Herefordshire trains making progress but remain "unreliable"
A number of other complaints described the state of trains as "filthy"
A senior figure from one of Herefordshire’s two rail operators has heard how some services remain "unreliable" and "filthy" by disgruntled customers.
Concerns about unreliable services and the cleanliness of trains were aired at a meeting in Leominster with West Midlands Railway head of performance Kelly Henshall.
Leominster Rail User Group secretary Jim Scott told the meeting trains from the town arrive into Hereford two minutes before outgoing Birmingham trains, meaning “you either run across the bridge, or you have a 59-minute wait”.
Local councillor Jenny Bartlett told the meeting, organised by the Green party, that rail operators “have two opportunities a year to sort this”. Ms Henshall said she would “take this back” to colleagues.
A local rail user who declined to be named said it would be “nice to go out for an evening and not worry about getting back home”. Yet there is “very rarely a bus replacement”, and a taxi ride home “costs you, the operator”, he added.
Rail & Bus for Herefordshire representative Jago Frost said that while he appreciated recent improvements in service reliability, the cleanliness of Birmingham-Hereford trains “has got worse”.
“They start the day with no soap in the toilets, and by the end of the day they are filthy,” he said.
“We want to keep our new trains nice and clean – and we get audited on this stuff,” Henshall added, but she maintained that overall, services are headed in the right direction.
“We have gone from 20 per cent of services cancelled last summer to 4 per cent now, and having sufficient train crews has been part of that,” she said.
Asked whether the recent crash between a Transport for Wales express train and a farm vehicle at a rail crossing near Leominster had caused WMR to look at how it operates services in rural areas, Ms Henshall said: “Safety is at the heart of everything we do, it’s part of our DNA. We recognise that a safe railway is a better performing railway.”
Mr Frost said afterwards: “It can be hard to find out who is responsible for what part of the service, so it was good they received our concerns today.”
And while welcoming the emphasis on expanding public transport in Herefordshire Council’s new draft transport plan for the county, he said previous such plans “have been poorly implemented, or not at all”.