Intercity Service update

We are sorry that in recent weeks we have frequently suffered short formations on a number of intercity services (with some services operating with eight carriages instead of nine). We fully understand the frustration that has resulted from the subsequent crowding. The problems have been caused by a series of unusual and unexpected carriage faults occurring all at once, exacerbated by the late return of some carriages from their heavy maintenance programme. We are implementing four very specific actions to address this problem :

Our maintenance team is focusing additional resources on getting carriages back into service in the short term. They have already significantly improved the position (with more carriages now back in traffic) and are committed to maintaining that progress during the difficult autumn season.

We are trying to re-schedule elements of the heavy maintenance programme in a way that helps day-to-day carriage availability.

We are working through changes to the day-to-day maintenance regime to free up more carriages (not a quick solution, but one that should start to bring benefits within a couple of months).

We will be leasing some additional carriages, which will need some initial modifications before they can be used in service, but which should provide greater resilience over the coming weeks and months.

We apologise again for those occasions when customers' journeys have been adversely affected by trains being a carriage short. We believe these actions and investments will progressively improve the consistency of service delivery for our intercity services.