The Monday morning blog no. 1: another National Express cancellation

I have just arrived at Newcastle Central Station to find my train to London is, yet again, cancelled by National Excess. This has been caused by a "train failure". Should this be a National Express company failure? I have had more cancellations of my train since National Excess took over the East Coast line 6 months ago than I had in the whole of the 8 years before then.

It means there will be a battle on the next train to get a seat. It also means a much longer journey. The next service takes nearly half an hour longer to get to London.

I wouldn't put National Excess in charge of a Hornby trainset, never mind a real one.

The next train has now arrived. To make matters worse, we are being told that the train I have just got onto was actually my service but it is being converted to the much slower next service. And we are now being told that the reason for the cancellation of my service is a "set shortage" - that is technical, gobshite talk for not having enough trains. Quite how we are supposed to encourage more people to travel by train rather than by car with such a crap train operator running one of the main services is beyond me.

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