Dear Secretary of State,

In May 2018 timetable changes plunged the North’s rail service into chaos.

Since then, travelling by train in the North of England has become a nightmare for passengers forced to contend with unending delays, cancellations and overcrowding on services operated by Northern.

This has cost our economy more than £38m, but there has been a human cost too. People have lost their jobs because they couldn’t get to work on time, missed hospital appointments or been unable to visit friends and family – simply because the train never turned up.

18 months on there is little sign of improvement with less than half of Northern services arriving on time between October and November and 1440 fewer trains now running between Liverpool and Manchester.

And to make things even worse passengers are now paying more for a worse service, with ticket prices 45% higher than at the start of the decade.

We can’t go on like this.

Northern are not fit to run our trains – we deserve better than this second-class service.

As passengers from across the North we say “enough is enough” and we are demanding that you strip Northern of its franchise without any further delay.