Valid cause for complaint

May this Oxford MA kindly assure Simon Moppett ( Open Access, RAIL 829) that some of us local yokel paper readers do actually venture to open RAIL sometimes, although we may have trouble with the big words!

But he may have missed the fact that we patronised locals may also have a valid view on the rail services which we actually use every day. Perhaps that is why the Western

Morning News ran a headline three-page spread on the Class 802s, which revealed among other things that Cornwall Council is contributing to pay for the main line resignalling in its county (surely the responsibility of Network Rail), and that the modest Class 802 accelerated journey times (all of six minutes, Paddington-Plymouth) will be entirely due to the abolition of slam doors at station dwell times.

Their hasty bi-mode redesign has degraded the new trains’ power-to-weight ratio, and hence their all-important acceleration out of speed restrictions as well as their maximum speeds.

This is not (in Simon Moppett’s

words) a “new broom” anything like that of the impact of the HSTs in 1976. Local businessmen, who have been demanding journey times to the capital comparable to other areas of Britain a similar distance away, are right to be underwhelmed.

We get angry when we see 30-year-old Class 153s, built from unwanted 1980s Leyland National bus parts, on important regional services from Cardiff to Paignton or Bristol to Penzance. Then we read in RAIL of all the glossy trains, far newer than anything hereabouts, planned for imminent storage.

Why is the rail industry apparently unable to produce small but important improvements to second division services, rather than leave them - victims of an ineffective cascade system - rusting for years awaiting the scraps left over from the all-new major projects so often featured in your pages?