YEP says: Who will take responsibility for running Leeds trains on time and with enough carriages?

SIX months after The Yorkshire Evening Post teamed up up with rival newspapers across the North to challenge the Government about the chaos on the region's railways, services here remain a national embarrassment.
Transport Secretary Chris Grayling.Transport Secretary Chris Grayling.
Transport Secretary Chris Grayling.

Still this newspaper, and others, await a full and satisfactory response from Theresa May and her Downing Street team to the unprecedented joint editorial. And far from punctuality and reliability gradually improving as train operators – and others – respond to May’s timetable turmoil, services run by Northern and TransPennine Express have continued to deteriorate. And this makes the continuing contempt of Chris Grayling even more unforgivable after a Parliamentary inquiry confirmed yesterday that the Transport Secretary should have done more to assist passengers rather than absolving himself of direct responsibility.

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Maintaining the pretence that he has apologised “many, many times” already, and does need to do so again, Mr Grayling should be coming to Yorkshire, seeing the situation for himself, justifying next month’s fare increase and saying sorry to all those passengers whose lives are still being disrupted.

They’re people who just want to get to work on time. They want to get home on time at the end of the day. And they want to be able to rely upon the trains to travel around the North.

And that’s not much to ask of a railway service in the year 2018.