AS a transport planner in the rail industry, I would like to reply to your correspondent’s suggestion that having the Metrolink system extended to Bolton might have helped during the recent poor levels of performance on the local rail network.

Whilst I couldn’t agree more that the recent levels of service through Bolton have been appalling, improvements to the current heavy rail service is most definitely the answer. The Metrolink system connects the city centre to the suburbs of Manchester (and indeed towns on former heavy rail branch lines such as Bury and Oldham) very well, with regular service intervals and increased connectivity.

Buses, too, can offer competitive journey options on some shorter routes; however, trains and trams cannot run on the same tracks. For a town such as Bolton on a through mainline and twelve miles away from Manchester, a light rail transit system replacing the current heavy rail system with routes to Blackburn, Wigan, Preston and beyond would not be beneficial. For longer journeys, trams would offer a slower alternative, with prohibitive journey times between Bolton and Manchester and a loss of the many through services currently available. For Horwich and Blackrod, the area I represent, this would be disastrous as the current scheduled journey time to Manchester of half an hour would be vastly increased.

Nonetheless, I absolutely understand your correspondent’s frustrations. Residents who use local train services are by now used to overcrowded, old train carriages turning up at the railway stations of the borough of Bolton.

Yet the promise of improved services in the long term, with tangible signs of electrification in progress (albeit two years behind schedule) gives us hope for the future. Until recently, on the majority of days, the daily commute is pretty reliable and trains tend to turn up within ten minutes of the advertised time, which commuters on the whole will accept. Passengers don’t expect to get a seat and the default position is that there will be no service at weekends or late at night due to the ongoing engineering works which are needed to bring about the faster, cleaner, newer services that await us, with the increased capacity that this will bring.

However, we can only tolerate so much; anyone who has used the train in the Bolton area over the six weeks on a regular basis has met with daily cancelled, severely delayed and short formed trains on both legs of their daily journey – the service has been absolutely diabolical. In this regard, I wrote to Northern Rail primarily on behalf of the constituents I represent who use Blackrod, Horwich Parkway, Lostock and Bolton stations, but also for everyone who uses rail services in the wider Bolton area.

I expressed in no uncertain terms that the current standard of service is completely unacceptable and the answer I received from Northern Rail acknowledged this, with a recovery programme having been put in place to bring the service back to an acceptable standard.

While we hang on to the promise of an improved railway in the future, people still require an acceptable service until this time in order to go about their daily business.

Councillor Stephen Pickup

Horwich and Blackrod ward