they had to remain calm and come up with a plan. She was in no doubt as to what lay behind their problems: “The ‘180’ fleet are a challenge - they’re probably the most complex trains out there to maintain.

“We had four trains and we needed three. The maths tells you that to have a small fleet of trains is always going to be a challenge. It needs a lot of skilled technicians to work on these trains to keep them going.”

While the company faced criticism from passengers and the local media, Hull Trains soldiered on with the promise of new trains by the end of 2019, but could their existing fleet keep going until then? Behind the scenes, Cheeseman and her team were working on a plan. That plan involved a 40-year-old stalwart. In January 2019, after a good deal of negotiation and paperwork, Hull Trains obtained a High Speed Train (HST) that was going off-lease at its sister company, First Great Western. Before the train could enter service and dig the company out of a hole, staff had to undergo training.

Hull Trains’ Driver Manager at the time, Steve Pugh, said it completed the safety validation with the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) in record time. There was only a limited amount of time to train crews on the HST before training was due to begin on a Class 802, and each driver would need three weeks’ training on the HST before it could enter service. The company decided to only train half of its drivers and onboard crews to save time.

Even passengers had to be briefed about the HST. Hull Trains posted advice on its website for customers who might not have been familiar with slam-door stock. An accompanying ScotRail video showed how to open a train door by opening the window, leaning out, and moving the handle - handy for a generation possibly unfamiliar with the way it used to be. The video advised: “If you’re the last passenger on the platform, please close the door behind you.”

The HST’s introduction on the route gave Hull Trains a spare train in case a Class 180 developed a fault, as well as giving engineers more time to work on the Adelante fleet. First Great Western provided Hull Trains with two HST sets. While one was in service on the ECML, the other would be taken to Bristol for maintenance. The two sets swapped over every week, so that one was always available to Hull Trains. In March 2019, training began on a Class 802 train, with the first of Hull Trains’ new fleet due to be in service by the end of that year. It took more than 600 days of training to get drivers and Onboard Managers (OBMs) ready to operate the new trains. This put extreme pressure on the small team at Hull Trains.

While the crews trained on a test train, Hull Trains’ first brand new train was being assembled and tested in Hitachi’s factory at Pistoia, in Italy. Hull Trains staff were involved in deciding what the Class 802 would look like inside and out, down to which shade of blue paint the train would have. Cheeseman says they did a lot of customer research and listened to what people had to say - even changing the flavour of crisps sold on board because customers didn’t like the one chosen by the company. For the record, it was Salt and Vinegar which proved unpopular. Hull Trains’ passengers chose plain instead!

Cheeseman says the company was aware of criticism about the seats on some of the new trains being introduced by other operators, but that the choice was limited: “When you go out and procure a train, you can only buy a train that’s available. And so, where we could make tweaks and slight changes, we did.”

Having left the factory in Italy, the first ever new train for Hull Trains made its way through the Alps and the Channel Tunnel. New trains then have to undergo four to five weeks of ‘snagging’ (checking for minor faults), but Hull Trains was in a hurry and Cheeseman asked manufacturer Hitachi if it could put on a double shift and hand the train over faster. Which it did. Just two weeks after the ‘802’ arrived in the UK, the operator was finally allowed to put the Hull Trains wrap and branding on.

The new timetable of May 2019 saw the first Class 802 in service on the Hull to London route, but it was in the colours of LNER. It had named its fleet ‘Azuma’ (meaning East in Japanese - a nod to the train’s birthplace). Hull Trains needed a name for its new trains, and it chose a name which would be only too familiar to the people of Hull - ‘Paragon’.

Hull Trains’ website explained why: “Our five trains will be named the Paragon fleet due to its standalone meaning and the significance of Paragon station, which has stood as a landmark in the centre of Hull since 1848.”

The arrival of the first shiny new Class 802 train at Hull Paragon station on November 25 2019 was a significant moment and was marked by a big launch event. The Chief Executive of Hull City Council, Matt Jukes said: “The connectivity of the city to other places around the country is vital, and the train is a lot of people’s first view of our city, so the fact that we’ve got that £60m of investment in that rolling stock… I think it’s very positive.”

Louise Cheeseman told an audience of invited guests: “This is our contribution to the economic regeneration of the city that this business is named after… we are determined to make the people of Hull and the surrounding area proud.”

It was ten days later, on December 5 2019 (an unremarkable Thursday morning), when the real moment of truth came.

There was no fanfare. There was no advanced notice. Passengers awaiting the 1033 to London were told of a platform alteration and duly made their way to Platform 7. Then, around the curve into the station, came a brand-new Class 802 train (802301) for its first trip in public service for Hull Trains. After nearly 20 years and some turbulent times, this was seen as a sign of a bright future for Hull Trains. The operator could start the new decade with optimism. However, nobody knew what the next year – 2020 - would bring…

See RAIL 1020 for part two of our special look at Hull Trains.