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Rail trackAlmost one in three trains were late following Railtrack's collapse in the autumn of 2001, and half of services on some of the busiest lines were delayed, new figures released show. Senior rail industry sources said that operators were considering running fewer trains in future as the only way to deliver the national timetable reliably. Government statistics show that rail passengers lost more than four million minutes of their lives sitting on delayed trains between October and December that year. Industry insiders warned that it still cannot forecast when performance will return to the levels achieved before the Hatfield crash in 2000, when one in 10 trains was late. Stewart Francis, chairman of the Rail Passenger Council, said travellers were often delayed by a third of their scheduled journey times, with hour-long hold-ups still common on many inter-city services. 'Some passengers are getting appalling delays on some parts of the network and they are at the end of their tether - it is extremely disappointing,' he said. Francis warned the travelling public that it would be a 'very long haul' out of the depths of poor performance.

In the last quarter of 2001 the performance of almost all train companies plummeted. On the 10 commuter lines into London only 60 per cent of trains were on time. Almost half of peak time trains run by companies such as West Anglia Great Northern, South West Trains and Thameslink were late. A third of Virgin West Coast's trains were late last autumn, although Trainchief executive Chris Green said there had been a dramatic improvement in the past two months on both Virgin's West Coast and cross-country services with punctuality hitting 90 per cent on good days. In the year before the crash at Hatfield almost 18 months ago punctuality nationally approached 90 per cent, although this had slipped to around 85 per cent immediately before the accident as the network became overcrowded. The entire rail system was virtually paralysed after the accident as trains were withdrawn or forced to run at crawling pace when thousands of cracked rails like the one that caused the crash were discovered across the network. Experts warned it could be several years before punctuality was restored. Now the industry declines even to set itself a deadline for getting back to 90 per cent on-time running.

However, sources insisted that figures for the first quarter of this year are likely to show punctuality back in the 'mid-eighties' and improving. Despite last autumn's figures coinciding with the collapse of Railtrack, Francis said the RPC supported the Government's decision to force the privatised company into administration after its costs ran out of control. There is increasing frustration, however, at the length of time it is taking to organise a new owner for Railtrack and the performance of the Government over the railways and transport in general. Separate surveys showed that 80 per cent of people questioned were unhappy with the Government's handling of the railways since the Labour Party took office in 1997.

The private companies running Britain's train services were supposed to have received £2.7bn of taxpayers' money over the past three years. But they have soaked up £4.2bn because the state subventions, which were supposed to decline year on year, have shot up.

Nearly 500 trains a week are to be scrapped when the winter timetables are introduced. A spokesman said the cuts were being made to allow more heavily subscribed services to run on time and because the trains were "obstructing trains behind them."

 

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