Merseyside Tornado - 2nd October 2010

LNER A1 Pacific 60163 'Tornado' hauls HF Railtours 'Merseysdie Tornado' on Saturday 2nd October.

The route is steam hauled throughout, and runs from;

Liverpool South Parkway to Runcorn, Crewe, Stafford, Lichfield Trent Valley & London Euston, and returns via the same route.

 

This tour has now sadly been canceled and re-scheduled for May 2011. I Believe this was due to low bookings.
From the HF Website:
"It is with great regret that we have had to postpone THE MERSEYSIDE TORNADO on Saturday October 2nd to Tuesday May 24th 2011. Passengers who wish, may transfer their booking to THE CALEDONIAN TORNADO on November 3rd by contacting the office on 01453 835414"
Lets hope HF rail tours up their advertising budget and make a go of this.

 

The cancellation does not surprise me. Marketing for this tour was very late in the day and on an already busy weekend, Royal Scot etc. HF need to plan further ahead, and rescheduling to May 2011 is a good sign of that. We will book this tour.

 

Starting the tour from Lime St and not some little shack in the suburbs may have helped.

 

The operator told me the reason for starting from Southparkway was network rail would not guarantee access to Lime street with a 13 coach train.

 

That little shack is some station - very modern, clean and friendly station staff too. Also it costed over (I understand) £30 million to totally rebuild the station which incorporated the old Allerton Station and the nearby Garston Station that served the Merseyrail 3rd rail network. It has 6 platforms in total, a bus interchange and excellent parking facilities. In fact I can understand why the "tour" would start & finish there.

By the way, the Google image is way out of date - the station is not even finish on that image as it opened on 11 June 2006. The large building at top of image next to station is a housing estate now.

 

Very wise that HF Railtours have re-scheduled this tour for next year. Gives them more time to publise & market it.

 

Lime Street is limited in that there are only a couple of platforms now that are long enough for big trains, than these have to to cope with the regular virgin trains and the TPE / London Midland, East Midland trains that run out of them.

LSP is a nice looking station, but on the mainline part of it, it had problem that nothing stopped there. The virgin trains and except for the local services, the Manchester trains all missed it, giving the impression of a £30m folly. a station kept nice because nobody uses it.

Would have been nice to Tornado it start from merseyside, it doesn't visit the big NW stations enough

 

How about rescheduling the start from Preston/Wigan. Ample platform space and readily accessible for all in the NW and beyond. LSP is not the easiest station to get to by rail compared to Lime Street, so if the latter is not possible an alternative main line station surely makes sense. How many people looked at the number of changes needed to get to and from LSP and thought "not worth it?" Tour times mean that good access to and from the origin is a crucial consideration.