Nearly half of Bolton Station's Sunday trains cancelled

A stark 42 per cent of the town’s main station’s Sunday services were cancelled over the last six months, according to Ontimetrains as of October 14.

This comes as operator, Northern, issued a ‘do not travel’ warning for the sixth Sunday in a row last week (October 13).

Bolton is the 168th busiest railway station in the country with more than 8,000 passengers passing through it daily.

Its Sunday performance in the last six months ranks it as the third ‘most unreliable’ station, out of the UK’s 500 busiest, to travel from on the backend of a weekend.

On the most recent Sunday, October 13, the majority (51 per cent) of trains were cancelled and only 19 per cent were on time.

Bolton Labour councillor for Queens Park and Central, Linda Thomas, said: “It’s the same story of them not really delivering for the people of Bolton.

“I’ve said so many things in the past, we’ve got overcrowded trains as well.

“I just hope that now we have a new transport minister that stations like Bolton will be taken seriously.

“The train is one of the only ways to get into Manchester and we have so much congestion on our roads.

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“When I used to travel into Manchester to meet Andy Burnham when I was council leader, I used to have to just trust a train would get me there or drive.

“It’s horrendous, in order for the town to thrive we need good transport links; we’ve got congested roads, no trams and very poor trains.”

A spokesperson for Northern said: “Our customers have experienced higher levels of cancellations in recent weeks and for that we are sorry.

 “The underlying reason for services being cancelled remains traincrew availability – and the root causes of that are high levels of employee sickness and Sundays being contractually outside of the working week.”