Barry: Get our village train service back on track

Jul 1 2009 By Barry Gibson

Still, at least it’s only £1.10 from Slaithwaite to Huddersfield. If you go the other way, you’ll be expected to fork out £7.90 for the pleasure of travelling all the way to Manchester Victoria.

It’s almost as if Northern Rail is begging you to use the M62.

Such are the joys of travelling on one of the neglected suburban lines of 21st century Britain.

Spend too long on trains in the Colne Valley and you’ll start to doubt that this is, in fact, one of the richest countries in the world.

All this would be slightly less annoying were it not for the fact that the railway system receives a massive public subsidy each year. So the poor old passenger is hit in the pocket twice – first as a taxpayer and then again as a fare-payer, facing above-inflation ticket price rises year after year.

And for all this money we get the worst railway system in western Europe. OK, I admit it, I haven’t been on trains in every other country at this end of the continent. But I would be very surprised if any of them were as bad as Britain’s.

When I went to Brussels last December the real culture shock was not having to use my GCSE French – it was the trains. They were clean and pleasant. The tickets were reasonably priced.

And the trains didn’t just arrive on time – they arrived early. Imagine that. It was like being in the 21st Century.

But back in Slaithwaite, the train system has more in common with the village’s Victorian mills than with the modern world.

When I saw that pile of dog excrement on the shelter floor, I couldn’t help but stare. It was only a small thing of course – a moment of selfishness by a dog-owner without a plastic bag.

But the fact that the mess was just lying there festering made me angry that we passengers don’t matter enough to anyone to deserve a clean station.

That smell, for me, was the smell of privatised railways.

Re-nationalisation can’t come soon enough.