Parliamentary train

A Parliamentary train or Parly (also referred to as a ghost train) is, nowadays, a British English term for a train that operates a Parliamentary service - that is to say a token service to a given station, thus maintaining a legal fiction that either the station in question or, in some cases, the whole line is in fact open, whereas in reality the train operating company in question has almost completely abandoned the station or line. Originally, however, the term stems from the Railway Regulation Act 1844. Working people were increasingly travelling long distances to find employment in the growing industrial centres. Such third class facilities as there were consisted usually of open wagons, often without seats, nicknamed "stanhopes". The Act was an attempt to make train travel available – and safe – for those who could ill afford it. The Act set minimum standards for passenger accommodation, and was influenced by the railway accident at Sonning Cutting on Christmas Eve 1842 when nine stonemasons were thrown from open wagons and killed.

Methodology
A typical parliamentary train will serve its stations or line as little as once per week, and never when the service would actually be useful to any passengers. Parliamentary services will typically be either very early in the morning or very late at night or in the middle of the day at the weekend. Quite often the service will run in one direction only.

These services run at all only because rail transport is heavily regulated in the United Kingdom and it is therefore considerably cheaper for a train operating company to run a parliamentary service than it is to go through the full legal process of applying for a station or line to be permanently closed.

Origins
The Railway Regulation Act 1844 bound the various train operators to provide third class passengers with a minimum standard of service: specifically, that at least one train per day must have adequate facilities in third class including a covered carriage with seats. Furthermore trains so equipped needed, on any given day, to serve every route and station in the railway company's area (across the whole day's service) each day. Finally all this had to cost no more than a penny per mile in third class.

The reaction of train operating companies, fearing the loss of revenue of increasing or improving third class facilities (i.e. that those who could afford second class would choose the cheaper option if it became bearable) was to follow the absolute letter of the law and no more – thus running just one train with decent third class facilities per day, at a useless time, such as very early in the morning or very late at night, and (because only one train like this was run) that one train really would stop at every station and halt on its line, thus making the journey extremely slow.

These services became known as parliamentary trains, and, reflecting upper class attitudes of the time, even got a mention in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado as follows:

"The idiot who, in railway carriages Scribbles on window-panes We only suffer To ride on a buffer On Parliamentary trains."

Examples
Some modern examples of lines served only by a Parliamentary train include the following:


 * The Chester to Runcorn (Main Line) route has one service per week on Saturday mornings, (summer only) using the uni-directional Halton Curve.
 * The Stockport to Stalybridge Line where just one train per week runs in one direction.
 * The Gainsborough (Trent Junction) to Barnetby section (via Kirton Lindsey and Brigg) of the Sheffield–Lincoln–Cleethorpes Line, where three trains per week run, all of them on Saturdays.
 * It is interesting to note that one of the stations on this line, Gainsborough Central, posted in 2006 lower passenger figures than Watford West – a station that is actually closed.
 * Lancaster to Windermere, via Morecambe.
 * The Crewe to Derby Line is franchised to go to Nottingham. However the only train to Nottingham is the last train on Sundays. Trains usually terminate at Derby.
 * Sheffield to York via Pontefract Baghill (two journeys per day)

Alternatively, an individual station may get a parliamentary service because the operating company wishes it closed, but the line itself is still in regular use (most trains speed straight through). Example of such stations are the following:


 * Tees-side Airport in County Durham.
 * It is worth noting that the airport is not called 'Teeside Airport', rather Durham Tees Valley.
 * Coombe Junction Halt in Cornwall.
 * Pilning in South Gloucestershire, near Bristol.
 * Barry Links and Golf Street both in Carnoustie, Scotland.
 * Manea in Cambridgeshire (between Ely and March on the Ely to Peterborough Line).
 * Shippea Hill in Cambridgeshire and Lakenheath in Suffolk (both between Ely and Brandon on the Breckland Line to Norwich).
 * Bordesley, one train a week (on Saturday), except when Birmingham City Football Club are playing at home, in which case certain trains stop to coincide with the matches.
 * Polesworth one train per day

In an interesting example, British Rail was forced to serve Smethwick West in the West Midlands for an extra 12 months in the mid-1990s after a legal blunder meant that the station had not been closed properly. This meant that one train per week each way still called at Smethwick West, even though it was only a few hundred yards down the line from its replacement Smethwick Galton Bridge.

A variant of the parliamentary train service is the 'permanent' replacement bus service, as employed on the Watford and Rickmansworth Railway. This railway line in Hertfordshire was 'closed' in 1996, but to avoid the legal complications and costs of actual closure train services were 'suspended' and a bus service now runs between the stations, thus maintaining the legal fiction of an open railway. The track and station structures are still intact, but are now heavily overgrown and damaged by lack of maintenance. The 'rail' service still appears on the national rail ticket scheme and on the National Rail online timetables, with an accompanying note informing passengers of the replacement bus. The Croxley Rail Link plan would see this parliamentary service replaced with a full rail service.