Ordsall Chord, also known as the Castlefield Curve, is a short railway line in Ordsall,

Salford Salford () is a city and the largest settlement in the City of Salford metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, England. In 2011, Salford had a population of 103,886. It is also the second and only other city in the metropolitan county afte ...

, England, which links and Manchester Oxford Road to , designed to increase capacity and reduce journey times into and through Manchester. It allows trains to run from

Leeds Leeds () is a city and the administrative centre of the City of Leeds district in West Yorkshire, England. It is built around the River Aire and is in the eastern foothills of the Pennines. It is also the third-largest settlement (by populati ...

Newcastle Newcastle usually refers to: *Newcastle upon Tyne, a city and metropolitan borough in Tyne and Wear, England *Newcastle-under-Lyme, a town in Staffordshire, England *Newcastle, New South Wales, a metropolitan area in Australia, named after Newcastle ...

and Redcar Central direct to

Manchester Airport Manchester Airport is an international airport in Ringway, Manchester, England, south-west of Manchester city centre. In 2019, it was the third busiest airport in the United Kingdom in terms of passenger numbers and the busiest of those n ...

. A chord was proposed in the late-1970s and parliamentary powers for its construction were received in 1979, but the project was cancelled.

Network Rail Network Rail Limited is the owner (via its subsidiary Network Rail Infrastructure Limited, which was known as Railtrack plc before 2002) and infrastructure manager of most of the railway network in Great Britain. Network Rail is an "arm's leng ...

revived the proposal in 2010 as part of its

Northern Hub The Northern Hub was a rail upgrade programme between 2009 and 2020 in Northern England to improve and increase train services and reduce journey times between its major cities and towns, by electrifying lines and removing a major rail bottlenec ...

proposal. Funding for its construction totalling £85 million was announced in the 2011 United Kingdom budget and construction commenced in 2016. It became operational on 10 December 2017. However its use since becoming operational has been limited as no additional capacity at Victoria, Oxford Road and Piccadilly has been built to cope with more through services.

Background

By the late 20th century, the rail network in Manchester could not support demand. The main stations at Piccadilly and Victoria were not linked and many trains terminated at Victoria taking up excessive platform space.
One solution, the

Picc-Vic tunnel Picc-Vic was a proposed, and later cancelled, underground railway designed in the early 1970s with the purpose of connecting two major mainline railway termini in Manchester city centre, England. The name Picc-Vic was a contraction of the two sta ...

between the stations, was proposed in the 1970s but rejected on cost grounds in 1977. A curve at Ordsall linking Piccadilly to Victoria was proposed in the late 1970s when it was known as the

Castlefield Castlefield is an inner-city conservation area in Manchester, North West England. The conservation area which bears its name is bounded by the River Irwell, Quay Street, Deansgate and Chester Road. It was the site of the Roman era fort of Mamu ...

Curve after the nearby district. A bill relating to its proposed construction was debated in the

House of Commons The House of Commons is the name for the elected lower house of the bicameral parliaments of the United Kingdom and Canada. In both of these countries, the Commons holds much more legislative power than the nominally upper house of parliament. ...

in June 1979, receiving some support but it was opposed on the grounds that a tunnel would provide a better alternative. By the end of the year,

British Rail British Railways (BR), which from 1965 traded as British Rail, was a state-owned company that operated most of the overground rail transport in Great Britain from 1948 to 1997. It was formed from the nationalisation of the Big Four (British ra ...

had received parliamentary powers to construct the line. It was estimated to cost around £10 million but following opposition from local politicians and a shortage of funding, the project was never started. By 1985 it had been abandoned. The proposal was included in a draft

report in 2005 as a solution to overcrowding in the region, at an expected cost of £44 million. In February 2010, the project was revived by Network Rail as part of the Manchester Hub Study, with the intention of receiving government funding by around 2014. On 23 March 2011

George Osborne George Gideon Oliver Osborne (born Gideon Oliver Osborne; 23 May 1971) is a former British politician and newspaper editor who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2010 to 2016 and as First Secretary of State from 2015 to 2016 in the ...

, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced £85 million funding for the scheme in the 2011 budget. The announcement was unexpected and was welcomed by the Greater Manchester Integrated Transport Authority.

Proposal

The Ordsall Chord provides a direct link between Piccadilly and Victoria stations, allowing trains from Manchester Victoria and the east to continue to Piccadilly. Following completion of the chord, in theory four trains per hour will travel between Manchester Airport/Manchester Piccadilly and Manchester Victoria in each direction, and associated reorganisation of train paths and retimetabling will provide eight trains per hour from Manchester Victoria towards the west via

Chat Moss Chat Moss is a large area of peat bog that makes up part of the City of Salford, Metropolitan Borough of Wigan and Trafford in Greater Manchester, England. It also makes up part of Metropolitan Borough of St Helens in Merseyside and Warrington ...

, and six trains per hour from Manchester Piccadilly towards either Chat Moss or Bolton and Preston (trains from both Victoria and Piccadilly stations to the west and north west (Chat Moss, Liverpool, Bolton, Preston, etc.) do not actually pass over the Ordsall Chord, both ends of which lead eastwards, but travel over pre-existing track). The chord is part of the larger

project, proposed by

in the Manchester Hub Study of 2010. The complete scheme would cost around £530 million to implement. The Ordsall Chord will cost £85 million and will allow around 700 extra trains per day to operate into Manchester. Most through trains on

TransPennine Express TransPennine Express (TPE), legally First TransPennine Express Limited, is a British train operating company owned by FirstGroup that operates the TransPennine Express franchise. It runs regional and inter-city rail services between the major ...

