Fare pain for little gain on the trains

Commuters in the North will face massive hikes in rail fares but will not reap the benefits after the Government announced only 100 of 650 new carriages to tackle overcrowding are en route.

The Government says commercial sensitivity stops them announcing exactly where the rolling stock will go but a Department for Transport source said Northern Rail which operates the local and inter-urban services in the North and First Transpennine Express are expected to receive 100 between them.

Transport secretary Philip Hammond denied the North was losing out to the South and said everyone would benefit. But he rejected calls from Southport MP John Pugh to publish a regional analysis.

Mr Hammond confirmed that London’s Thameslink project will go ahead in its entirety at a total capital cost of around £6bn, as will £900m of rail electrification projects on lines between London and Didcot, Newbury and Oxford as well as between Liverpool, Manchester, Preston and Blackpool.

In addition Mr Hammond said there would be 2,100 new rail carriages on the network by May, 2019.

But only 650 of them will be delivered by 2014 — far fewer than the 1,300 promised by the Labour government, which he said was “not so much a plan as a press release”.

Defending the fare rises Mr Hammond said: “I readily acknowledge that there will be nobody out there in the commuting fraternity welcoming the increase in the cap on regulated fares that we have proposed for 2012 to 2015.

“But this is one of the tough decisions that we have had to make in order to protect the investment programme in our railways.”

Michael Roberts, chief executive of the Association of Train Operating Companies, said: “The real question marks remain over whether key commuter routes in other parts of the country will be receiving enough new carriages quickly enough to deal with overcrowding.”