The AGM notice is enclosed with this newsletter (internet readers click here) so please make a note of the above date in your diaries. We really need to discuss the future direction of the Association with our members.

This is no longer because we are struggling to form a Committee or find members - in fact, for the first time in several years, we have a full complement of officers. Actually we have one Committee Member too many according to our constitution - a bit of an oversight there! Our membership is gradually increasing from its already healthy state - 125 individuals not counting our corporate supporters - which is quite respectable for a group not presently promoting excursion trains.

Financially we are still almost too well off, having not spent much money since our (sadly failed) legal battles regarding the relocation of Wrexham Central. In the last year we have started to spend more, by setting up our website (www.wbrua.net), timed to complement an advert promoting the Sunday train service last summer and very useful for the same purpose this year too. Having twice advertised Wales in the Wirral Globe, natural justice dictates that we should balance this by plugging the Wirral in Wales "next time".

It is our constitutional duty to promote the line, but with hundreds of pounds involved each time, we would really like endorsement for such ventures from the general membership whose money it is - and this is best expressed at the AGM.

Improvements?

You may have noticed the quotation marks around the words "next time" when we were referring to our advertising activities. We can also talk about the similarly punctuated "next time" that we submit suggestions regarding improvements to the service on the Borderlands Line, which is how the Wrexham-Bidston route is now branded.

A real catalogue of errors resulted from our suggestions for this year’s summer timetable and the reliability of our line’s service is far from satisfactory, so the next time we similarly invest money, time and energy will be dependent on having something that we can promote with pride and satisfaction.

We had been really delighted when Arriva’s Service Planning Manager Paul Jeffries asked for our suggestions for improvements to the draft timetables that he sent us, but with only a few days before the deadline for changes we had to put many hours of effort into studying all the various connections that could be improved at Bidston, Shotton and Wrexham General.

At Shotton in particular, there is always going to be the problem with regular hourly services, in that a slick ten-minute interval, for example, between arrival and departure for one passenger is going to equal fifty very boring minutes for somebody else. Any change may well be creating potential patronage at the expense of some of the people already on the trains.

Unfortunately because of the very short time we were given to make our suggestions, we were unable to complete the market research among existing passengers regarding what we regarded as the most important change of all: the evening commuter train from Bidston.

For many years this ran at about 1740 but a couple of events involving Merseyrail caused this timing to edge forward to its present 1732 with the connection leaving Moorfields at 1706. This is obviously too early for most nine-to-fivers and we have lost hundred of season ticket holders over the years.

The first event in 1993 was electrification from Hooton to Chester and Ellesmere Port. To minimise the number of trains on the Wirral Line, the new services were "interworked" with the New Brighton and West Kirby ones - hence the first timetable change.

We thoroughly disliked the interworking: having a train from Bidston to Liverpool not arriving because of a signal failure in Chester really tried our patience. But full marks to Merseytravel in the end: for a few years now all Wirral trains have been running straight back from the Liverpool Loop to their originating stations. However this meant another timetable change for our line too.

We lost yet more commuters some of whom suggested to us that the 1732 from Bidston should be put back to connect with the 1721 from Moorfields and we included this in our list of suggestions for the summer timetable. Another reason was that its previous journey as the 1632 from Wrexham was so busy that it had problems with punctuality which would be automatically solved by running it later.

Once we started monitoring this train daily we realised how bad this punctuality problem was. In the first week the train arrived late every day and on three days the connection to Liverpool was missed.

But it left on time every day, just five minutes after the arrival of the train from Liverpool. Unfortunately the rush of getting the change finalised led to a series of errors in the timetables - including the departure time from Moorfields still being advertised as 1706 which meant a 20-minute wait at Bidston for those who believed it.

Regrettably, an existing regular passenger or two resented the change, complained about it and the train has returned to its generally inconvenient, frequently unpunctual 1732 departure. We will be conducting a proper survey on the train to find out what the majority think, something that we wish we had had the chance to do before.

Another request concerned the 1902 from Wrexham Central, which left General just before the arrival of the evening peak train from Birmingham, called at Shotton too soon after the arrival of the most useful day-trippers’ train from Llandudno and then spent nearly half an hour in the siding at Bidston. while its passengers had to wait for around twenty minutes to continue on their way to both West Kirby and Liverpool. However, a clash with an occasional freight train to Penyffordd meant that our suggested alteration - running it ten minutes later - could only be made on Saturdays.

The change was made and an extra stop for a Holyhead train on Saturday mornings delivered a superb opportunity for us to promote "Great Saturdays Out" in our Wirral Globe advertisement. We had no feedback from passengers on this except from our own Committee Members who cited several instances of connections that would otherwise have been missed. The morning train to Holyhead seemed also to attract a very healthy number of Deesiders although we have no idea of their individual destinations.

