February 8 - email reply

Thank you for your email of 25 January 2011. I am sorry for the problems you had on your journeys with us from Wargrave and London Paddington on 17 and 21 January. Our 07:17 service arrived 49 minutes late at London Paddington due to an earlier signal problem on 17 January and on 21 January this service arrived 13 minutes late due to a points failure at Maidenhead. I apologise for the inconvenience these delays caused you.

The start of the last period was challenging for us with some frozen and icy conditions. Although we were pleased that we managed to maintain a service through this bad weather, some of our trains were delayed or cancelled. Our service has also been affected by 2 major disruptions recently - some bricks fell on the line from the Sapperton Tunnel and one of our High Speed Trains hit a herd of cows. Both of these things caused considerable delays throughout the day and badly affected our performance.

We are continuing to experience far too many signal and track problems and we are discussing this with Network Rail at a very senior level. Network Rail have put an action plan in place to resolve these problems and have also made some changes to their business helping them to deliver a better service to us and our customers. We will continue to support them with this and we are confident that the improvements they have made in the last few weeks will continue into the New Year.

Despite a recent overall improvement in performance, punctuality in the London and Thames Valley area is just not good enough at the moment. We are working really hard to bring it back to a level that our customers have every right to expect and I am sorry for the inconvenience you have been caused.