Connor mcloud
Player Valuation: £10m
Blackstone st and Dublin st
davek
Player Valuation: £150m
Chong was talking about stadium operations - he only mentioned transport in relation for the need to co-ordinate with the local authorities Merseyrail...
...it WASN'T a united front with Rotheram claiming it a 99% success. As said: the club have pointedly distanced themselves from making any pronouncement on the success or otherwise of the transportation of fans to the stadium.
All talk about what was agreed by the council and the club over transportation simply smashes against the rocks of the fundamental fact that this stadium should never have been handed planning permission. That's a local authority decision as I keep underlining to you. If it's built then they had to redouble their efforts to get funding to upgrade or at the very least do those "quick fixes" that you spoke of above to mitigate congestion, which they didn't do.
As for fans not complaining before the stadium was complete: fans are fans and they (rightly) assume that getting to and from the new stadium would be taken care of by people who get paid a lot of money to make those things run smoothly. To admonish them for not forensically reading every planning document and suggesting they have no basis to complain now after the event is unbelievable high handed.
Tom Hughes
Player Valuation: £15m
And...... as I keep saying to you. The CLUB'S TRANSPORT PLAN has been fully implimented. Shuttle buses, a marshalling area at Sandhills, Road closures. End of story!
If chaos ensues, the council do not gave to issue the safety certs, they may have capacity capping agreements or other agreements about funding of further infrastructure by the club. We don't know, so there is no point in speculating about circular arguments. At worst they can shut or limit Sandhills Stn to certain services only, and send the rest of the passengers to Kirkdale/Bankhall/Moorfields..... multiplying platform space. Their only responsibility is what was agreed! No admonishment at all....
davek
Player Valuation: £150m
The transport plan was the document put together by multiple stakeholders; the TWG was the steering group of those stakeholders.
To suggest Everton bear responsibility for all shortcomings on transport...well, maybe you should put a poll on this forum and see how much support you get for that barmy notion.
And you keep ducking the fundamental issue that has been pointed to a number of times: the permission granted to the planing application opened the doors up to all this and, therefore, all roads (no pun intended) lead to their door.
Tom Hughes
Player Valuation: £15m
Any responsibility is defined by what was agreed by all parties, and is fully documented! Feel free to campaign for a case of failure by the council to meet ANY of those contractual/legal responsibilities. None of which you actually mention!
You can go on forever about what you think the council should have provided. At the end of the day, it's the club's project. The transport plan was formulated by the club's transport consultants using the club's transport consultation data in conjunction with all data regarding the local transport network and any additional resources offered by the operators/agencies involved. The resultant document has been in the public domain for years. In effect, you're demanding a gold standard transport solution paid for by the city council, AFTER the fact.... when clearly that was never promised and never agreed at ANY point in the whole process, and covered on this forum for years. Literally an exercise in futility, that's over half a decade behind reality.
Of course, if you feel strongly enough, you can campaign for the council to withhold the safety-certificate or limit capacity until such infrastructure is provided!
davek
Player Valuation: £150m
No, no, no...I'm asking you whether you agree with me that the local council should have rejected this stadium application given the obvious access / egress problems that were insurmountable without a lot of money being spent on eliminating them. It's as simple as that.
As for your constant blaming of a club that sunk £750M into a stadium that's always equally been about regeneration in the north end - well, good luck with that on this or any other Everton forum.
Tom Hughes
Player Valuation: £15m
I haven't blamed ANY INDIVIDUAL party at all, that is what you're doing. In one of my first responses to you on this thread, I clearly stated that. If there is any blame, it has to be collective one, because the Transport Strategy and all funding responsibilities were negotiated, agreed and signed off by all parties before a single grain of sand was dropped into the dock. Which has nothing whatsoever to do with how much the club has committed. That would be the case even if it was a £2bn stadium with multiple ancillary developments attached. To say otherwise over 5 years afterwards, is like howling at the moon.
