MPs warn of more cattle wagon misery for rail travellers

The Department for Transport's (DfT) latest plans showed that all the relevant targets for increasing the number of passenger places on trains by March 2014 will be missed.

There will be 15 per cent fewer extra places delivered in London in the morning peak and 33 per cent fewer into other major cities.

This is in comparison with the numbers the DfT stated would be needed just to hold overcrowding at current levels, the report from the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee said.

The report said it was "not clear to passengers where the money from increased fares has been spent".

On some parts of the South-eastern franchise, where high-speed Javelin services operate, "passengers are paying premium fares to support new services which do not stop at their stations and do little to alleviate overcrowding on the trains they use", the MPs said.

The committee said the DfT's knowledge of how many people use which parts of the rail network and when was "inadequate and sketchy".

The MPs recommended that the DfT should require all new train carriages to be fitted with automatic passenger counting equipment to show how many people are travelling on what trains and when.

Rail franchisees should provide "useful and verifiable data" from the counting exercise, the committee said.

The report said the current round of planning had relied heavily on buying extra carriages and on extending platforms to accommodate longer trains "but this approach cannot go on indefinitely".

The MPs said: "Clearly, alternatives must be found to meet the capacity challenge in the future. The Dft should vigorously pursue and promote smart ticketing and other demand management techniques to reduce the inefficiencies of overcrowding in peak hours and underused rolling stock at other times."

The committee's chairman Margaret Hodge MP said: "This committee is concerned that, for commuters, the already unacceptable levels of overcrowding will simply get worse and ever more intolerable.

"At present there is no incentive for the rail industry to supply extra capacity without additional public subsidy."