Next stop, 2023: rail trends and predictions for the coming year

Commenting on these trends, Edward explains, “While Friday-Monday long-distance services and increasingly full, urban and commuter services are empty, mid-week, this flips, with urban trains too full. The seven-day timetable of five and two no longer works.”

Adding, “2023 will see increased challenge for customer groups, and greater recognition from the government of a need to alter this balance, with a more dynamic solution required, both in the timetable itself, and the configuration of trains that serve that timetable.”

He goes on to say: “The move to a dynamic timetable not yet enabled by a fully ‘digital railway’ will, nonetheless, begin, and with it a new movement of drivers between operators (enabled by the transition to a more government-controlled rail system through rail reform) to help that to happen.”

Sally predicts that, “The legacy of Covid-19 remains, from the Great Resignation to quiet quitting and current industrial action. For a long time, transport has focused on the infrastructure needed to provide transport services and recent months have highlighted the importance of the people operating and maintaining it.”

She adds that: “There will be a call for greater investment in people, both maintaining the engagement of those already servicing our transport sector and attracting new people, skills and ways of people into it.”