A TORY MSP was last night accused of using misleading figures to accuse the Borders Railway of poor punctuality.
Rachael Hamilton, Tory list MSP for the South of Scotland, went on the website of ITV Borders to accuse the Borders Railway run by Abellio ScotRail of “hugely underperforming” after its latest monthly punctuality figures appeared to show that in the four weeks to Saturday, June 25, only 42.2 per cent of trains arrived at the Tweedbank terminus on time.
Hamilton said commuters had been “consistently and persistently” let down by the Borders Railway.
The accusation brought a swift response from Abellio ScotRail, which pointed out that the way of calculating punctuality had changed and that it was now publishing a figure representing trains that arrive within 59 seconds of the scheduled time instead of five minutes, as before. That figure for arrivals at Tweedbank was indeed 42.2 per cent against a target figure of 64.8 per cent.
However, by the other previous measurement – the one used across the rail network called Public Performance Measure (PPM), which allows arrivals within five minutes of schedule – the Borders Railway in June was on time 86.1 per cent of the time, against a target of 93 per cent.
Scottish Borders Council leader David Parker, a strong supporter and regular user of the Borders Railway, said: “The MSP seems to have not realised the changes made by ScotRail to the way they calculate the punctuality.
“There is no question that the figure she uses is unfair and misleading, and as a regular user I can say that the punctuality is pretty good.
“The fact is that we have a fantastic new railway that is on course to carry double the numbers that were expected.”
ITV Borders also corrected the story on its website after ScotRail issued the following statement: “For the four weeks in question, we experienced two points failures plus one instance where a train had to be removed from service due to a fault with one of the doors.
"On another occasion a train was cancelled due to a driver being unavailable at short notice due to illness. These four incidents generated the most delays.”
ScotRail’s website states: “We work as part of an alliance with Network Rail to continually make our train services more reliable and run on time. All our services are monitored every day, including Sundays and Bank Holidays.
“The standard measure throughout Great Britain for measuring train service performance is the PPM. It is made up of two distinct elements – punctuality and reliability.
“Punctuality is measured as the percentage of our trains that have arrived at their final destination within five minutes of the advertised time. When a specially advertised revised timetable is in operation, at times of engineering work for example, we are measured against the revised times.
“Reliability is measured as the percentage of our advertised train services that operate.
“Abellio took the decision to publish On Time data as well as PPM when they took over the franchise in April 2015.”
A ScotRail Alliance spokeswoman said: “We believe customers should have access to On Time information, as well as the industry standard figures, so we publish both on our website and at stations.
“We do our utmost to keep passengers moving and only cancel trains when we have exhausted every alternative. On this occasion, we did not meet our targets but will continue our efforts to improve.”
The National was unable to contact Hamilton for comment.
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