Northern Trains + TransPennine Express : Shipley to Huddersfield

My rail journey today was from Shipley to Huddersfield, which isn’t an expensive one, coming in at £6.50 for the two services, a Northern Rail from Shipley to Leeds and a TransPennine Express from Leeds to Huddersfield.

It takes a little bit of working out to find the appropriate platform at Shipley railway station.

Wikipedia tells me that there are only two triangular railway stations left in the country, this one and Earlestown on Merseyside. I’m not entirely sure how interesting a fact that is, but there we go.

That’s how the situation evolved.

A handy little waiting room.

The Northern train which had come from Skipton, with Shipley being the final stop before Leeds. This is a horrible train (or the interior, the actual train is fine), the seating isn’t large enough, but more about that another time when I get around to writing about when I went from Leicester to Bradford (when I took photos). It’s really not a good look for a rail company, and the Government managed Northern Trains (no longer Northern Rail, just to confuse things) would do well to just take half the seats out and dump them in a heap somewhere, as a large number of seats are unuseable with the current set-up. Anyway, I digress and it didn’t much matter as I found a seat at the end of the carriage.

Here we are in Leeds.

There’s the TransPennine Express service from Leeds to Manchester, which was operating at well over its seating capacity, meaning standing room only. As the journey from Leeds to Huddersfield is only 17 minutes, I decided just to stand near to the end of the carriage, but I felt sorry for those unable to be seated who were going all the way to Manchester. There was a friendly guy who was passing around sweets (which were sealed) to customers in his vicinity, which I don’t think was a mass poisoning exercise (can’t be too careful). I hope not anyway, I had a Wispa.

And safely into Huddersfield, with hoards more people trying to get on (mostly not in the photo). This is clearly a heavily congested route, I’m not sure if there are usually this many problems with a lack of seating. Customers would have got away without paying for a ticket though on this route, there were no ticket checks and there are no barriers at Shipley and the barriers at Huddersfield weren’t in operation.

The exterior of Huddersfield railway station, and a statue of the former Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

As for this journey, convenient and on-time as it was, it’s not an ideal set-up from the rail companies who seem to be struggling to deal with the number of passengers wanting to use their services. Time perhaps for the Government to speed up more investment in the rail network to get more services running. Anyway, I digress….