Comment: A tough task to tie in train timings on the busy East Coast

Philip Haigh studies the revised East Coast Main Line timetable that will go live in December 2025.

Whenever a new timetable appears, it’s natural to check your train - whether that’s the one taking you to work or back from town after a weekly night out.

When LNER dropped the long-awaited December 2025 timetable (RAIL 1026), I did just that.

Let’s look at what happens to today’s weekday 0702 from York to London King’s Cross, which arrives in Cubitt’s trainshed at 0908.

From December 2025, it becomes the 0700, which arrives at 0917. With the same calling pattern of just Peterborough, it will take 11 minutes longer.

OK - I wasn’t expecting a longer journey time from a timetable that’s been widely trailed as an improvement.

Then I turned to a train I never catch, but which is today’s fastest southbound service. It’s the flyer that leaves Edinburgh at 0540, calls only at Newcastle, and arrives in London dead on four hours, at 0940.

In future, it will roll from ‘Auld Reekie’ at 0537 and arrive in London at 0950, with a journey time of 4hrs 13mins. So, that’s another service taking longer, although it will call at York as well as Newcastle.

Omitting York, but still passing slowly through its station, was the price to pay for that headline journey time. Calling there makes more sense, even if it’s just eight minutes before another southbound fastish service calling only at Retford.

So far, so not so good. But that’s not fair. Producing December 2025’s timetable has proved very difficult, as shown by previous aborted attempts.

Network Rail’s East Coast Main Line is busy and carries a wide variety of traffic.

It hosts LNER services along its length. Govia Thameslink Railway’s commuter and suburban services share the southern end of the line, while the northern end must be shared with TransPennine Express and CrossCountry.

There’s freight too, as well as other operators such as Northern, East Midlands Railways and ScotRail to be weaved into the overall timetable. They include trains for North Berwick, Tweedbank, Ashington and EMR’s long-distance Norwich-Liverpool trains that use the ECML between Peterborough and Grantham.

In addition, the ECML is open access territory, with Hull Trains, Lumo and Grand Central.

LNER took the lead in publishing the timetable, doing so at 1718 on the last Wednesday before people disappeared for Christmas.

For such a major piece of work, this was a bizarrely low-key unveiling - and one that gave only LNER a voice. It might have caveated Managing Director David Horne’s quotation to say he was “speaking on behalf of the industry”, but it’s hard to believe his opposite numbers at other train operators would not have wanted to comment.

There followed website links to 59 individual timetable booklets that totalled 1,589 pages.

Before taking a closer look at main line services, it’s worth revisiting today’s timetable.

From King’s Cross, LNER broadly offers five departures every hour. At xx00 and xx30, trains leave for Edinburgh, with the on-the-hour departure running fast to York in around 1hr 51mins. Leeds services leave at xx03 and xx33, taking just under two hours, with some extending to Harrogate, Skipton or Bradford. Then there’s an xx06 stopper for either York or Lincoln.

From December 2025, LNER’s offering becomes six trains per hour. The pattern will mostly be xx03 to Edinburgh, xx10 to Leeds, xx30 to Edinburgh, xx33 to Newcastle, xx40 to Harrogate or Bradford Forster Square (both via Leeds), and xx47 to Lincoln or York.

Those xx30s provide Edinburgh’s fast service, typically reaching York in 1hr 46mins, Newcastle in 2hrs 39mins, and Edinburgh in 4hrs 8mins. That compares with today’s faster times of around 1hr 51mins, 2hrs 52mins and 4hrs 22mins respectively.

The xx03 services become Edinburgh’s semi-fasts, and they include the 1003 to Aberdeen and 1203 to Inverness. Despite adding Peterborough, Newark and Doncaster to their stopping pattern, December 2025’s timetable shaves a couple of minutes from both overall journeys.

That’s likely testament to the better acceleration of LNER’s bi-mode Class 800 units that run under electric power south of Edinburgh, when compared with the diesel High Speed Trains that powered Inverness and Aberdeen services until 2019. Unlocking this improvement was one of the reasons for rewriting the ECML timetable.

