Predicted road mayhem failed to materialise, as thousands of regular travellers either took the day off or worked from home.
The only road jam was on the M62 west of Leeds, where roadworks began at the same time as the strike and caused a queue of vehicles 10 miles back to Halifax.
Elsewhere in the north the main road routes were described by police as no busier than normal.
The strikers' target, Arriva Northern, was severely hit in Yorkshire and the north-east but ran a third of its 1,600 daily services, including its hourly service across the Pennines .
The Rail, Maritime and Transport union, which called the two day action in protest at pay differentials, said that members' support had been as steady as in a similar strike two weeks ago.
Bob Crow, assistant general secretary of the RMT, said that conductors and guards were pressing the union for more and possibly longer strikes.
The union is arguing for 15% rises to take conductors' annual pay to £18,000, after lucrative wage offers to new drivers by Arriva as part of an emergency recruitment campaign.
The company has been so short of drivers that trains have been replaced by buses on some routes, including all weekday services between Leeds, Knottingley and Pontefract, for five months.
Euan Cameron, managing director of Arriva Trains, said that the union figure was unreasonable.
The firm has offered to increase conductors' and guards' basic pay to £16,760.
Sticking punctually to the emergency schedule, the 3.12 from Manchester to York pulled out with a manager standing in for the guard.
"It's a nice surprise," shouted a postgraduate from Leeds university through the closing doors. "I wasn't sure there'd be a service. I live in Manchester and I've got to be at the university this afternoon. If there'd been no train, I'd have been paying a fortune for a taxi."
Another would-be commuter to Yorkshire was less lucky, leaving Piccadilly station on foot with a grievance about Arriva's website.
A management consultant with appointments in Sheffield, he said: "There was nothing on the web about trouble on the Sheffield line. But with Arriva that's par for the course."
Arriva was also on the back foot over a protest by Lisa Muggeridge, a Leeds civil servant who was fined £100 with £200 costs by Dewsbury magistrates for sitting in first class on a packed train to her home in Hebden Bridge, and refusing to pay the £6 supplement.
Backed by other passengers who also invaded the carriage but were not prosecuted, she said that she had been singled because she chided a conductor for being shirty to another customer.
"They offer an appalling service anyway," she said. "If they spent half as much money hiring and training drivers as they spend on prosecutions, they would be in a better state."
Arriva North's regional director, Peter Cushing, said: "We do not tolerate non-payment of fares and will seek to prosecute wherever possible."
