Engine trouble is not the only excuse Virgin is giving its passengers to explain why trains are not arriving on time.

One disgruntled York man claimed today he was told the train his niece was due to catch had been cancelled because a member of staff had not turned up for work in Newcastle.

Hugh MacPherson, of Wentworth Road, York, said he was expecting to put his 13-year-old niece on the 7.42am train from York to Plymouth yesterday, when he found out it would not be running.

Her alternative was to catch a Swansea train and change twice in order to reach her final destination of Gloucester, an option Mr MacPherson did not think was suitable for a 13-year-old girl.

Luckily he was able to arrange with a relative that she would be picked up at a different station so she could catch a direct train to Cheltenham, but he said: "My cousin had to drive an extra 30 miles to pick her up and she was more than an hour late.

"You can understand if Virgin blame the rolling stock, although they have been using that excuse for a long time, but with that level of responsibility, they should have a back-up in place if someone goes sick or does not turn up for work."

The incident is the latest in a series of embarrassments for the operator, including one in which a train ran out of diesel fuel a hundred miles short of its destination on a Newcastle to Bristol service.

A spokeswoman for Virgin said the scheduled train was vandalised the previous afternoon when a piece of concrete was thrown on to the windscreen.

The driver was so shaken that he could not work.

There was no replacement driver for the return Plymouth service, so instead of starting from Newcastle, it ran from Derby.

She said: "Anyone travelling from York to Plymouth could have got the 7.43am train, one minute later, and changed at Birmingham."

Every effort would have been made to find another driver.

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