West Coast Partnership Timetable Design

West Coast Partnership (WCP) is a railway franchise operating passenger trains on the West Coast Main Line, the busiest long-distance corridor in the UK and one of the busiest in the world. It connects London Euston with Birmingham, North Wales, Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh and Glasgow.

The corridor is operationally very complex: a first cause due to a mix of infrastructure constraints, in particular some two- and three- track sections in a four-track corridor. The second is the presence of several other companies operating local, regional and interregional services in parts of the corridor causes the saturation of several sections. As a result long-distance paths, which must be as fast as possible to be attractive for passengers, are very difficult to plan. During the franchise bid, trenolab was asked by one of the competitors to support the development of timetables and test them using stochastic simulation.