MEDIA reports of John Prescott's recent "riot act" meeting with Britain's train operators appears to pin the blame for all delays on the latter.

But a recent rail industry magazine article revealed that only 25 per cent of delays to each train operator's services were directly attributable to that operator.

Most delays were due to Acts of God, vandalism, trespass, the knock-on effect of other operator's delays and failures of infrastructure such as points and signals belonging to Railtrack, but maintained by various contractors.

Even train breakdowns cannot always be attributed to train operators. Most of their rolling stock is leased from the "fat cat" rolling stock operators which the last Tory government created and sold railway assets to at knock-down prices.

Some operators like Northern Spirit want to keep running Transpennine-style trains with only two or three coaches, but at a greater frequency to ease present overcrowding.

To meet these aspirations, Railtrack must iron out infamous rail bottlenecks like Leeds Station and invest in new signalling to create more train paths along congested routes.

Railtrack is regenerating a lot of stations across the UK, and creating better security, lighting, cycle parking and disabled access.

Well done, but it must not be at the expense of the "nuts and bolts" side of the business, otherwise we will continue to read about local railway engineering companies like Adtranz Signal, laying off professional design staff.

Paul F Hepworth,

Windmill Rise,

Holgate,

York.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.