Rail revolt after 1,000 trains are axed in a week

Bosses block angry passengers’ Twitter complaints

Twitter ban adds ‘insult to injury’

RAIL chiefs and ministers are facing a revolt from passengers across the North after the number of cancelled trains doubled to more than one thousand in a week. Commuters across the country face more chaos as they return to work today following the botched introduction of a new rail timetable.

But, following the well-publicised problems across southern England, tensions are boiling over in the North with train services to cities including Manchester, Liverpool and Sheffield hitting a new low.

Northern Rail has resorted to blocking some irate passengers from complaining on Twitter, as it faces a torrent of criticism on social media. One fed-up passenger has set up a dedicated ‘Northern Fail’ app which documents how many trains are cancelled each day.

This showed that almost a thousand trains were fully cancelled – often blamed on a ‘shortage of train drivers’ – in eight days. Between Monday May 21, the day after the new timetable was introduced and yesterday, 1,626 services were either fully cancelled or partly cancelled.

The same app calculated that 900 trains were cancelled in the two weeks before ‘meltdown Monday’ on May 21, meaning the number of cancellations has more than doubled. Yesterday Northern Rail’s official figures revealed the problems were even worse – with 1,089 cancellations between May 21 and Sunday May 27. Another 509 trains were part-cancelled.

This means that more than ten per cent of trains were fully or part cancelled over this period.

The radical timetable shakeup affects one in four rail passengers across Britain, including 90 per cent of Northern’s 2,600 daily services.

The crisis in the North will be debated in Parliament next week, while Transport Secretary Chris Grayling has insisted it is his ‘number one performance priority’. Northern Rail insists delays by Network Rail to engineering works – including the electrification of the route between Manchester to Preston via Bolton – is largely to blame for the latest disruption.

As a result of this, it maintains, it had too little time to prepare for the new timetable, including training drivers on new routes.

But Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram, the metropolitan area mayor of Liverpool, have criticised Northern Rail for causing ‘extreme chaos’ on networks for ‘far too long’.

They have called on the firm to lose its franchise unless urgent improvements are made, while the rail operator and Network Rail have ordered an independent report into the disruption.

Northern has inflamed tensions by blocking some passengers from complaining on Twitter. Journalist Dave Thackeray, was blocked by the Northern Assist twitter page. He said he started to post complaints after frequently having to apologise to his boss for being late to work and then being late home.

He added: ‘Evidently something snapped [at] their end and all of a sudden while waiting for another cancelled train to get me to work, I tried looking on their Twitter feed to find out about that service and found that I’d been blocked.’

Consumer watchdog Which? has claimed that censoring passengers ‘adds insult to injury’.

Northern said it had blocked 76 accounts for breaking its social media policy, but pointed out it has 97,100 Twitter followers.

It added that it wants to improve driver rostering to get more trains running, and increase driver training on new routes to get more services running as quickly as possible.