I mentioned the obvious shortcomings of the transport plan from the very beginning and was often labelled a negative doom-monger by many on here, and repeatedly told that the club's experts had it covered. As I said previously, without the £780m+ funding that would've come with a successful CWG bid (if Durban hadn't collapsed), and also after the massive public investment in a whole new fleet of trains, and various other station refurbishment and newbuild projects, additional public funding for rail infrastructure at BMD was probably always a long shot. That's why it was never promised, and also why all talk of 61,878 seater stadium was dropped at that time.
I have no idea if it should've been rejected or not, I'm not privvy to the modelling ourcomes/details or negotiations... maybe it should've been. However, the council would probably simply say that the club's data regarding their modelled travel plans for their surveyed fanbase demonstrated that provision was sufficient, and/or any shortfalls could be mitigated against. In anycase the plan is underpinned by 30 min walking radius to ample public transport. That is their acceptable fall-back/safety-net, which has also been the recurring view of many posters on here.
Knowsley's arse-covering safety-net was capacity-capping clauses..... which only they and the club knew about. I assume that they were more than prepared to face that PR disaster and political fall-out as long as they could balance it against the shopping mall and jobs.
davek
Player Valuation: £150m
Oh I think it's very relevant. Turn it on its head: there'd rightly be no sympathy for the club on access to this stadium if it'd have been largely paid for out of the public purse, as some other stadiums have been. It's a preposterously legalistic and hidebound notion that EFC are in any way shape or form either to blame or are partially to blame for an inadequate transport system when they've done the LCC's heavy lifting of providing the anchor for regeneration down there. In the court of public opinion this is another argument you'll never sustain.
Both LCC and KBC accepted stadium applications which were outrageously short of being acceptable.
There's no 'maybe' about it in relation to should this stadium have been handed planning permission. Anyone with two eyes in their head can see after two test events that this is a failed project as far as access and egress is concerned...just like Tesco Dome was....and should never have got past the preliminary discussion stage. Any plan that was passed that had 53,000 being reliant on Sandhills and a 30 minute walk (if you're fit enough - which many aren't) should have been crumpled up and put in the bin. You know it and I know it.
If I were to hazard a guess I think both parties may have believed or hoped that - in the intervening period between PA acceptance and stadium build completion - finally some headway would have been made on the Ten Streets development LCC had been trailing, and maybe hopes on that finally being a reality went west with Covid and geo-political convulsion. That it didn't happen is not a club issue though. Then the jockeying for blame would have begun...and I think that's just coming out now or beginning to.
All roads lead to LCC and Rotheram's office. As said, there's no 'maybe' about it.
Tom Hughes
Player Valuation: £15m
Well, as they say..... "where there's blame, there's a claim"....... and if there's "no maybe", even more so! We can all look forward to legal proceedings and LCC coughing up for a new infrastructure.
davek
Player Valuation: £150m
The Kopite freak has aways got some excuse to hand.
www.liverpoolecho.co.uk
Everton fans won't get Grand National-style trains for matches
Blues fans have asked why the same speedy service used at Aintree can't be run to Sandhills
James Patrick
Player Valuation: £8m
The extra services to Aintree are at expense of a direct service between Kirkby and Town.The Kopite freak has aways got some excuse to hand.
Everton fans won't get Grand National-style trains for matches
Blues fans have asked why the same speedy service used at Aintree can't be run to Sandhills
davek
Player Valuation: £150m
He's one chancer.
Coming up with 'answers' to questions now that he should have known years ago.
All on the hoof with this feller. He's just in that role to get the foreign visits and cash.
He has zero aptitude for anything other than being a blagger. He was probably
at laying bricks.
summerisle
The rain, it raineth every day
Looking good for the winter.He's one chancer.
Coming up with 'answers' to questions now that he should have known years ago.
All on the hoof with this feller. He's just in that role to get the foreign visits and cash.
He has zero aptitude for anything other than being a blagger. He was probably
'Unprecedented’ Merseyrail fail could reoccur without change warns report
“UNPRECEDENTED” winter failures across the Merseyrail network could happen again if changes aren’t made immediately, a new report has warned.
'Unprecedented’ Merseyrail fail could reoccur without change warns report
During a cold snap in January as snow and ice fell across Merseyside, services across the Merseyrail network were completely suspended for a number of hours, leaving commuters stranded and trying to find other ways to get to work or around the region.