Taking most of LNER’s once coveted xx00 King’s Cross departures are open access operators.

Grand Central will leave for Sunderland via Hartlepool at 0800, 1100, 1300, 1500 and 1700, while Hull Trains heads for its namesake city at 1200 and 1400.

LNER keeps the 1600 path for Aberdeen (arriving at 2310, which is one minute longer than today’s journey), plus the 1800 and 1900 departures for Edinburgh.

In turn, this gives over the 1803 departure to a Skipton train that curiously doesn’t include times for Leeds, while the 1904 departure takes Hull Trains to Beverley. Finally, 2000 has GC heading for Bradford Interchange.

Overall, Grand Central has six weekday departures for Sunderland and four for Bradford Interchange, Lumo has five for Edinburgh and one for Newcastle, while Hull Trains has eight, two of which continue to Beverley.

Middlesbrough has a single train each way, courtesy of LNER, heading south from Teesside at 0732 (arriving King’s Cross 1039) and returning at 1845 to arrive back at 2147.

A large part of the foundation in developing this new ECML timetable surrounded the question of where to send trains. This was particularly acute in northern England, where politicians were keener to see more trains between Newcastle and Manchester than between Newcastle and London, which they argued was already served well.

Meanwhile, the past decade has seen much investment in infrastructure at the ECML’s southern end, with schemes such as the remodelling of King’s Cross that opened another approach line, a flyover for northbound GTR services at Hitchin, and a dive-under just north of Peterborough for freight pushed off the ECML and onto the slower route to Doncaster via Lincoln.

For now, the ECML prescription is an extra London-Newcastle service. But the pressure for Manchester will only increase when Network Rail completes its Transpennine Route Upgrade in the early 2030s. By this time, Darlington will boast extra platforms, while York should have a third approach track from the north to segregate Harrogate local services.

This means that from December 2025, we will continue to see TransPennine Express running four long-distance services through Leeds every hour.

Heading west, they leave Leeds at xx00 (Hull-Liverpool Lime Street), xx15 (Scarborough-Manchester Victoria), xx30 Newcastle-Liverpool Lime Street), and xx45 (Redcar-Manchester Airport). The same station pairs have eastbound trains departing Leeds at xx13 for Redcar, xx27 for Hull, xx43 for Scarborough, and xx50 for Newcastle.

Manchester Piccadilly receives an hourly TPE stopper from York (leaving at roughly xx58) via Wakefield Kirkgate to arrive at xx39.

The timetable continues recent TPE practice of giving Newcastle no direct services to Manchester Airport, and from a Yorkshire and North East England perspective it makes woeful use of Ordsall Chord, which Network Rail built in 2017 for £85 million (£111m in today’s money).

LNER reckons the new timetable adds over 16,000 seats to its trains every day. That gives more scope to tempt people out of cars and onto trains. It boasts of better connectivity and better local services.

However, there are inevitably losers from such major changes.

In Northumberland, CrossCountry’s 0704 Edinburgh-Plymouth becomes the 0705 and no longer calls at Alnmouth at 0810, where today it provides a useful service for people working in Newcastle. From December 2025, Alnmouth’s southbound workers will need to catch the 0716 or 0830, with the latter timed too late for most office hours.

Over the border, there’s a mixed picture for the new stations at Reston and East Linton. The former has a TPE train every two hours to take passengers into Edinburgh. The latter also has ScotRail’s Dunbar services, but northbound morning times of 0651, 0701, 0746, 0842, 1041, 1100, 1242 and 1257 both bunches trains and leaves long gaps.

This is the result of mixing long-distance, high-speed services with local trains making more stops. It’s an age-old challenge for timetablers and illustrates the compromises that come with constructing schedules under pressure to squeeze in more trains.

The other challenge comes in making sure a timetable is reliable and drives punctuality. Here, memories of 2018 loom large, when timetables for Thameslink and Northern proved impossible to deliver, leading to many complaints.

So, all eyes will be on December 2025 to see how the East Coast Main Line’s new timetable actually delivers. I wish it well.