#visiting the Northumberland Line
on December 15th 2024, the date of the National Rail timetable change, i visited newcastle to go ride the newly restored and reopened Northumberland Line.
at this time, only two stations on the line have reached completion, Seaton Delaval (SEJ) and Ashington (ASL), with the rest planning to open 2025. the line operates from Newcastle, via Manors to the new stations, and is run with BR class 156s and BR class 158s. the service is half hourly, except sundays which is hourly. the intention is to run two car services. on the sunday i went all services i saw were four car. looking at Realtime Trains, this seems to have been the case the whole day, but since then only two car services have run. this makes some sense considering the increased ridership for opening day.
this rail line also has integration with the Pop card. with my Pop Blue card each single was £1 and the daily cap was £2.20 across the whole network. it would be nice to see this integration for the rest of the rail lines in the area, and hopefully GBR will bring some of this. notably, the conductor on my service said they did not yet have a way to check you had tapped in with the Pop card.
the stations are very minimal, mostly what you would expect for a small branch line. notably besides the posters, there is no Northern branding on any signs and such, similar to newly refurbished stations elsewhere on the network, like Morley in West Yorkshire. this seems to be preparation for trains running under GBR branding in the hopefully near future. they all have the standard itso reader for Northern stations, that is able to read the Pop card.
-- 17/12/24
