Travellers stranded as West Midlands train driver shortage continues
Tens of thousands of passengers are being stranded because West Midlands Railway has cancelled the last two services of the day.
Figures from the last month have laid bare the amount of trains being cancelled across the West Midlands.
Every day last week there were cancellations with chaos on Thursday when 31 of the final 46 services on lines through Snow Hill Station, Birmingham, did not run.
The situation left passengers scrambling to get back to the Black Country by bus or taxi.
Every train to The Hawthorns, Smethwick, Cradley Heath, Lye and Stourbridge from Birmingham was cancelled during rush hour, leaving commuters who traded in their cars for rail furious.
A snapshot of three days in late October showed there were nearly 200 service cancellations and the situation is so bad the Government is coming under pressure to remove the contract from operator Abellio.
West Midlands Railway has apologised, blaming a staff shortage.
Rail campaigners have warned the constant cancellations of trains will put off passengers from public transport for good.
An audit revealed more than 500 trains were cancelled in the West Midlands in just one week.
The Campaign for Rail is collating cancellations and warned of more problems this winter.
Its chairman Ian Jenkins said: “Some things are unavoidable like cable theft or a broken track but a lot of the problem is down to staff shortages. That is unacceptable because other train companies have coped and trained up drivers during the pandemic.
“It was absolute carnage on Thursday night, two thirds of the final 46 services were cancelled which leaves people stranded. The pattern is the last two services are often cancelled, this is just not on.
“The inability of people to plan or rely on train services leads to passengers walking away from public transport when we should be doing all we can to get them to use it for both post-pandemic and environmental reasons.”
A spokesman for West Midlands Railway said the disruption was due to a lack of drivers.
The company currently has 151 trainee drivers waiting to qualify and says the pandemic had delayed their start date.
“We are sorry for the recent disruption to services and the inconvenience this has been causing passengers," the spokesman said.
"The disruption is due to a shortage of available drivers and is a direct result of the impact Covid-19 on our training programmes.
“There are inadequate train crew resources to operate the volume of WMT services timetabled, effectively leading to a planned vulnerability daily with overtime being relied upon to reduce such susceptibility. Such an approach is not an acceptable way to operate and manage a train service.
“During the pandemic we lost 25,000 training days and have not been able to train our new staff as quickly as normal. As more drivers qualify in coming months our resourcing position will stabilise.
“We always cover as many services as possible with overtime but unfortunately we will sometimes have no choice but to cancel services. We urge anyone whose journey is delayed by 15 minutes or more to claim compensation through our Delay Repay scheme.”
