Over the last few weeks we have seen first the unravelling and then the partial restoration, of critical rail service in the Lake District.

I am of course referring to the lakes line service which was first suspended and then (partially) restored by Northern rail, as it grappled with the problem of servicing the new timetable.

The difficulties with Northern rail are not new.

John Woodcock, the MP for Barrow has highlighted, through his public Connecting Cumbria meetings, the failings of Northern over many months. As he pointed out in the June meeting, and I was happy to reinforce, our complaints about poor service seem to have been ignored by Government. It is only when the service breaks down completely do we seem to get the London’s attention.

My analysis of this sorry saga is that it is not wholly Northern’s fault. Central government are also culpable. They awarded the contract to Northern against local rail user advice, they ignored our repeated complaints, they appear not to have strong monitoring of actual against expected performance, and they chose to disregard Northern’s expressed discomfort with the new timetables.

The communications seem broken. On June 4th Chris Grayling the Secretary of State said in parliament that he would not allow the suspension of the Lakes Line beyond 2 weeks. Three days later I was at a meeting in which Northern said it would be 4-5 weeks. Such “miscommunication” is deeply embarrassing.

Lisa Nandy’s question to the Prime Minister on the subject shone a light on how some people in Whitehall seem to view us in the North. ( If you have not seen the clip, take a look on You Tube. It is illuminating.)

And now we learn the the Government is considering taking over a non performing rail network (run by Govia Thameslink )in the South, but not ours in the North.

Through several people’s ineptitude, we in the Lakes were left with no rail service along the Lakes Line during June. However, all was not lost. Thanks to the efforts of Tim Farron our MP, the Lakes Line User Group and West Coast railways a shuttle service filled in the rail void. But as Tim said it should not have been left up to him, his office and volunteers to fix this. It could and should have been done by Northern or the Department of Transport themselves.