Heavy snow blamed for quarter of West Midlands' train delays in January
A quarter of trains through the West Midlands were delayed last month, with rail companies blaming heavy snow for the problems.
Virgin Trains, which operates West Coast services, only ran 72 per cent of trains on time, a drop of more 13 per cent on the same month last year.
London Midland, where passengers have been compensated for delays caused by staff shortages, was the next worst-performing company at 79.8 per cent, a fall of more than 10 per cent.
CrossCountry managed to get 81.7 per cent of its trains to run on time compared with 90 per cent in the first month of 2012.
Chiltern Railways ran 92.9 per cent of its services on time making it one of the better performing companies in the country.
Arriva Trains Wales, which connects Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Shrewsbury, had a punctuality rate of 91.5 per cent compared with 94.7 per cent in January 2012.
Nationally the average was 68.7 per cent.
Virgin said today that its dip was down to the bad weather conditions.
It said it would actually have recorded better results if it had cancelled services and switched to emergency timetables during the heavy snow, but chose not to do so in order to keep as many services going as possible.
Virgin's spokesman Glynn McDonald said: "Operators do have the option to put in place emergency timetables and it would be against that that they are judged. We try to stick wherever possible to our normal timetable.
"As a consequence of minimising the disruption, the figures do show a drop in punctuality but we felt this was better than running the emergency timetable."
The official rail industry figures are based on the percentage of services that arrive within a minute of their scheduled time.
The Association of Train Operating Companies said the latest figures, which relate to the period from January 6 to February 2, showed eight out of 10 trains ran without delay during the recent bad weather.
But the organisation said it understood passenger frustration when trains were delayed.
The Office of Rail Regulation has said rail passengers have "suffered poor performance in recent months, far below the standard".
