Nobody believes me when I tell them how bad TransPennine Express is

theguardian.com:

P eople in London used to think I was making it up when I told them what an ordeal it was planning a journey on TransPennine Express (TPE). It sounded so absurd. The angst began as soon as you dared to book a ticket, wondering whether the train you had chosen to get you to Manchester Airport for a flight, to Leeds for an interview or to Cleethorpes for the seaside, would actually run. The niggling feeling: maybe I should drive, just to be safe?

The night before, you needed to stay up until 10pm, when TPE would publish a list of “planned cancellations” for the following day. There were regularly 50 cancellations, sometimes 100, invariably blamed on staff shortages and sometimes the rail unions too. You’d then have to make alternative plans which might involve leaving the house before the kids woke up, booking a taxi or begging your employers to let you join by Zoom instead.

If you persisted in travelling by train, when you arrived at the station the next day, the original service you had booked would have disappeared from the departure board. It was as if it had never existed. That’s because TPE had cancelled it using what rail industry insiders call p-codes, which until very recently – and thanks in large part to the Guardian’s exposure of their abuse – were not reflected in the official cancellation statistics. Originally intended for cancellations beyond a rail operator’s control, such as after a landslide, TPE landed upon p-codes as a handy way of disguising just how appalling its service was.

I only discovered about p-coding when I wrote an opinion piece moaning about terrible northern trains, which mentioned that TPE had cancelled 5.8% of all trains in the previous 12 weeks. Someone in the know wrote in to say that