(12 May 2023, 6:49 pm)Storx wrote The government need to take some blame for it. The railways over the Pennines are Victorian and should've been well on the way for major improvements by now. Instead they've made more plans than GNE route changes and the thing isn't fit for the 21st Century and have gone for sticking some wires up and not an awful lot more.

Why put up with all that crap as a driver when you can go work for LNER instead and have it easy.

100%, I agree.
But there's nothing TPE can do about that, other than put pressure on the government.
It's an external factor. 

What they can do, is focus on all of the internal pressures and factors, doing something about them and fixing them.
From the outside looking in, they've not fixed them.