Where is the PPS to the Transport Secretary when you need him, following his boss’s line that trains are becoming redundant perhaps? – Owl

“It’s 6am on Monday at Tiverton station, still dark and dank, but platform two is heaving. We have just been told — yet again — that the first London train has been cancelled: inclement weather or staff shortages, it’s not clear. We must wait 50 minutes for the next arrival. Many trundle disconsolately back to the freezing waiting room and queue for the coffee machine.”

Alice Thomson www.thetimes.co.uk [Extract]

Then a second announcement confirms that the next train is delayed by 38 minutes due to overrunning engineering works. It had given up on Cornwall altogether and had started in Exeter. By the time the headlights emerge from the gloom, it is clear work interviews and hospital appointments will be missed. Teenagers are running late for lessons in Taunton and a woman is in tears.

A noticeboard reminds passengers that there will be a series of strikes in the run-up to Christmas. Attendance at office parties and carol services will have to be cancelled. Roads will be jammed as families struggle with travel arrangements. A year ago, few would have cared. After the pandemic the station and car park were almost empty on Mondays. Now there is an air of quiet desperation.

If the prime minister and chancellor want to encourage people back to work they need to sort out public transport. Mark Harper is the latest Tory transport secretary to imply that trains are becoming redundant when he said passenger numbers had plummeted 50 per cent in the past three years. But the figures show he’s wrong.

Commuters and recreational train travellers are making a comeback. On some routes passenger numbers are higher than pre-pandemic. Meanwhile, the new Elizabeth Line is crammed at 8am and 6pm as workers abandon their Zoom calls and head into London offices from Slough and Brentwood.

Young adults rely on public transport. Only one in four under-21s and fewer than two thirds of under-30s have a driving licence, saying they are priced out by the cost of lessons, owning a car and insurance, according to the National Travel Survey. On top of that, rent increases and house prices have forced many young employees further out of towns and cities, too far to walk or bike to work. They need reliable journeys that don’t make them look flaky to bosses.

Trains are environmentally justifiable and save on inner-city parking space; they should provide time to read and relax and entice older people out of their cars. Yet new rolling stock isn’t made for comfort: the seats are hard, the carriages heaving. Train travel has become an ordeal……