As part of the inquest into what went wrong, Vernon Everitt, Greater Manchester’s transport commissioner, was asked by Metro Mayor Steve Rotheram to produce an independent assessment of the network and how issues could be fixed. In return, he delivered a 61-page report to the Liverpool City Region transport committee outlining his findings.
Mr Everitt, who has decades of experience in the rail industry, warned that if changes were not made to how the three partner organisations responsible for the network – Merseyrail, Network Rail and Liverpool City Region Combined Authority – operate the same collapse of the network could happen again later this year. He said: “You are likely to get the same outcome with the same set of circumstances.”
As part of his assessment, which was presented to the Metro Mayor on Wednesday ahead of the transport committee this afternoon, Mr Everitt made six findings and nine recommendations to the committee on how performance can be improved moving forward.
In his foreword, the commissioner described the scale of the disruption as “highly unusual” and this was in the context of 2024/25 being the first full winter period in which the new class 777 trains were operating and the first time a “relatively new” anti-icing product had been used on the network which had not been tested against snowy conditions.
He told the LDRS how the root cause of issues were icing on the third rail which provides power to the new trains. He said: “Dealing with ice on the third rail is something that is a challenge for every operator of third rail railways, they are an existence here on Merseyrail and London Underground.
“Generally, the way in which you mitigate the risk is to lay an anti-icing fluid on the third rail, which loosens the bond between ice and the rail, it doesn’t melt the ice, but what it does it makes sure that the ice doesn’t bond. Then it relies on trains then passing over that ice with their conductor shoe or with a scraper on other railways and removing the ice.”
Mr Everitt said assumptions had been made in the winter plan put together by the rail partners that the new trains would operate in a similar way in scraping the ice away. In fact, when the trains can’t draw power from the line, it cannot move and the shoe is designed in such a way to protect electrical components.
He added: “In the plan for 2024/25, there wasn’t an adequate enough shared understanding across all of the parties of that different design characteristic between the old stock and the new stock. That significant change wasn’t captured in the planning for 2024, and the focus was still on that philosophy of a morning startup and everything would be fine.”
Regarding the new anti-icing fluid, Mr Everitt said the agent had been used the year before in what he described as a “relatively mild” winter. He told the LDRS how officials had concluded it had performed well but had not exposed it to extreme weather.
He said: “That wasn’t carried through and therefore they went into 2024/25 with not only a differently designed unit, but they didn’t have a full appreciation of the best way in which to deploy the anti-icer because these things have to work in harmony to loosen the ice, sheer it off.” Mr Everitt, who sits as non-executive chair of Transport for Greater Manchester’s executive board, said as a result the service’s “window of vulnerability” moved from being a period in the morning to all day.
He added: “When the weather hit, it iced over and therefore everything started to not work while trains were in passenger service. That’s pretty unprecedented.”
At one point, some rail temperatures were recorded as -6°, which Mr Everitt described as “getting towards extreme.” He cited Merseyrail’s previous “good record” during winter but highlighted how at no point did any of the partner organisations allocate a single point of accountability.
He said: “Everybody worked diligently on their own individual elements of the plan, but there was no-one with the unambiguous responsibility of being able to piece everything together in the round.” Mr Everitt added how as a result, nobody had envisaged the whole network coming to a halt simultaneously “and therefore those plans hadn’t been tested against a wider range of scenarios.”
A failure to make good on some promises made to Mr Rotheram and the Combined Authority was also highlighted in his findings. These included how resilience would be improved, including testing, the anti-icing, and an analysis of whether heat strips being laid along the third rail might be a mitigant.
To tackle these issues, Mr Everitt outlined his key recommendations and called for January’s events to be a “line in the sand.” He said: “Let’s stop planning on the old basis.
“Get in a room together, work through. And also rehearse against a wider range of scenarios than just assuming that once you’ve got the service up running in the morning, then you’re all right. because we now know that it is not the case.
