It can be no surprise that Manchester Oxford Road tops the list of cancellation-prone stations, with Piccadilly not far behind, when these two stations are connected by an inadequate two-track railway carrying dense passenger traffic plus a substantial flow of freight trains (UK rail system described as ‘broken’ as 2022 data reveals extent of disruption, 26 December).
Successive governments have shelved plans to widen the line and expand the through platforms, an improvement that was urgent 20 years ago, and for which detailed plans were drawn up. This bottleneck is a significant contributor to delays and cancellations across a wide area of north-west England.
Unions’ reluctance to agree to “modernisation” of their practices needs to be seen against numerous failures to implement modernisation of railway infrastructure, of which the Manchester example is just one. The list includes failure to complete Great Western electrification, failure to include electrification in plans for the east-west (Oxford-Bedford-Cambridge) restored line, the scaling back of HS2 and many others.
Derek Buttivant
Milverton, Somerset
• Your article doesn’t mention two important aspects of the “broken rail network”. First, the private companies that operate and lease trains have paid £8.3bn in dividend payments to shareholders since 1996, according to an RMT report. If British Rail had been nationalised, this would have been ploughed back into the service, and therefore it would have been in a much healthier condition now.
Second, rail fares in Britain are among the highest in Europe. If the government viewed the railways as a “service” with reduced rail fares and a more efficient service, car usage would go down, reducing our contribution to global warming.
Rob Dark
London
