It was easy to scoff when in 2014 George Osborne unveiled his vision for a “northern powerhouse”. When the government was simultaneously shredding local services in the region, many here suspected it might turn out to be a false dawn.

Yet the principle that underpinned his thinking was sound. The north desperately needed a functioning infrastructure, as well as someone to knock heads together in Whitehall to get it moving. For the Conservatives it made sense, too: perhaps this could finally detoxify their northern brand.

Yet as we approach the fourth anniversary of his flagship policy’s announcement, Osborne is now safely ensconced back in the capital. In his northern promised land, thousands upon thousands of people are unable to get trains in or out of Manchester, Liverpool, and myriad other towns and cities that were supposed to fire his powerhouse. The train operator Northern rail has been cancelling so many trains each day that an app, Northern Fail, has enterprisingly sprung up to help out northerners unable to make the most basic of journeys.

The meltdown being experienced by passengers seems, in comparison to the chaos experienced by Southern or Thameslink commuters, to have gone largely unnoticed by opinion-formers in London.

But for journalists here, the fiasco is impossible to ignore. Our Twitter feeds are as packed as a Manchester Piccadilly platform with desperate cries of fury from people trying to travel even the shortest of distances.

Like the man who literally moved jobs a few weeks ago because he couldn’t reliably get to work on the train any more, even before things spiralled into further chaos. Or the woman who expressed disbelief this morning on finding every commuter train for nearly three hours from Gatley to Manchester – just an eight-mile journey – had been cancelled. Or the friend of mine who tried to do his usual trip to see his partner last Friday evening and found timetable changes had scrapped his normal train, then, after hanging around Manchester Piccadilly station for a couple of hours, discovered every other train had been cancelled too and so gave up and went home.

It’s probably safe to say most people here are not all that bothered where the specific fault lies for the current chaos. While transport secretary Chris Grayling points the finger at Network Rail for its delayed electrification programme, local politicians are more inclined to believe the fault lies with the operator.

Ultimately, however, the buck stops with a government that just four years ago made great, sweeping promises to the north of a historic economic rebalance in language that frequently evoked the industrial heritage of the rail network’s golden Victorian age. “Here are the hard economic facts,” said Osborne in his northern powerhouse speech at Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry in June 2014. “In the 19th and 20th centuries, a factory would be located where you could find raw materials, power, and cheap labour. Today, in a services-based economy, what investors are looking for is not a river to dam, but access to a deep pool of human capital.”

Much of that human capital is currently stuck on a platform.

But if that “hard economic fact” can’t be felt in Westminster, here’s a hard political one: the Conservatives did not win a majority last summer. They did not, for example, win Bolton North East, where Theresa May launched her campaign a year ago, and commuters are now even more crippled by rail delays than they were then.

A significant proportion of the northern powerhouse’s population are spending their time staring at a cancellation board.

And while they may not be able to catch a train, they have plenty of time to think about how they might vote.

• Jennifer Williams is social affairs editor of the Manchester Evening News