“You will never eliminate all risk of this because third rails are inherently open. You can get to the conditions where ice does form, but you need the anti-icer and the train working in harmony to minimise that risk to the lowest possible level, and you need to start work on that now.”
Mr Everitt said the Liverpool City Region should take responsibility for appointing somebody with accountability for plans moving forward. He also called on train operators to adapt the units to be able to scrape ice off the rails and apply anti-icer as they go.
He said: “You don’t have to do every one of them. There are 53 units, but there are seven of these units that can operate in battery power only, which means they don’t have to draw power from the third rail. So, if you adapted them with some sort of brush or scraper, and even enabled them to deploy anti-icing fluid themselves, which would be on top of what Network Rail put down the night before, that will make an enormous difference.”
The commissioner said if plans were to be in place for the next period of cold weather, partners “need to get going now.” He also cited the possible use of a shunt battery on the trains to help get stranded services – like one stuck at Old Roan for three hours in January – to a station to let passengers off.
He said: “I think the collective planning had become something of a routine because by and large, it had worked. In previous years it had worked and I think that all parties just continued to operate on assumptions that those big changes had fundamentally changed.
“My review is about understanding what happened and making recommendations to minimise the chances of it happening again, so that’s what I’ve done. It’s not about blame apportionment, but it is about a collective team effort to make sure that this doesn’t happen again or we minimise the risk of it happening again.”
Mr Everitt also underlined the seriousness of the challenges ahead if changes were not made. He said: It could happen again.
“If we had a repeat of it, it would happen today, so action needs to be taken now and I say in my report that work needs to start immediately. There certainly needs to be a fully comprehensive plan in place by June for how all this stuff gets implemented. Then there needs to be formal program management to make sure it gets done.”
Responding to Mr Everitt’s findings, Mr Rotheram said: “Well, it’s a very comprehensive report and it stems from the fact that on January 9 this year, we let passengers down and I said I wanted to learn the lessons of what had happened so that we can prevent those mistakes happening again and that’s what Vernon has provided for us. It’s a really good report and all of the recommendations are things that we can implement.
Mr Rotheram said he couldn’t “see how anybody can refute the evidence that’s being presented” and not act. He admitted there had been communication issues with Merseyrail and highlighted how the rail infrastructure itself is in the purview of Network Rail.
He added: “Then there are issues that we need to contend with such as ensuring that when people promise us that they’re going to do something, that we already address those shortfalls to ensure that they don’t happen again. That’s what this report does for us.
“It codifies all of the issues and then it puts a name against who that issue is the responsibility of, and now we need to get on and ensure that this doesn’t happen again.”
The Metro Mayor said plans on how to ensure the network can cope in winter will be made public and said all partners were now “willing” to address the issues. He said: “Merseyrail, for instance, are really interested in working more collaboratively with us than at any stage that I can remember.
“They’re very keen on putting their house in order. The Network Rail stuff is a bit of a frustration because we have very little sway over what happens at a national level and their funding is a national pot and what I’ve continually said to them is that when you don’t maintain something, it costs you more in the end and we’ve seen that just recently with some of the breakdowns that we’ve had on the infrastructure, which of course trained delays, and of course, that frustration to passengers.
“So they really do need to step up to the mark, but I do think that this report is quite salutary and they’ll have to do something more than they’ve currently done to ensure that passengers aren’t inconvenienced like they were on January 9.”
In a joint statement, Merseyrail, Stadler and Network Rail said: “We welcome the findings of the review of the disruption on the 9th January 2025. As the report makes clear, Merseyrail is a well-managed and high performing network.
“It’s right therefore that when things don’t go to plan that we review and learn from them. Merseyrail, Network Rail and Stadler are committed to working closely with the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority, to ensure that the plan for winter resilience is the best it can possibly be.”
davek
Player Valuation: £150m
It's always some other organisation's fault. They're always in charge and his office cant effect matters.Looking good for the winter.
