IF you travel by rail to or from Worcester, delays and even cancellations will be an all-too-frequent part of your life.

“Slippery rails” was the memorable reason, or excuse, for a delay heard by one of my colleagues just the other day.

But “congestion”, “a fault on the train”, “signalling failure” and “lack of train crew” are things that commuters will be wearily used to, with “animals on the line”, a “fire by the trackside” and “a disturbance on the train” being heard less frequently .

Both companies that run services through the city, Great Western and West Midlands, must bear a portion of blame for this state of affairs, but so must Network Rail, which is charged with maintaining the network.

No system can be perfect, and breakdowns and problems will occur in even the best-maintained transport network, but does it have to be so frequent?

Sometimes, I have even heard fellow commuters murmur that not one of the services they have used in a given week has been on time.

Rail travel, especially commuter travel, is not cheap, and regular travellers can be forking over a fairly large chunk of their income on the service.

It is not too much to expect, therefore, that the service is reasonably reliable, and that delays or cancellations are not part of most travellers’ everyday existence.

But what makes the delay or cancellation much worse is when the train operator or whoever cannot or will not provide accurate information about the delay or what is being done about it.

In these days when almost every smartphone carried a Global Positioning System chip, there is no excuse for rail operators not to be able to tell us exactly where the delayed service is. And if they can manage that, surely they can tell us when it’s going to arrive.

Giving disgruntled commuters accurate information will at least allow them to phone the office or loved ones, telling them they will be late for work or late for dinner, or whatever.

The number of rail journeys has doubled over the last 20 years, and over half of all rail journeys are commuting, so the demand for rail travel is there.

Surely it is long past time for those who operate the railways to raise their game.