Timetable travails

SIR – Peter Jones (Letters, September 26) is right that this year’s timetable fiasco on Thameslink and Northern was caused by loss of corporate memory.

But the Southern Region timetable fiasco he mentions actually happened in 1967, not the Fifties. A two-man “beaver patrol” spent a whole year roaming the region to identify all the misjudgments in the infamous 1967 timetable, which were eventually corrected.

The most fundamental misjudgment was, of course, to base a railway timetable on the optimistic assumption that nothing would ever go wrong.

Tunbridge Wells, Kent

SIR – You ask who is in charge of our clattering trains (Letters, September 26).

Our local Chiltern Railways line, which runs from Amersham to London, is clean, efficient, rarely late and never blighted by strikes or industrial action. It is owned by the private joint-stock company Deutsche Bahn AG, with the Federal Republic of Germany being its single shareholder.

Chorleywood, Hertfordshire