Why are our train services so bad?
NICK AND MARGARET: THE TROUBLE WITH OUR TRAINS BBC2, 9pm
BY her own admission, Margaret Mountford has not had too many dealings with Britain’s rail network, but she makes up for it in this one-off programme.
She meets one commuter who spends nearly £4,000 on an annual season ticket – her daily, 30-mile journey into Paddington last just 30 minutes but it is her bad luck that the service has become something of a byword for overcrowding.
If she pushes her way on to the train, she gets a seat, but most of the time she has to stand. Sometimes the train can be delayed by 40 minutes, or even an hour.
Once, she says, it grew so hot on an excessively-delayed train that a young man fainted. Such was the overcrowding on board the driver had to make his way down the track to get to him.
Expensive, standing-room-only train journeys rival the weather as topics of conversation among strangers. Mountford and her colleague Nick Hewer have stumbled across fertile territory for their investigation. Britain’s railways are at bursting-point, says Hewer. Some 4.4 million journeys are made – or, in some cases, endured – every day. “The last time trains were this busy,” he adds, “was during demobilisation after the First World War”.
As you would expect of such highly experienced business types (to say nothing of their steely-eyed roles as henchmen to Lord Sugar in The Apprentice), Mountford and Hewer do not suffer fools gladly, and do not shirk the big questions. Exactly where, they demand, are the £8 billion of fares and £4bn of public money that go into our trains each year being spent? How much can train operating companies actually do to improve their services? And who is to blame for endless train delays?
They meet irate commuters, train operating company bosses and the head of Network Rail. They uncover “infuriating” inefficiencies, get sucked into remarkable bureaucracy and experience the drudgery of some of Britain’s worst commutes. They set out to understand how an outdated system can cope with passenger numbers higher than at any time in living memory, but also wonder whether there are signs our railways may be getting back on track.