'Unprecedented’ Merseyrail fail could reoccur without change warns report
“UNPRECEDENTED” winter failures across the Merseyrail network could happen again if changes aren’t made immediately, a new report has warned.www.wirralglobe.co.uk
'Unprecedented’ Merseyrail fail could reoccur without change warns report
During a cold snap in January as snow and ice fell across Merseyside, services across the Merseyrail network were completely suspended for a number of hours, leaving commuters stranded and trying to find other ways to get to work or around the region.
As part of the inquest into what went wrong, Vernon Everitt, Greater Manchester’s transport commissioner, was asked by Metro Mayor Steve Rotheram to produce an independent assessment of the network and how issues could be fixed. In return, he delivered a 61-page report to the Liverpool City Region transport committee outlining his findings.
Mr Everitt, who has decades of experience in the rail industry, warned that if changes were not made to how the three partner organisations responsible for the network – Merseyrail, Network Rail and Liverpool City Region Combined Authority – operate the same collapse of the network could happen again later this year. He said: “You are likely to get the same outcome with the same set of circumstances.”
As part of his assessment, which was presented to the Metro Mayor on Wednesday ahead of the transport committee this afternoon, Mr Everitt made six findings and nine recommendations to the committee on how performance can be improved moving forward.
In his foreword, the commissioner described the scale of the disruption as “highly unusual” and this was in the context of 2024/25 being the first full winter period in which the new class 777 trains were operating and the first time a “relatively new” anti-icing product had been used on the network which had not been tested against snowy conditions.
He told the LDRS how the root cause of issues were icing on the third rail which provides power to the new trains. He said: “Dealing with ice on the third rail is something that is a challenge for every operator of third rail railways, they are an existence here on Merseyrail and London Underground.
“Generally, the way in which you mitigate the risk is to lay an anti-icing fluid on the third rail, which loosens the bond between ice and the rail, it doesn’t melt the ice, but what it does it makes sure that the ice doesn’t bond. Then it relies on trains then passing over that ice with their conductor shoe or with a scraper on other railways and removing the ice.”
Mr Everitt said assumptions had been made in the winter plan put together by the rail partners that the new trains would operate in a similar way in scraping the ice away. In fact, when the trains can’t draw power from the line, it cannot move and the shoe is designed in such a way to protect electrical components.
He added: “In the plan for 2024/25, there wasn’t an adequate enough shared understanding across all of the parties of that different design characteristic between the old stock and the new stock. That significant change wasn’t captured in the planning for 2024, and the focus was still on that philosophy of a morning startup and everything would be fine.”
Regarding the new anti-icing fluid, Mr Everitt said the agent had been used the year before in what he described as a “relatively mild” winter. He told the LDRS how officials had concluded it had performed well but had not exposed it to extreme weather.
He said: “That wasn’t carried through and therefore they went into 2024/25 with not only a differently designed unit, but they didn’t have a full appreciation of the best way in which to deploy the anti-icer because these things have to work in harmony to loosen the ice, sheer it off.” Mr Everitt, who sits as non-executive chair of Transport for Greater Manchester’s executive board, said as a result the service’s “window of vulnerability” moved from being a period in the morning to all day.
He added: “When the weather hit, it iced over and therefore everything started to not work while trains were in passenger service. That’s pretty unprecedented.”
At one point, some rail temperatures were recorded as -6°, which Mr Everitt described as “getting towards extreme.” He cited Merseyrail’s previous “good record” during winter but highlighted how at no point did any of the partner organisations allocate a single point of accountability.
He said: “Everybody worked diligently on their own individual elements of the plan, but there was no-one with the unambiguous responsibility of being able to piece everything together in the round.” Mr Everitt added how as a result, nobody had envisaged the whole network coming to a halt simultaneously “and therefore those plans hadn’t been tested against a wider range of scenarios.”
A failure to make good on some promises made to Mr Rotheram and the Combined Authority was also highlighted in his findings. These included how resilience would be improved, including testing, the anti-icing, and an analysis of whether heat strips being laid along the third rail might be a mitigant.
To tackle these issues, Mr Everitt outlined his key recommendations and called for January’s events to be a “line in the sand.” He said: “Let’s stop planning on the old basis.
“Get in a room together, work through. And also rehearse against a wider range of scenarios than just assuming that once you’ve got the service up running in the morning, then you’re all right. because we now know that it is not the case.
