First the good news - they wanted to see me,and are clearly trying to improve their service and customer relations. The current timetable left many people in my area frustrated, because there were too few trains, and too few seats on the trains that did run. It was a local illustration of a national problem - insufficient rail capacity. We are promised 6 trains a hour at peaks from Reading to London and back, and 4 trains an hour during peaks from Twyford to Paddington and back, 3 of them fast, for the new timetable late this year.

Now the bad news. They are still planning their railway on the assumption that they will only be able to get 20 trains an hour into Paddington, the eastern terminus of the Great Western railway. They are spending large sums on refurbishing old diesel train sets that are far too heavy, forcing large gaps between trains to allow for slow braking and poor acceleration. The new engines will be a bit more fuel efficient, but the whole package remains wasteful of fuel. The matter was so unimportant to the industry that my guests could neither tell me the horsepower nor the fuel efficiency of the engines they are fitting. The new trains and the refurbished trains still have no restraints to keep luggage safe if the train suddenly brakes or crashes. There will be no seat belts on the new or refurbished express trains.

??The railway needs to lift its game. It is feasible to halve the weight of our older trains with new equipment that would be so much more fuel efficient. This would enable many more trains an hour to use the tracks with suitable signal adjustments to allow for the improved safety performance of newer lighter trains.

The railway industry is falling further behind the motor industry in its approach to emissions and safety. No car maker is allowed to sell a vehicle without a secure boot for luggage and without seat belts. Cars have to meet increasingly tight emissions standards. No-one would think of taking 15 year or 20 year old cars and giving them a facelift so they could work for another 15 years. Modern cars are so much safer and cleaner than cars of a couple of decades ago, yet trains are stuck in a time warp.

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