How new faster Northern train service between Leeds and Sheffield is 'just the beginning'

Known as the ‘Yorkshire Flyer,’ as it provides a quick and convenient connection between Yorkshire’s two biggest cities, the new Northern service was officially launched during an event at Leeds station earlier today.

Cutting journey times and providing more than 30,000 extra seats a week, the service will support economic growth by making it easier for people to get to work and reach new opportunities.

Speaking at the launch, Mayor of West Yorkshire Tracy Brabin described the new service as “just the beginning” with a hope that the faster travel times will further open up options for work, leisure and education.

“It’s now a journey of 47 minutes and I know that with electrification we can get that down even faster, but this is just the beginning of the wider connectivity across Yorkshire that we have been championing as part of the White Rose rail plan,” Mayor Brabin said.

“It shouldn’t be that if you are young person who wants to go to university in Sheffield that you decide the travel is too difficult, I’ll never get a seat or the services are too unreliable and you decide not to go to Hallam or Sheffield Uni. We need to bring these two great cities together.”

It used to take all Northern customers around an hour or longer to make the journey, with trains calling at various stops along the way.

The new service will complete the journey in 47 minutes, making just one stop at Wakefield Westgate. It will run once every hour in both directions, alongside the hourly fast CrossCountry service that links Leeds and Sheffield.

Alex Hornby, Northern's commercial and customer director, has expressed his desire to work in unison with CrossCountry to ensure better connectivity, and hasn’t ruled out the possibility of increasing the number of services in future.

“We’re going from five trains an hour to six trains an hour and if we see growth on this then we will do our very best to react accordingly. Our ambition is to grow demand for rail on Northern by 30 million journeys by 2030 so we will not be sitting on our hands,” Mr Hornby said.

“We also don’t see ourselves as working in competition with CrossCountry or other rail operators, that’s in the past. We have planned this service to deliberately create that common every 30 minutes frequency between two operators. This is about the railways truly coming together.”

Northern will continue to operate their four stopping services per hour in both directions between the two cities, providing important connections to local communities, including Barnsley and Meadowhall Shopping Centre.

Plans to expand platform 17 at Leeds station, which regularly houses the Northern stopper service from Leeds to Sheffield, are expected to move forward in 2026, alongside longer term plans to increase capacity at both stations.

Mayor Brabin is hopeful that this announcement, alongside a revamped bus network and proposed mass transit plans, will further boost connectivity across the region.

“My ambitions for this region and connectivity are off the scale, because I know the only way we can reduce our £11 billion productivity gap is to provide better transport and increased skills. We are working with government to get these projects up and away,” she added.

“We have been promised so much in Yorkshire and have been let down far too many times. That’s why this announcement from the Labour Government of £45 billion to get us underway is so important. And for the first time, in quite sometime, Yorkshire is at the front of the queue.”