Northern’s apathy is an insult to rail passengers

SIR – Northern railway says the root cause of the timetable debacle (report, telegraph.co.uk, June 4) is that the electrification programme is well behind schedule.

Problems such as this do not appear overnight. As soon as the company was told that it only had four months to make changes that normally take nine, a warning should have been issued.

The two questions for me are: who decided that trying to fit a quart into a pint pot was acceptable? And why was the public not advised of the potential disruption well in advance so that we could plan our travel accordingly? John Newman

Hinckley, Leicestershire

SIR – For the past few years, any criticism of the poor performance of the rail franchise model has been countered by the argument that it compares favourably with the performance of British Rail.

However, the performance of the rail companies is now so abysmal that this argument is no longer valid. By almost any measure, they have become as complacent, inefficient and incompetent as the old nationalised rail model, and some other system has to be found. John Snook

Sheffield, South Yorkshire

SIR – We are told that rail fares are to be “simplified” (report, June 4).

East Midlands Trains has a monopoly on the Wellingborough to St Pancras journey. It is the only operator. Consequently, it can get away with charging £105 for a peak-time day return ticket including Tube travel. One way to reduce the cost is to split the journey into two: Wellingborough to Bedford (£10.20) and Bedford to London including Tube (£50).

Are we really to believe that “simplification” will result in the £105 ticket being reduced permanently to £60.20? More likely the option to split journeys into cheaper parts will simply be removed. Kim Thonger

Finedon, Northamptonshire