Castlefield corridor

The Castlefield Corridor from Manchester Piccadilly station. 40 million passengers travel through Piccadilly, Oxford Road and Deansgate in Manchester city centre on only one track per-direction.

Castlefield corridor
Legend
To Salford Crescent
To Manchester Victoria Manchester Metrolink
To Eccles
To Trafford Park
Deansgate Manchester Metrolink
Manchester Oxford Road
Manchester Piccadilly Manchester Metrolink
To Mauldeth Road
To Levenshulme
To Ardwick

The Castlefield corridor (also known as the Deansgate corridor[1][2]) is a railway corridor between Castlefield junction and Fairfield Street junction in Greater Manchester, England. The corridor forms the eastern end of the southerly Liverpool–Manchester line.

The route is recognised as a significant bottleneck, magnified further by the opening of the Ordsall Chord in 2017 and timetable change in May 2018 which increased the number of services through Manchester city centre from 12 to 15 trains per hour.[3] This uplift in services had a detrimental impact on punctuality and reliability, ultimately playing a major factor in the failure of the Arriva Rail North franchise in 2020. As of August 2021, 12 trains per hour pass through the Castlefield corridor.

  1. ^ "Grayling seeks Piccadilly solution". Modern Railways. 25 October 2018. Retrieved 17 March 2021.
  2. ^ "The Long History and Exciting Future of Railway Systems Thinking". Rail Engineer. 16 October 2020. Retrieved 17 March 2021.
  3. ^ "Castlefield Corridor Congested Infrastructure" (PDF). Network Rail. February 2021. Retrieved 4 August 2021.