Why Yorkshire is the railway equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle - Andrew Vine

Okay, this is a facetious take on the ordeal endured daily by passengers in Yorkshire, but it’s accurate even so and borne out by official figures that show the area around Huddersfield is the worst place in the country to travel by train.

Of the 10 stations in Britain where trains were least likely to be on time last year, we’ve got six of them, four close to Huddersfield. No other region comes even close to being as badly-served as Yorkshire.

Taken together, Ravensthorpe, Dewsbury, Slaithwaite and Deighton amount to everything that is wrong with railways in the north – and the lack of action to fix them.

In Ravensthorpe, only slightly more than half of trains ran on time, the worst performance in the country. In Dewsbury, the figure was 52 per cent. Our old friend Slaithwaite, byword for utterly appalling services thanks to the timetable fiasco of a few years ago that made it a national emblem of a broken network, had 55 per cent. Deighton was slightly better, achieving almost 60 per cent.

Two other Yorkshire stations also put in appearances. Cottingley managed just over 51 per cent and Micklefield 54.6.

This dismal tally is from the Office of Rail and Road figures for cancellations and late-running services. Nationally, there were 217,000 trains cancelled last year, with a further 165,000 part-cancellations, which meant they failed to serve at least one of their scheduled stops.

What the figures did not reveal is the undoubtedly massive numbers of passengers inconvenienced, upset or stranded as a result.

It won’t be lost on regular passengers marooned in the Huddersfield Triangle that for the privilege of their trains failing to turn up, or running late, they are now paying 4.6 per cent more, fares having gone up a couple of days before the figures were published.

For reliability this poor, those fares should have been slashed, never mind hiked. At the very least, the increase ought to have been put on hold until there is a vast improvement in performance.

Instead, the government’s response to the figures has been an exercise in performative PR-driven pointlessness, with an undercurrent of slippery evasiveness over shouldering blame for the mess the north’s railways are in.

Stations will display the percentage of trains arriving within three minutes of their scheduled time and the number of services that have been cancelled.

Oh, great. That’s really going to be a big help to somebody stuck on the platform at Slaithwaite or Ravensthorpe isn’t it? All it does is rub passengers’ noses in it that the services they rely on to get to work and home again are hopelessly unreliable.

And here comes the slippery evasiveness, from Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander who said the displays heralded “a new era of rail accountability”. It’s effectively a policy of naming and shaming badly-performing train operators.

But for those in the Huddersfield Triangle, the train operator is the government.

Both Northern and TransPennine Express, which serve the worst-performing stations, are nationalised. There is nobody to name and shame for their failings apart from Ms Alexander and the department over which she presides.

That fact was glossed over in the announcement, which amounts to an attempt to evade responsibility, particularly since Northern is now into its fifth year of public ownership but has made grindingly slow progress towards improving its performance.

Even the much-heralded trans-Pennine route upgrade – welcome though it is – may not sort out all the problems. As a letter from the Slaithwaite and Marsden Action on Rail Transport group published in The Yorkshire Post last week pointed out, it is far from certain that local services will be better or more frequent.

What is certain from the cancellations and late-running figures is that services across substantial parts of Yorkshire are no better now than they have been for a decade or more.

Empty gestures like displaying a mass of useless information on screens at stations won’t change that.