Provide the service that people deserve

LIKE many thousands of other regular rail travellers, I’m not mourning the end of the Arriva Trains Wales contract which has failed to deliver for passengers.

The Valley Lines service I use has simply not been fit for the 21st century with trains that should have been consigned to the scrapheap years ago still being used, overcrowded carriages and an often unreliable service.

While Arriva has done well financially, a lot of the blame for services can be laid at the door of the UK Labour Government which let a very poor contract back in 2003.

The so-called government experts wrongly assumed that passenger numbers would go down – and how wrong they were.

It is only fair to point that if more trains were needed permission had to be sought from government, initially the UK and latterly the Labour Welsh Government.

Control of the new franchise now rests solely with the Labour Welsh Government and they must ensure a quality service is provided after years of a second class service. Transport for Wales has made a lot of promises. It now lies with them to deliver.

Together with many others my own view has always been that the rail network should be renationalised. It seems absolutely crazy that some rail services in the UK are run by nationalised European rail operators.

I wish the new contractor Keolis Amey well and trust they will provide the service that people on the Valleys network and across Wales deserve and demand.

Colin Mann Leader, Plaid Cymru Group, Caerphilly County Borough

Council and propagandists. There would have been no point in translating the poems into Latin, the language of the Church – a body hardly likely to be interested in heroic epics – or retranslating them into Welsh “many centuries later”.

Although we know very little about the beginnings of Christianity in Britain, the names of Julius and Aaron, the site of their martyrdom in Caerleon (or Chester ?) and the military profession of their fellow martyr, St Alban, all suggest that they were Roman rather than British. Perhaps it was the withdrawal of Rome after 410 AD, when Christianity was no longer identified with the foreign overlords, that allowed the emergence of the Age of the Saints. Certainly when St Augustine came to convert the English in 597AD, Wales already had a strong Christian tradition. As for the arrival of the Saxons, though it may have been less violent than the later invasion of the Danes, to write it out of existence is somewhat overoptimistic, to say the least.

There is an old saying that we only know where we are going when we know where we have come from; if we do not know how our history has developed, how can we successfully move towards our future ? SR Jones Port Talbot