The Office of Rail and Road (ORR) has rejected proposals for new train services between London and Wrexham, as well as Rochdale and Blackpool.
The rejections come following an assessment carried out by the ORR, which found that adding more trains to the West Coast Main Line would ‘likely increase delays and cancelled trains for passengers’.
Applications from the Wrexham, Shropshire & Midlands Railway Company (WSMR) would have seen four return services between Wrexham, Wrexham-London Euston, whilst applications from Lumo would have included four return Rochdale-Euston services.
Elsewhere, the ORR has also rejected an application from Avanti West Coast for additional services between Blackpool-Euston.
The ORR has stated that its assessment followed detailed and extensive analysis on the West Coast Main Line, which led the regulator to conclude that the both the capacity and performance of the southern section of the West Coast Main Line has not materially changed since similar applications were rejected in 2025, whilst an external review, also commissioned by the ORR, also supported this conclusion.
In the assessment, the ORR concluded that adding more services into current timetable gaps would reduce crucial recovery time in the event of disruption, weakening the line’s overall resilience.
Despite this, the ORR has approved access for Avanti’s weekday 19:29 Chester to Euston service to carry passengers until December 2030. This service currently runs as a fully crewed empty service, and will now add passengers.
Stephanie Tobyn, ORR’s Director of Strategy, Policy and Reform, said:New services, destinations and greater choice can bring real benefits for passengers and communities. But the West Coast Main Line is already under significant pressure, with performance reflecting limited resilience on a heavily used part of the rail network.
Our detailed analysis has shown that adding more trains to the current timetable would reduce the ability to recover when disruption occurs, increasing the risk of delays spreading and making reliability of the network worse for all passengers.