The above change has now been made also for Mondays to Fridays for the winter timetable. While this makes the journey to Liverpool much slicker, the brilliant connection from Llandudno - which would have formed the return leg of a whole variety of day trips - now runs fifteen minutes later too and is too tight to recommend.

You may recall our attempts to initiate an advertising wrap for the Wirral Globe in May: this failed dismally with neither Arriva buses, nor Arriva Trains picking up on the idea and without them we could hardly ask other interested parties to contribute. Even when we tried to settle for a modest advertising feature to coincide with the start of our summer Sunday service, we ended up going it alone with a half-page full-colour advert, Wales By Rail and Bus. The Globe gave us pride of place on page two for a bargain price of £500 for the whole of the Wirral.

The summer timetables allowed us to plug three "Great Sundays out" - Moel Famau buses from Shotton Station, connections to the North Wales Coast and a Snowdon Sherpa bus tour from Llandudno Junction.

For Saturdays we suggested the North and Mid Wales Day Ranger specifying a Cambrian Coast plus Conwy Valley tour (with Snowdon Sherpa or Ffestiniog Railway between the two) and also the old chestnut of "Upton to Rhyl in 54 minutes" - although this is the fastest time ever. courtesy of that extra stop by the Holyhead train.

For weekdays we suggested a day return to Wrexham and a £5 Arriva Wales and North West Day Ticket bought on buses to Bidston, Upton and Neston to be used also from Wrexham to Llangollen, Bala, Dolgellau and Barmouth. "Great Weekdays Out for £9 (or less!!)" we proclaimed.

It was certainly successful. In fact we almost wish it hadn’t been because the reliability of the service plummeted almost immediately. In fact we have been really shocked by what has been shown by our increased monitoring of the line’s performance following the advertisement.

The second Sunday of the summer service the 1001 from Bidston simply failed to arrive. On the day for which we expected the impact of the promotion to peak, there had been no driver for the very train which featured in three of our advertised Great Days Out.

The following Saturday the 1032 train was taken out of service at Bidston after the passengers had boarded. This was because of a faulty door - goodness knows how many passengers hoping to get from "Upton to Rhyl in 54 minutes!!!" watched their train zoom past empty. Our observer was left sighing loudly at Bidston. It was mid-afternoon before that unit was replaced.

You’re already probably getting bored with all this and we could catalogue a whole stream of delays and cancellations, but will just recall one of the worst.

Engineering work meant that the West Kirby line was closed from Birkenhead North one Sunday morning in September and our chairman had decided to park the car at Upton before taking a short return trip to Bidston just to make sure that the crew knew that the replacement bus from North was due only three minutes before their departure for Wrexham.

It turned out that Bidston had not been excluded from the engineer’s "possession" and it took more than an hour to get the problem sorted out and the train into the station. Our passengers can be extraordinarily patient - all of them were equipped with mobile phones and seemed even to be enjoying recounting the latest tale of incompetence.

It is NOT something that we enjoy at all.

To the astonishment of our chairman and the train’s crew, on arrival back at Upton they found four passengers still waiting for the train which was now about 70 minutes late! They forgot to ask them how many people had given up, but there were probably quite a few.

Still, there were lots of others who had very enjoyable days out over the summer. Had Arriva paid the £500 themselves, they would have needed about 100 extra passengers throughout August and September to recoup their investment and we suspect they got them in the first week or two. Several trains each had ten or more travelling directly because of our publicity but we cannot honestly estimate the overall figure.

However, your Committee has already decided that there will be no "next time" regarding such financial outlay until the reliability of the service has vastly improved.

There is hope however!

We really regret that our obligation to state facts has resulted in such a negative newsletter and we are actually very anxious to avoid criticising the Arriva personnel for whom we have a good deal of sympathy. This does not necessarily extend to the umbrella company who need to learn about the concept of false economies.

Like the trains that earn their keep while stationary at termini by improving levels of punctuality, administrative staff who have time to spare also have time to think and this is not necessarily an inefficient use of human resources (to use the ghastly modern business jargon).

We have actually been quite impressed by certain things. The stations are looking quite good these days with Neston and Hope both vast improvements on their previous sorry states. Arriva’s Ben Davies is very aware of shortcomings such as the class 153’s door problems and the company is "stripping them down" to provide a lasting solution.

He himself requested that we double the frequency of our local authority liaison meetings to every three months and the latest one, the 39th, seemed to be as positive as any we have had.

As for the long term future of the line, the new Dutch managers of Merseyrail Electrics, Merseytravel’s boss Neil Scales and members of the Taith transport consortium of North Wales Authorities are voicing ideas so bold that even we have difficulty believing it!

Watch this space...