I look across the Thames this morning, in Windsor and Eton Riverside sits a train.  It is not the train it should be, it is not an “Arterio” train, which it should have been by 2019, it is some older thing which takes an hour to trave 25 miles to London Waterloo – when it’s travelling.

I go down on the train to see my elderly mother, it stops in Gillingham, the train is ancient – it is usually packed all the way to Yeovil and Exeter, that’s because it is usually shorter in length than it should be. Typically at weekends it gets converted to a bus service, it takes three and a half hours to travel 100 miles back to Waterloo when the bus in replacing train. There is no recompense nor very much warning.

There is no excuse either, other than there are shortages of drivers. Like the modern Arterio trains, drivers aren’t always running. This shambolic rail service – GWR- reminds us from time to time that we can go to a passenger forum to air our views, do they think we have time, after they have lost so much of ours?

SWR, which the Government has been nationalised less than five hours when I write this. It is one of the better off railway services. It was owned by First Group (about whose pension management I wrote good things yesterday – it’s not all bad!). It was solvent but everyone hated it under old management. Last weekend, I got a lift to Westbury and a train in to Paddington not wanting to waste three and a half hours on an SWT bus. I didn’t get a new ticket but knew I should so explained my situation to GWR’s ticket collector.

“Don’t worry , we won’t charge you extra, you’ve been badly treated enough”. We don’t want to be tarred with their brush.

That’s the truth, I got to London quicker than I normally would and GWR carried me free. That is my experience of SWR’s behaviour, take the money but not deliver the service. By laying on a bus to go the best part of 100 miles, they did not have to refund passengers.

I take this chart (thanks FT) as proof that First Group’s attitude to passengers has been less loss-making, mainly because an increasing number of people (like me) do not drive cars! We like collective modes of travel which save emissions of noxious substances!

But SWR still took my taxes to subsidise its service. The drivers who I speak to on SWR are furious with their management, so are the station staff, so their train customer staff.

The Arterio trains sit in sidings outside Clapham Junction  and elsewhere, awaiting deployments while some commuter lines round London are even worse served by way of trains than we are. If I want to get to London quick I can take GWR trains via Brunel’s master piece viaduct past Eton or use the new Elizabeth Line from Slough that takes me straight to the City and beyond.

SWR you are no longer owned by First Group, you should no longer be in dispute with your unions , you should get on with deploying new trains to match your rivals. There are of course worse operators but I don’t travel Cross Country, Northern and TfW. My heart goes out to their commuters, I wonder how we are surprised at British productivity levels when workers are stuck on platforms and delayed trains.

I have nothing to say about plans to bring together train operations and network maintenance under one management (Great British Railways) , this is not for me to comment on. I concur with Heidi Alexander – on the platform at SWR Bournemouth yesterday, reported by the FT

Asked whether she would commit to not interfering in the running of GBR, Alexander said: “I do not want to be the Fat Controller,” a reference to the fictional character in the Thomas & Friends television series. “I want experts to be running the railway.”