(TPE) routes to , and will be re-routed via Victoria rather than Piccadilly but some TPE services to Leeds, Liverpool and Newcastle will continue to run via Piccadilly and will stop at and/or and . The current fast North TransPennine services will operate via Victoria reducing journey times. The full scheme includes new through platforms at Piccadilly and track improvements outside Manchester to allow fast expresses to overtake slower stopping trains, reducing journey times to Leeds by 14 minutes on average and to Liverpool by 17.

Railfreight Railfreight was a sector of British Rail responsible for all freight operations on the British network. The division was created in 1982 when BR sought to assign particular stock and management to the evolving requirements of freight traffic ...

access to yards in the

Trafford Park Trafford Park is an area of the Metropolitan Borough of Trafford, Greater Manchester, England, opposite Salford Quays on the southern side of the Manchester Ship Canal, southwest of Manchester city centre and north of Stretford. Until the lat ...

area will be improved. Ordsall Chord construction 2016 006

The chord will preserve connectivity between the relocated East-West services and the city's main rail interchange at Manchester Piccadilly. It will improve access to

which cannot be reached easily from Victoria. Without the chord, such operations would require trains to be run to and then reverse. Concern was raised about the impact the scheme will have on the historic

Grade I listed In the United Kingdom, a listed building or listed structure is one that has been placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Historic Environment Scotland in Scotland, in Wales, and the Northern Irel ...

1830 railway bridge over the River Irwell, part of the

Liverpool & Manchester Railway The Liverpool and Manchester Railway (L&MR) was the first inter-city railway in the world. It opened on 15 September 1830 between the Lancashire towns of Liverpool and Manchester in England. It was also the first railway to rely exclusively ...

's original approach to

Manchester Liverpool Road railway station Liverpool Road is a former railway station on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in Manchester, England that opened on 15 September 1830. The station was the Manchester terminus of the world's first inter-city passenger railway in which all ...

, (now the site of the Science & Industry Museum (SIM)), which lies in the path of construction. Detailed designs were presented by Network Rail in November 2012, followed in May by the intended planning application, for submission at the end of August 2013. The plan proposed avoiding the Stephenson Bridge to cross the river on a network arch bridge but severing the museum's main-line rail connection immediately to the east of the bridge, ending the museum's out-and-back live steam trips using a replica of one of Stephenson's 1830

Planet A planet is a large, rounded astronomical body that is neither a star nor its remnant. The best available theory of planet formation is the nebular hypothesis, which posits that an interstellar cloud collapses out of a nebula to create a you ...

-class locomotives. According to Network Rail, "The removal of this connection is not something that Network Rail takes lightly, and we have explored many alternative solutions before reaching the conclusion that the connection would need to be removed to make way for the chord." The museum opposed the alignment, claiming that it would have "a damaging effect on SIM visitors, volunteers and income."

Construction

Network Rail submitted the Transport and Works Act application to construct the Ordsall Chord in September 2013. The

statutory instrument In many countries, a statutory instrument is a form of delegated legislation. United Kingdom Statutory instruments are the principal form of delegated or secondary legislation in the United Kingdom. National government Statutory instrumen ...

authorising construction was made on 31 March 2015, and preparatory works began in October 2015. In January 2016, Network Rail began work on the foundations with a planned completion date of late 2017. In November 2016, Network Rail announced they expected services to run to

from December 2017 and electric trains to run between Manchester and Preston via Bolton with new connections into Manchester from the Calder Valley. 2018 will see the introduction of an hourly direct service from Newcastle to Manchester Airport, which will also mean an extra hourly service between Leeds and Newcastle, and six trains an hour between Manchester Victoria and Rochdale. Mark Whitby, civil engineer and former President of the

Institution of Civil Engineers The Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) is an independent professional association for civil engineers and a charitable body in the United Kingdom. Based in London, ICE has over 92,000 members, of whom three-quarters are located in the UK, wh ...

, appealed against the decision to approve its construction in the High Court. On 14 October 2015, the High Court rejected his appeal and denied Whitby the right to appeal the decision. Whitby did appeal and on 11 January 2016, the Court of Appeal granted Leave to Appeal saying "The grounds of appeal raise important points and have real prospects of success". Whitby wanted an alternative that would not sever the main-line rail connection to the Museum of Science and Industry nor destroy heritage structures. The case was heard in March 2016 but Whitby's appeal was rejected. The network arch was lifted into place on 21 February 2017.

Operation

The first passenger service was at 08:40 on 10 December 2017: Manchester Victoria to Manchester Oxford Road followed by the return service continuing to Leeds. It was envisaged that congestion at Manchester Piccadilly would reduce by a quarter, in part due to the reduced need for trains to cross the throat of the station, blocking other services. It was hoped there would be more frequent train services through Manchester. However this has not yet materialised, particularly after the May 2018 timetable which created widespread disruption around Manchester. The Ordsall Chord's lack of use in comparison to its £100 million cost has been attributed to a lack of capacity at Piccadilly, Oxford Road and Victoria to cope with increased 'through' services that the Chord generates. Chief Executive of Network Rail, Andrew Haines, remarked upon the inadequacies of the infrastructure to support the Ordsall Chord as part of a review in Network Rail's operations: In January 2021, the UK government published proposals to deal with congestion on the

Castlefield corridor The Castlefield corridor (also known as the Deansgate corridor) 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–Ma ...

through Manchester Oxford Road and Piccadilly. One option would reduce the use of the Ordsall Chord to one train each way every hour.

References

External links