Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.1; U; en-us) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413 es61i)

And meanwhile, travellers from outside Central London, connecting at Watford and Milton Keynes have vastly increased journey times, thanks to the lack of stops at connecting points, all to shave a few minutes off the journey times to/from London.

Commuters on London Midland are now left with a vastly understaffed service (thanks to the unwelcome transfer of semi-fast services to Crewe and Brum to them), and have levels of cancellations and delays that even First Great Western at its worst would have blushed at (but, of course, the press is only concerned at 10 minute savings from Euston).

The same is happening with EMT, and is soon set to happen with NXEC and FCC. Every last semblance of the railways being anything approaching a public service is being finally eroded.

Another chip away at the veneer of civilisation in this country in the name of profit. Happy New Year.