The great British train wreck

A couple of weeks ago I met David Grime and Alan Noble, members of the Lakes Line Rail User Group, over a very good dinner in the Brown Horse pub in Winster in the heart of the Lake District. They had contacted me in despair at the collapse of services on their beloved ten-mile Windermere branch line. This once reliable and well-used service is now a shadow of its former self: characterised by cancellations, rampant overcrowding, bus replacement services and — sometimes — an absence of any trains at all.

The trouble started following an inexplicable government decision to take the service away from TransPennine Express and give it to Northern, part of the much larger Arriva Trains. It wasn’t long before services started to deteriorate. New trains were mysteriously swapped for old ones. Cancellations, once a rarity, became an almost daily occurrence. The timetable changes last May, which sent much of British rail network into chaos, proved to be the coup de grâce for the Windermere Line, which had more than seven cancellations per day. The excuses ranged from problems with crew availability to faulty trains and the ‘Train Operating Company Directive’ (whatever that means). The result was that the service became impossible to rely on. Regular travellers found alternative ways to reach to Oxenholme, such as buses or cars. Those forced to use the trains were crammed in on the few carriages there were and, according to a BBC report, ‘treated like cattle’.

When all services ended up being suspended for a month to allow for ‘driver training’, the Department for Transport agreed to stump up £5,500 a day for a charter company to provide half a dozen daily return journeys on the line using vintage British Rail carriages. This, a kind of Titfield Thunderbolt service, proved immensely popular. But it lasted only a fortnight, and now we are back to the situation where just a few normal trains are operating.