“You will never eliminate all risk of this because third rails are inherently open. You can get to the conditions where ice does form, but you need the anti-icer and the train working in harmony to minimise that risk to the lowest possible level, and you need to start work on that now.”
Mr Everitt said the Liverpool City Region should take responsibility for appointing somebody with accountability for plans moving forward. He also called on train operators to adapt the units to be able to scrape ice off the rails and apply anti-icer as they go.
He said: “You don’t have to do every one of them. There are 53 units, but there are seven of these units that can operate in battery power only, which means they don’t have to draw power from the third rail. So, if you adapted them with some sort of brush or scraper, and even enabled them to deploy anti-icing fluid themselves, which would be on top of what Network Rail put down the night before, that will make an enormous difference.”
The commissioner said if plans were to be in place for the next period of cold weather, partners “need to get going now.” He also cited the possible use of a shunt battery on the trains to help get stranded services – like one stuck at Old Roan for three hours in January – to a station to let passengers off.
He said: “I think the collective planning had become something of a routine because by and large, it had worked. In previous years it had worked and I think that all parties just continued to operate on assumptions that those big changes had fundamentally changed.
“My review is about understanding what happened and making recommendations to minimise the chances of it happening again, so that’s what I’ve done. It’s not about blame apportionment, but it is about a collective team effort to make sure that this doesn’t happen again or we minimise the risk of it happening again.”
Mr Everitt also underlined the seriousness of the challenges ahead if changes were not made. He said: It could happen again.
“If we had a repeat of it, it would happen today, so action needs to be taken now and I say in my report that work needs to start immediately. There certainly needs to be a fully comprehensive plan in place by June for how all this stuff gets implemented. Then there needs to be formal program management to make sure it gets done.”
Responding to Mr Everitt’s findings, Mr Rotheram said: “Well, it’s a very comprehensive report and it stems from the fact that on January 9 this year, we let passengers down and I said I wanted to learn the lessons of what had happened so that we can prevent those mistakes happening again and that’s what Vernon has provided for us. It’s a really good report and all of the recommendations are things that we can implement.
Mr Rotheram said he couldn’t “see how anybody can refute the evidence that’s being presented” and not act. He admitted there had been communication issues with Merseyrail and highlighted how the rail infrastructure itself is in the purview of Network Rail.
He added: “Then there are issues that we need to contend with such as ensuring that when people promise us that they’re going to do something, that we already address those shortfalls to ensure that they don’t happen again. That’s what this report does for us.
“It codifies all of the issues and then it puts a name against who that issue is the responsibility of, and now we need to get on and ensure that this doesn’t happen again.”
The Metro Mayor said plans on how to ensure the network can cope in winter will be made public and said all partners were now “willing” to address the issues. He said: “Merseyrail, for instance, are really interested in working more collaboratively with us than at any stage that I can remember.
“They’re very keen on putting their house in order. The Network Rail stuff is a bit of a frustration because we have very little sway over what happens at a national level and their funding is a national pot and what I’ve continually said to them is that when you don’t maintain something, it costs you more in the end and we’ve seen that just recently with some of the breakdowns that we’ve had on the infrastructure, which of course trained delays, and of course, that frustration to passengers.
“So they really do need to step up to the mark, but I do think that this report is quite salutary and they’ll have to do something more than they’ve currently done to ensure that passengers aren’t inconvenienced like they were on January 9.”
In a joint statement, Merseyrail, Stadler and Network Rail said: “We welcome the findings of the review of the disruption on the 9th January 2025. As the report makes clear, Merseyrail is a well-managed and high performing network.
“It’s right therefore that when things don’t go to plan that we review and learn from them. Merseyrail, Network Rail and Stadler are committed to working closely with the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority, to ensure that the plan for winter resilience is the best it can possibly be.”
Mr Rotheram said he couldn’t “see how anybody can refute the evidence that’s being presented” and not act. He admitted there had been communication issues with Merseyrail and highlighted how the rail infrastructure itself is in the purview of Network Rail.
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