WITH the new Worcester Parkway station due to open later this year, a lot of current rail users hope that the services through the city will get a lot better.

There is plenty for commuters to complain about; anyone who uses the railways regularly will experience one or more minor delays – say, up to 15 minutes – in most weeks.

And a couple of times a year, there will be more serious disruptions, with services being delayed – or even cancelled – one after another.

Reasons given for the delays have included mechanical failures on trains, faults with the signalling system or line-side equipment, shortage of train crews, and vandalism.

All these are things that the rail operating companies should be expected to deal with as a matter of course. They are the day-to-day difficulties to be expected if you are running a railway, and if you can’t cope with them, you should perhaps think about doing something else, instead of a operating public transport franchise.

But the new station, just outside Worcester at the junction of the Cotswold Line towards Oxford and London and the line linking Birmingham with Bristol and beyond, will represent a major change to the local transport infrastructure.

It has not yet been revealed how its impact will be reflected in the new timetables that the rail companies serving it – notably Great Western and Cross Country – must already be devising. But commuters, from and to Worcester, may well be waiting anxiously to see that the services they use are not sacrificed in favour of flashier, more glamorous (in so far that public transport can be glamorous) long-distance services.

Rail use is steadily increasing, we are told, and that can only be a good thing if it makes our roads less congested.

But these services must be properly financed, and if the government wants the railways to run smoothly, it must be prepared to provide the finance needed to make that happen, to ensure the companies are fully staffed, that they have the resources to keep their trains in working order, and that the services that ordinary people rely on to get to and from work, to visit relatives, and for dozens of other reasons, run smoothly.

Now that the powers-that-be have given us Parkway, perhaps they can concentrate on that.