On Saturday (12 August), Hull Trains carried a record number of passengers on its services.

The open-access operator carried over three thousand fans to London for Hull Kingston Rovers’ (Hull KR) appearance in the men’s rugby league Challenge Cup Final, and many journeys in the other direction for Hull City Football Club’s home match and music and arts festival Humber Street Sesh.

Hull Trains focused its resources on providing extra capacity on its trains between Hull Paragon Station and London Kings Cross, and increased its seat availability to one third more than on an average Saturday.

To do this, it used all five of its bi-mode trains, working with Hitachi and Network Rail to bring its fifth train into service.

The operator also added five extra carriages on the 08:24 from Hull and the 19:48 from London, offering 327 extra seats in each direction. Two additional services ran at 08:32 from Hull and 20:27 from London, specifically for Hull KR fans travelling without seat reservations.

Over the weekend, Hull Trains also had to deal with overrunning engineering works resulting in extra passengers using Hull Trains and some services being especially busy.

Hull Kingston Rovers lost the final  to Leigh Leopards by the narrow margin of 17-16.|

Louise Mendham, Service Delivery Director for Hull Trains, explained: “We knew this was going to be an exceptionally busy weekend for our services already with Humber Street Sesh and Sheffield United playing, and then Hull KR reached the finals at Wembley which bolstered our Saturday bookings.

“We are huge supporters of the club both as a business and many of our team personally, so it was vital that we could do all we could to play our part in supporting our home city and provide extra capacity on those key services to and from the capital to both ensure fans could get to the game but also keep our leisure travellers moving with minimal disruption.

“Although the Rugby didn’t finish as we hoped for, we were able to carry all of the 3,000 fans booked with us there and back through the strengthened 10-carriage and extra services that we ran. It was certainly a win for team Hull Trains, and I’d like to put on record our huge thanks and appreciation for all of our team who made the weekend possible, and to our customers who choose to travel with us.”