Northern Hub
The Northern Hub programme will improve rail travel in the North of England. It is a significant investment to stimulate economic growth in the North of England by making rail travel across the area faster and more frequent. The Northern Hub will boost the region’s economy by £4.2bn and create 20,000 to 30,000 extra jobs in the North.
It will ease the rail bottleneck around Manchester Piccadilly Station and free-up space on the network for faster, more frequent services, including:
- up to 700 extra trains per day with capacity for 44 million more people to travel by train each year
- two new fast trains per hour between Manchester Victoria and Liverpool
- six instead of four fast trains per hour between Leeds and Manchester
- faster journeys across the North:
- up to 10 minutes faster between Leeds and Manchester
- up to 10 – 15 minutes faster between Liverpool and Manchester
- a new direct service through Manchester city centre to Manchester Airport
- faster, more frequent service from Sheffield and East Midlands, Chester, Bradford, Halifax, Hull, Newcastle and the North East.
Northern Hub
This extensive programme of works includes:
- major station changes to Manchester Piccadilly and Manchester Oxford Road, including new & longer platforms and major station refurbishment
- the introduction of a new rail link between Manchester Piccadilly and Manchester Victoria, known as the Ordsall Chord
- journey time improvements on radial routes in/out of Manchester
- significant Inter-disciplinary engineering interventions to support capacity requirements for signalling, track, electrification, and Civils schemes
- introduction of a fourth platform at Manchester Airport
- benefit delivery aligned to interdependent projects:
- National Control Strategy
- National Freight Strategy
- North West Electrification
- Manchester Victoria Redevelopment
- Planned Asset Renewals schemes.
Northern Hub
The key outputs of this project were:
- faster and more frequent services to important cities across the North
- capacity for 700 more trains to run between the major towns and cities in the North every day
- a new railway link between Manchester Piccadilly and Manchester Victoria, known as the Ordsall Chord, which will provide increased capacity and reduced journey times in to Manchester and across the region
- the doubling of capacity of the trains into Trafford Park freight terminals
- £560m of targeted investment to help the North continue to thrive
- over £4bn worth of benefits to the region and potentially 20,000 to 30,000 new jobs.
Northern Hub
Client: UK Department for Transport
Location: Manchester, UK
Start date: 2009
End date: 2018
Duration: 108 months
Contract value: £560m
Services provided: Programme management, station redevelopment & renewal, whole railway upgrade