Kenilworth booking office to close in September due to lack of footfall

THE RM understands that the independently operated booking office at Kenilworth station will close on September 24. The operator is quitting because of the combination of poor reliability of the service between Nuneaton and Leamington Spa and a downturn in passenger numbers that both predates and has continued with the Covid-19 pandemic. The haemorrhaging of passengers has made the ticket office function unviable. Since the reopening of the station in April 2018 at a cost of £13.2m up to May 31 this year, 47% of service interruptions have been attributable to the train operator. Further analysis reveals that half of these interruptions were a result of train crew issues. When trains have not run – currently during the pandemic there is two-hourly train service – a rail replacement bus service has operated and the costs of this are believed to have exceeded £500,000. Complaints about the poor reliability have been made to Transport Secretary Grant Shapps, the Kenilworth MP Jeremy Wright, Transport Focus and train operator Abellio which runs West Midlands Trains (WMT). It is known WMT has lost 25,000 training days due to the pandemic which has not helped the situation, and suffered other train crewing issues too. At present WMT is working on a training programme for its new CAF-built Class 196 DMUs. Another emerging concern is a redaction of the breach and default benchmarks within the publicly available franchise agreement. This redaction was applied pre-Covid by the Secretary of State for Transport, but is creating a lack of transparency. Given the Williams-Shapps review envisaged more independent retailers on the rail estate, the example of Kenilworth is unlikely to offer encouragement to future potential entrepreneurs, even with wider rail reopening plans on the horizon.