It’s been a pretty grim week to be a rail traveller in this region with a weekend of engineering work making it tough for leisure travellers followed by the almost inevitable “engineering over-run” hitting commuters on Monday morning.

Frankly the last few days has shown that rail passengers in this region get a poor deal in third class trains for first class fares – and that is simply not right.

In saying this, I must absolve current rail operator from most of the blame. Abellio Greater Anglia is caught in the middle of monumental incompetence at the Department for Transport and mind-blowing inefficiency at Network Rail.

Let’s take the Network Rail issue first. Once again we’ve had major engineering followed by over-runs which threw the whole system into chaos on a Monday morning. The one seems to follow the other as sure as night follows day.

And yet no one is held to account. No one in the engineering planning department is sacked or even disciplined (so far as we know).

Network Rail doesn’t seem to care about the passengers. Why should it? It’s the poor rail operating companies like Abellio Greater Anglia that act as their shield to keep them from the wrath of the public.

But Network Rail’s inadequacies are not the reason for the sub-standard trains that ferry passengers around in this region – and I had a dramatic demonstration of just how bad they are at the weekend.

I travelled from Manningtree to Sussex (Ipswich station was closed because of the above-mentioned engineering).

The train that took us to London was 25-year-old electric unit (a 321 for fellow rail nerds out there) with no air-conditioning, knackered seating, and the general smell of months of sweat.

The train that took me from Victoria to East Grinstead was a much newer design – a Class 377 for the nerds – with air conditioning, comfortable seats, and a much smoother ride. It really showed up how poor our trains are!

So surely we should blame Abellio? Wrong. This region has twice suffered from major Department for Transport foul-ups.

The last Labour government mucked up the East Coast franchise, resulting in National Express over-bidding, pulling out of the deal, and ultimately leading to major delays in the awarding of other franchises.

Then the current government wanted to show that it was just as capable of messing things up when it came to franchise awards, fouling up the West Coast deal.

The result is the long-term franchise for this region was put off from 2012 to 2014 and now 2016. Abellio cannot raise hundreds of millions of pounds to buy new trains for a two-year franchise so even if tracks do get sorted we’ll have grotty trains until the 2020s!