Who is in charge of the clattering trains?

SIR – The Office of Rail and Road report into this summer’s rail chaos (report, September 20) highlights a lack of leadership.

Billion-pound industries do not just exist on their own. Somebody must be responsible for nobody being responsible. Roger Hannaford

Haddenham, Buckinghamshire

SIR – The fiasco of the new rail timetables seems to have arisen because nobody working in the industry was around the last time it happened on such a scale and the folk memory of it has faded.

In the mid-fifties, the Southern Region of (nationalised) British Rail decided to make similar root-and-branch “improvements” to its timetables for the whole region. It was a disaster.

According to the newspaper reports, some passengers had to be bussed between stations on different branches to get back on the right route.

The main reason I remember this is that I had just stopped using Southern Region trains to get to school, and felt I’d had a narrow escape from the mess. I think they reverted to the old timetable and resumed their previous practice of making improvements bit by bit. Peter Jones

Woodbridge, Suffolk

SIR – The print of a stagecoach being used as a chicken coop (Letters, September 20) features the remains of one of William Chaplin’s many “Swan with Two Necks” coaches.

Having built the greatest coaching empire in the land, Chaplin had the foresight to sell up at the peak of his company’s reign and invest his fortune in the new railways. After rescuing the infant London and Southampton Railway from collapse, he became director and chairman of several successful British and continental railway companies.

Those notionally in charge of our railways should exercise similar perspicacity and recognise when they too are flogging a dead horse.

Jeremy Chaplin

St Breward, Cornwall

SIR – The Government has appointed a big-hitter from industry to review how modern railways should be run.

Anyone remember the last time they did that? Tim Matthews

London NW5