Time to shunt failing rail operator TransPennine Express into a siding - David Behrens

The route in question is operated by First Group, the people who brought you the 48 bus to Morley. How this qualified them to be awarded one of the country’s potentially most valuable rail franchises no-one can say. But everyone seems to agree that they don’t know one end of a train from the other.

There is one thing their managers are good at, though, and that is playing the system. For months now they have exploited a loophole known in the industry as p-coding, or pre-cancellation. This allows them to withdraw services as late as 10pm the previous evening without affecting the punctuality record against which their performance is measured.

Had they done this just occasionally no-one might ever have noticed – but TransPennine Express has been hoodwinking customers and regulators on an industrial scale, regularly removing up to 30 per cent of its trains at almost the last minute, despite having sold tickets for them.

If a package holiday company behaved in this way – taking money for services it had no intention of running – it would be an open-and-shut case of fraud. Yet on the railways it’s considered a legitimate part of the system.

And it’s not just the management at TransPennine that has been taking liberties; their staff appear just as willing to abuse the system.

Absence rates among the company’s drivers are nearly seven times the national average, according to the rail minister, Huw Merriman, who claims some of them are calling in sick 30 times a year. A few will be genuinely ill but unless there’s an epidemic at Leeds station, the rest must be swinging the lead. And who’s to stop them? Their bosses are in no position to claim the moral high ground.

It’s obviously no way to run a railway and with all the revelations now out in the open there is no conceivable way the government can let it go on. It’s time to shunt TransPennine Express into a siding.

But will its nationalised replacement, the so-called Operator of Last Resort, perform any better? After all, disruption has become a part of the expected routine – so much so that when I typed ‘train’ on my phone this morning the predictive text feature selected ‘replacement’ as the next word.

Two years ago, we thought we had found a way forward, with the narcissistically-tiled Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail, authored by the former Transport Secretary and the businessman charged with reviewing the botched timetable roll-out of 2018.

It proposed bringing the network under a single, accountable leadership, giving operators incentives to increase passenger numbers, and doing away with the litany of ticket restrictions that compel people to travel only after 10pm on months with an R in them. It was supposed to be the biggest reorganisation of rail transport since the one orchestrated by Dr Beeching. But it appears to have been all but abandoned.

Last summer, its co-author, Grant Shapps, proposed another set of initiatives that would, he said, drag the rail unions into the 21st century and force the abandonment of restrictive practices. Train crews, he said, earned on average £44,000 a year and had a guarantee of no compulsory redundancies – so they weren’t on strike for better pay and conditions but for the right to carry on exactly as they did 30 years ago. The world had moved on; they could not be the only ones left behind.

He’s not wrong about that, but we are dealing here with an industry in which everyone – management and regulators as well as workers– have their snouts in the trough. And that’s not going to change until someone takes the trough away.

Stripping TransPennine Express of its franchise won’t in itself make the trains to Manchester run on time, but at least it will move the trough somewhere else. And that’s a start.

In 15 weeks’ time, another set of new timetables is due to be introduced and if the government really means business it will have indelibly erased the TransPennine Express name from the map by then.

The staff will welcome this; they will keep their jobs regardless. They may even suddenly get well. As for their bosses, they’ll be lucky to get jobs driving the 48 bus to Morley.