Last Sunday saw the biggest timetable change in a generation, but your report (Passengers voice anger over timetable shake-up, Money, 19 May) is wrong – many will benefit from the change.
We know it is vital that the network keeps pace with demand. Through timetable changes over the next four years the industry will be able to run over 1,200 more services every weekday.
That’s why from last Sunday, as part of an investment programme by the rail industry set to generate £85bn in economic benefit and better connect communities across the country, there is space for an extra 50,000 passengers travelling to London in the morning peak each day, and 7,000 extra seats per week on Greater Anglia trains. Some journey times will be slashed, in the case of Manchester Victoria to Liverpool Lime Street reducing by 14 minutes to create a 35-minute shuttle.
Where there is short-term pain, we thank our passengers for bearing with us. Working as one railway we want to create more vibrant, stronger communities nationwide and allow our customers to benefit from more services and better journeys.
Robert Nisbet
Regional director, Rail Delivery Group
• Your report on the rail timetable changes refers to the broken connection at Hull. Similar cases are to be found across the system. For example, an alteration by TransPennine lengthens the journey from Middlesbrough to London by several minutes while missing an opportunity to accelerate it by 20 minutes because its trains will arrive at York a minute or two short of the specified connection margin.
The problem is endemic: the train-operating companies are preoccupied with their own services; Network Rail lacks the obligation, vision and skills necessary to coordinate the plans of fragmented operators; and the Office of Rail and Road has forgotten it has statutory duties to promote shorter journey times and to facilitate journeys involving more than one operator.
Whether or not our railway is brought into public ownership, it is essential to rebuild travellers’ confidence by establishing a powerful planning body charged with securing a truly integrated timetable. That is not something the secretary of state seems remotely interested in.
Jonathan Tyler
Passenger Transport Networks
• Another reorganisation, another disaster. Recently there was TSB, and now the reorganisation of the railway timetable. We have a lot to learn from the past. Great Western Railway was built as a broad-gauge system with the rest of the country as standard gauge. On the weekend of 21 May 1892 the conversion was planned to be completed by 4.40am on Monday 23 May, and it was. Marvellous.
Simon Hurdley
Bridport, Dorset
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