Regional capacity failings

The ongoing debate over differential investment between North and South misses the point. In vast swathes of the country, the battle is not about getting a service that is better, but about getting a functioning service at all.

For example, the morning peak service from Cardiff to Bristol for a reasonable commuter arrival totals three trains and (at most) 13 carriages.

Notwithstanding that a half-hourly peak service between two UK core cities around 40 miles apart is considered remotely acceptable, the relentless optimism from the train operating companies that they are making improvements is pretty grating to passengers.

A day after a full closure of Bristol Temple Meads for engineering, one of three trains was cancelled entirely (four carriages lost), and the previous train was two carriages short and thus standing room only from the start.

Statistics may show this service overall to be reliable and reasonably punctual, but would not show the fundamental variability in passenger experience caused by the operator’s inability to deliver the units required - on most days, at least one of these trains runs short-formed.

Commuters outside London and the Passenger Transport Executive areas are entitled to feel that such failure rates would never be acceptable in those places, and to resent the fact that no one in the industry is genuinely planning to fully resolve these sorts of issues.

Instead we get constant cheer about how other services are getting improvements and how eventually - maybe in a year if all goes well - our 32-year-old trains will be replaced by 26-year-old trains, with no guarantees whatsoever that these will be faster, more reliable or offer more capacity.

Even in the long term, there remains a fundamental threat: for all that the recent franchise awards elsewhere have brought new fleets, we have no guarantee that the music won’t stop and we won’t be left metaphorically (and indeed literally) without a chair. Gareth Aubrey, Cardiff