TRAINS running on the East Anglian mainline did not hit targets for being on time, new figures reveal.

Anthony Bond

TRAINS running on the East Anglian mainline did not hit targets for being on time, new figures reveal.

National Express East Anglia's target for trains arriving at all their booked stations and reaching their final destination within 10 minutes of the scheduled time is 88%.

But in the four weeks leading up to June 21, the train operator achieved just 82.8%.

Commuters have endured a horrendous month which started with passengers facing heavy delays after a new bridge collapsed at London Liverpool Street station at the end of May.

On Monday June 9 overhead power lines at Ingatestone came crashing down which resulted in severe delays and cancellations. Three workmen repairing the line were involved in a horrific accident two days later which further disrupted commuters.

Neil Skinner, vice-chairman of the Essex Rail Users Federation, said he thought the service was very poor at the moment. “It has been a complete nightmare in the past few weeks and there have been all sorts of problems. The overall problem is that everybody is playing catch-up after forty years of under investment and everything is falling apart. I think that will be a while before we can expect a decent service unfortunately.”

A spokesman for National Express East Anglia said: We are working together with Network Rail to focus on delivering improvements to our train service performance and to address last month's disruption and prevent such incidents in the future. Over the past year we have seen encouraging trends with improvements to train service performance and we are concentrating all of our efforts on delivering the standards of service that our customers expect and deserve.”