Thousands of state-run trains cancelled

Telegraph

6 days ago

Thousands of state-run trains have been cancelled because too many drivers are off on holiday.
South Western Railway (SWR) has cancelled about 2,500 trains over the next four weeks because of staff shortages, it said.
The company, which was taken into Government ownership in May, has slashed 5 per cent of its 1,600 daily services over the next month because 'large numbers of our drivers are on annual leave or cannot work due to sickness', it said.
Jeremy Varns, the co-ordinator of the SWR Watch group, said: 'It's increasingly evident that passengers are no longer a priority. With operators now financially supported by the Treasury, there's little motivation left to provide a reliable, quality service.
'Time and again, the industry's default response to challenges is to reduce timetables, not improve them. Meanwhile, passengers are paying record fares for turn-up-and-go travel, only to face declining reliability and longer gaps between services,' he continued.
'Rather than using the summer holiday period as an opportunity to promote rail travel with affordable fares, and extra services to tourist destinations, the focus appears to be on charging more while delivering less.'
DfT blames private sector
Officials from the Department for Transport (DfT), which now owns SWR, blamed 'previous private sector ownership' for August's spate of planned cancellations.
It comes after the Labour government handed train drivers a 15 per cent pay rise last year as one of its first acts in office.
About 80 trains per day will not run between July 28 and August 28 as a result of the summer holiday surge.
Passengers using South Western Railway (SWR) may feel especially aggrieved by the latest batch of cancellations because they come after repeated signal failures at London Waterloo, SWR's main London station, earlier this month.
The latest failure on Monday was so bad that bosses were forced to issue a 'do not travel' warning, leaving hundreds of thousands unable to commute to work.
Off-peak services mainly affected
A company spokesman insisted that the August cancellations are being made to prevent disruption caused by short-notice staff absences, and that they would mainly affect 'quieter, off-peak services'.
'The summer timetable sees a small reduction in services – less than 5 per cent of our 1,600 daily services – at a time when fewer customers are travelling with us,' said the spokesman.
'Over the summer holiday period, customer numbers drop by 12-17 per cent and the services we have removed are those with the lowest forecast demand.'
None of the cancellations are included in downloadable copies of timetables, although it is understood that online journey planners have been revised.
Referring to the delayed and over-budget £1billion fleet of new Arterio trains being introduced by SWR, the spokesman continued: 'Since the transfer to public ownership we have unlocked our new trains programme and now have 14 Arterios in daily service, enhancing capacity, comfort and reliability for customers across our suburban network.
'This timetable reduction will help protect the driver training programme so we can roll out even more Arterios in the coming months, while also and minimising the risk of on-the-day cancellations due to colleagues taking their annual leave during the school holidays'
A DfT spokesman said: 'We are driving high standards for operators, ensuring they put passengers first by protecting as many services as possible while making improvements for the whole network, and making sure more trains show up when they should.
'The issues causing these reductions were inherited from previous private sector ownership under the flawed franchise system, which is exactly the sort of thing we hope to eradicate through Great British Railways.
'The new Managing Director will be setting out a plan to drive up performance and is already ensuring these issues have as little impact on passengers as possible.'