Welcome to the Midland Misery Line
East Midlands Railway is falling apart - but no one at DFT seems to care
I do a lot of miles every week on the Midland Mainline, and the service is falling apart.
The trains are squalid. The toilets don’t work, the doors don’t work, the windows are blown. Too often several carriages have air-conditioning that doesn’t work. You end up standing like cattle on a shortened train.
And the service is dire. In the last two weeks only half of trains have arrived on time. A quarter were late, and fully a quarter were either cancelled or very late (over half an hour):
Delays caused by problems with the trains are at record levels:
And yet, it was all supposed to be so good. New shiny trains were going to arrive in 2022 and our service was supposed to get better. What went wrong?
Several things.
First, the new trains didn’t turn up on time - delays in production from Hitachi meant the new trains were hugely delayed. The order placed in 2019 has seen trains only finally arriving in 2026. That is mainly on Hitachi. I would love to believe that DFT have made someone pay a huge penalty for this, but I am not holding my breath.
The result is that there are still just a handful of new trains running so far, with most of the services still provided by the old ones.
Second, despite the fact that the new trains hadn’t turned up, and it had been known for several years that they would not turn up, despite this, DFT still allowed some of the existing trains to be sent away to other places anyway.
That’s when things got really bad.
At the end of 2025 and early 2026 five trains went off to Lumo in Scotland to run a new service.
This disastrous decision means there is zero slack in the service. It means the remaining trains they do have are in constant use. That in turn has made it nigh-on impossible to maintain these old trains, which are being hammered.
That’s why the toilets don’t work, the doors don’t work, the windows are blown and the air-conditioning doesn’t work, with passengers now melting in the summer heat.
Reliability has gone to pot with lots more cancellations, and trains that are half the length they should be - so people end up standing.
Third, there seem to be mysterious delays in getting the new trains into service, which no-one seems willing to talk about. Both prior to and after the recent tragic crash in which a driver was killed, several insiders have been in touch to talk about various problems. Some of these may stem from DFT fiddling with the design: compared to similar trains elsewhere they have made them shorter to fit in the too-short platforms at St Pancras (aaargh).
Making the trains shorter has caused them to have to completely re-engineer the whole thing. Related to all this, there seem to be complexities about coupling up the new trains which may be limiting the rollout of the new trains (lots of services are supposed to be two five-car units coupled together).
The RMT are now balloting on strike action relating to these issues with the new trains, but no-one involved seems to want to talk in public.
The upshot of all this is that people are paying a fortune for a terrible service: a season ticket from Market Harborough costs over £10,000 a year - and we are only an hour north of London. It’s £12,000 from Nottingham, or a whopping £17,000 from Sheffield.
Knee-jerk answers won’t do here. We can’t just “spend more” - the problems are actually being caused by a large (but botched) investment.
Likewise, nationalisation fans will probably say taking the franchises into public ownership will solve all this. I am less convinced. Labour are not taking the companies that own the rolling stock into public ownership, and the screw up here (allowing our trains to go elsewhere with no replacement) was a decision by the very same unaccountable DFT officials who will be running more of the railway system in future.
I also generally find the operator (EMR) much more responsive than the massive National Rail bureaucracy. Example: if you come to Market Harborough railway station one side of the path is run by EMR and is covered in flower boxes (provided by Market Harborough in Bloom), but the side owned by Network Rail is all derelict, because, despite years of asking, they haven’t allowed the same access for the volunteers on their side. Its a little visible example of how large nationalised entities are not always very responsive.
Conclusions
I would love to believe that lessons will be learned, but nothing I have heard back on this from DFT so far makes me think that they are learning anything.
There is a threat that things will get worse - for starters we may get strike action. And the remaining trains are due to leave during the course of the year: I now have no confidence in DFT not to stop that from happening.
I really feel for the EMR staff on trains and stations, having to deal with angry passengers and day after day of chaos which they did not cause.
But above all I feel sorry for my constituents who use the railway - at the moment we are being kept in the dark with no plan. EMR, Hitachi and ministers at the DFT are all staying tight lipped as we sweat it out on a failing service.
When are our new trains actually turning up in service in greater numbers? When will things get better? If we are going to be waiting a while, couldn’t DFT find us some more trains from somewhere?
This is no way to run a railway.
Half the time First doesn’t even have hot water for tea and coffee, which is basically the only reason for paying for an upgrade. Staff are embarrassed by the service they have to offer.
On the plus side, I am able to expense my regular London trips and with the frequent delays the compensation claims are a little side hustle
In the late 1970s some think-tank published a paper about electoral preferences that contained both an obvious result and a non-obvious corollary of extraordinary importance:
#1 People who owned houses, cars, share-based pension accounts voted for right-wing policies more than people who rented houses, used public transport, had defined-benefit pensions.
#2 This happened regardless of the income and status level of the voters.
That is working-class people on low incomes and low status but owned however tiny a house, battered a car, small share-based pension account became ("dry") tories.
So thatcherism started to dominate politics and all government since Thatcher and Blair have been undermining "socialist" policies for social housing, for public transport, for defined benefit pensions.
Of the 3 the biggest effect on torification is from housing ownership (when prices and rents are booming), but having a car instead of using public transport also has a significant effect.
So it seems that our blogger is a socialist as he worries about "losers" who use public transport but admittedly he has an excuse: the cost of commuting to well-paid jobs in London has a huge effect on property prices along the "Midland Misery Line" and therefore on the torification of the residents.