Cutting the number of trains as part of its nationalisation plans would be a cop out by Labour - Andrew Vine

There will be fewer trains to avoid last-minute cancellations, and in what looks disturbingly like capitulation to rail unions which have inflicted such misery on passengers with strikes dragging on for a year, timetables will only schedule services that they will guarantee to staff.

Sunday services that rely on voluntary overtime working would be particularly badly affected, which is a backward step because an increase in weekend leisure travellers is one of the few railway success stories of recent years.

Labour’s reasoning appears to be that if there are fewer services, cancellations are less likely and punctuality will improve. Sorry, but this sounds like a con trick. Telling passengers that scarcer services are somehow better for them is absurd.

It’s an attempt to massage an unacceptable state of affairs to make it look less bad, rather like the cynical stunt the hopeless TransPennine Express pulled to disguise how awful its services were by cancelling at the last minute to avoid including them in the daily tally of trains that didn’t run.

If Labour is to command the confidence of passengers that it can make real improvements after years of services that let them down and inflicted incalculable damage to businesses whose staff could not get to work, it has to do much better than this.

Yorkshire’s passengers deserve, and should demand, a wholesale rethink from the party increasingly confident of forming the next Government.

In its turn, Labour ought to acknowledge that our region has suffered more than any other part of the country from the woeful, ramshackle circus that has passed for a rail service over the course of most of the past decade, and that should spur it into coming up with proper improvements.

Last year, Huddersfield was named the worst station in the UK for cancellations, and not long before that, Slaithwaite, with its platforms full of stranded, frustrated passengers became emblematic of everything that was going wrong on the railways.

Our problems have only been aggravated by the widespread feeling that the railways have become a national embarrassment and nobody in government has a clue what to do about them.

That was demonstrated by the ill-conceived plan to make passengers’ lives yet more difficult by closing ticket offices at stations, which would have caused particular problems for the elderly or disabled.

The proposal was only abandoned after a massive public outcry and objections from charities who rightly pointed out that the closures would make using the railways impossible for some people.

And making everything worse have been the interminable strikes by the rail unions, which drivers belonging to Aslef are continuing in what can only be seen as intransigence for its own sake.

Given the inconvenience heaped on passengers, it is a wonder that so many continue to rely on the trains to get them to and from work.

But if the regular commuters I know are typical, they only do so through gritted teeth because driving, and especially parking, costs too much.

Not that going by rail can remotely be described as cheap. Fares rose yet again in March, by 4.9 per cent, and Britain’s passengers are charged the third-highest prices in Europe after Norway and Austria for the privilege of travelling on services which are still either subject to cancellation at short notice or overcrowded.

If Labour wants the votes of Yorkshire’s rail passengers, cutting services and giving the final say on which trains will run to the unions won’t win them.

The railways should operate for the convenience of the paying public, not for their employees.

And convenience for the commuters of Yorkshire means more services, not fewer, which will inevitably result in worse overcrowding.

Those passengers have every right to expect four basic things from their railways – frequency, reliability, punctuality and capacity.