What also irritates me, is that in my area the trains are usually very reliable and on-time. But they have just changed the time-table so the trains are sat around for ages.

For example, there was one service which was late by about 15 minutes once or twice a week. They just spread out the time-table by 15 minutes, so you spend ages sat at stations instead of moving which makes the car much much quicker.

Is that not because the regulators have forced them to?

My understanding is that they're penalised for late trains. Trains are usually late because of network problems, which are completely out of the control of the operators. Therefore, they've done the only thing they can. At least the times are more predictable, even if the service is now almost useless to you because it's so slow.

A week or so ago there were problems with the points at Watford which delayed a lot of trains. I was really annoyed because rather than get the trains through as quickly as they could, Midlands decided to cancel half of them so that the rest were "on time". I was sat in the station for over 30 minutes on what should have been the 10:10 but it turned into the 10:50. It would have been much quicker to have caught a later train that actually arrived earlier...

What we really need is "joined up thinking". Imagine how efficient things could be if the rail network and all the trains were run by one company. There would be no conflicts of interest, and we could have one great British rail system. Hmm. Why does that idea sound familiar..?