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Fares, stations and new routes - how public ownership of trains will change travelling on Merseyside

Merseyrail services are to be renamed and owned by the public in two years' time

[Merseyrail train passing through a level crossing]

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Huge changes are coming for Merseyrail(Image: Andrew Teebay)

Public ownership of Merseysides rail network will mean ticket pricing will be set for the benefit of passengers rather than shareholder, according to the man spearheading the project. Trains across the Liverpool City Region will be brought back in public control in 2028, allowing decisions to be made on services at a local level by the the city regions combined authority (CA).

Metro Mayor Steve Rotheram told the ECHO how the new system will work for passengers, and his ambitions to grow the existing network far beyond its current boundaries. The public ownership of the Merseyrail network would work alongside the move to bring buses back in-house, which will begin from September 2026.

Mr Rotheram said: It goes even a step further than the franchise model with the buses because its public ownership of everything. The trains are really, really good but the infrastructure has been neglected for decades, so its the infrastructure were trying to improve alongside taking things back.

Alongside this, the Metro Mayor said, would be the ability to set fares for the benefit of passengers, rather than private shareholders. He added: What youll have is services going to other areas.

Its an ambition that, because we can go off the live third rail, that we can run to some of the areas that currently we cant serve because previously it needed that live third rail able to get there.

Well have ownership of the trains, theyll be ours, Metro rail, as it will become, that means that we can decide and bid in to run services elsewhere, whereas theres that had to be Merseyrail on our behalf before.

In 2023, after something of a delay, a fleet of 500m new stock eventually rolled out onto the soon to be publicly owned rails. The Mayor admitted this wasnt without issues but said it was an integral part of rewiring transport across the boroughs.

He said: There were teething troubles early doors and its because we didnt just buy bog standard trains. We bought level boarding because were building a network where it will be the most accessible public transport network in the country by the end of this decade. The next one to us will be at least a decade behind.

Mr Rotheram said taking the services back in house would give the combined authority the ability to set fares, like on the publicly owned buses.

He said: The other thing that Ive introduced, which is smart ticketing, will be part of the same system, so the buses and the trains and the ferry and the rapid transit will be just part of the same thing.

We want people to be able to do their whole journey on public transport because not every train goes to every part of the city region. The reason that the train infrastructure is so important to us, is it takes a lot of the heavy lifting.

Eight hundred people on a train, especially on a matchday, whereas on a bus, I think the most you can get on is 72 or 73 or something like that, so you need a lot of buses.

[Steve Rotheram,Metro Mayor of the Liverpool City Region,with the new Merseyrail train at Kirkby Station]

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Steve Rotheram,Metro Mayor of the Liverpool City Region,with the new Merseyrail train at Kirkby Station(Image: Andrew Teebay Liverpool Echo)

I think we need to be slightly more ambitious than accepting what weve had to date, because London would never have accepted that; the fragmentation, the expense.

With the adoption of the publicly owned model, Mr Rotheram said he wanted public transport in the Liverpool City Region to be the mode of choice for commuters, rather than the car, as well as making our system the envy of the rest of the UK.

He said: I want to get the rail system so that we dont necessarily need to have a timetable, so that shows you the height of the ambition.

London have come and had a look to see what were doing because of our new ticket barriers. Thats what I want, everybody else is looking at us. I genuinely get people saying London has had this, why havent we got it?

Its because weve never had devolution, weve never had a pot of money for ourselves to decide on how we spend it. Westminster was saying, this is what you get.

The next stage of the devolution plan will be to bring stations back into public control, with the majority owned and maintained by Network Rail.

Mr Rotheram said: As we take the stations back, Ive got a pot of money that is consummate with what the requirements to upgrade them is, and well do that.

[Commuters aboard one of the new Merseyrail trains]

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Commuters aboard one of the new Merseyrail trains(Image: Andrew Teebay Liverpool Echo)

If weve got a system and more people are using it, its not now going to shareholders. So thats a surplus for us, its not brain surgery is it? Weve now got a proposal and its been more than 12 months that weve been working on this with Network Rail.

At the end of those deliberations, well announce how many because we cant take them all back. We dont want to take them into our ownership but then they continue to deteriorate.

One issue that is proving more difficult to amend is the ongoing problems at Cressington station. Services were put back during last weeks Open golf championship owing to issues with beacons on the line at the south Liverpool stop.

Mr Rotheram said he sympathised with passengers and wanted Network Rail to fix the issue faster. He said: What were suggesting is that we want our trains to run through and be able to stop somewhere where the signal is, dont open these doors but passengers can just move through.

That happens on a lot of rail systems, so it wasnt asking for them to invent this new process and what frustrates me is that this is Network Rail and others and they dont seem to be able to get the thing to work.

Its not the first time its ever done it. The poor people in Cressington, for those four days, have 40 minutes services. I want to go the other way, I want to reduce the gap between services, Im ambitious and Ive spoken to Network Rail and weve got some technical stuff on this, but I think that we can squeeze those journeys.

The frequency that we run trains, I think we can squeeze that. Id love to get in the next few years down to somewhere where if you miss a train, then itd only be if you literally just miss one, theres another one in 10 minutes or something like that.

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