Dear Sir,
On Friday afternoon the guard on a Cross Country train leaving Bristol explained that the reason for the overcrowding was students travelling home for the weekend. So — overcrowding is the passengers’ fault, rather than the decades of underinvestment, the Virgin policy of replacing 8-coach trains with 4 or 5 coaches in a period of passenger number growth, and the lack of spare coaches because of the cost of leasing them from, among others, an RBS subsidiary. This is why we pay over the odds(Leader, Fares Fair 20 February): a privatised mess which New Labour has ignored, being content to let the anti-rail mandarins at the DfT to simply ratchet up the billions paid to the Exchequer by the franchisees and thus to ratchet up the fares. Maybe the Chancellor could find a few bob to re-nationalise the railways too.
Yours sincerely,
John Gilham.
