PUNCTUALITY of Chiltern Railway trains slumped last month amid teething problems with new signals and the firm’s new speeded-up timetable.

The company is now planning timetable changes to improve reliability.

Just 87 per cent of Chiltern’s trains reached their destinations on time between mid-August and mid-September, down from 93.2 per cent in the previous four weeks.

In the same period last year, 97.3 per cent of the firm’s trains ran on time.

Chiltern’s new Mainline timetable, which was launched on Monday, September 5, was disrupted by a series of major faults affecting new signal equipment installed in August.

The new timetable brings Banbury within an hour of London, with some trains between Bicester North and London Marylebone completing the journey in under 45 minutes.

Services suffered long delays for several days, sending performance plummeting and dropping Chiltern from near the top of the Rail punctuality league to third from bottom.

Of the 19 major rail firms, only East Coast, which links London with the North East and Scotland, and Virgin, which operates between London, the West Midlands, the North West and Scotland, performed worse than Chiltern, with on-time performances of 86.7 and 82.1 per cent respectively.

However, Chiltern is now heading in the right direction, with punctuality in the third week of September climbing to 89.87 per cent. The figure would have been higher except for an incident when cows got on to the tracks, delaying a number of services.

A spokesman said: “The September 5 timetable change was the biggest in a decade.

“The disruption has been caused by a huge variety of different issues, including teething problems with our new infrastructure, and as a result we’ve not been able to deliver our usual consistently reliable service.

“We are doing everything possible to get these issues resolved quickly.”

A number of changes have already been made to the type of trains used on some services to help reduce overcrowding and Chiltern is planning a number of timetable alterations in December to improve reliability.

Chris Bates, of the Cherwell Rail Users’ Group, said: “Chiltern’s performance has improved in the past couple of weeks, as they seem to have ironed out most of the bugs in the infrastructure.

“But they need to work a lot harder to improve performance to achieve the kind of punctuality passengers are used to and there isn’t much recovery time allowed in the new timetable if there are problems.”

First Great Western, which links Oxford, Didcot and the Cotswolds with London, Paddington, the West Country and South Wales, ran 92.5 per cent of its trains on time during the four-week counting period, up from 91.4 per cent the previous month and 91.1 per cent last year.

CrossCountry Trains, which links Oxford and Banbury with the West Midlands and the South Coast, operated 90 per cent of services on time, down from 91.5 per cent in the previous four weeks, but up from 87.9 per cent a year earlier.

Nationally, 92.4 per cent of trains were on time from mid-August to mid-September, just up from 92.3 per cent in the previous four weeks.

The figure last year was 90.5 per cent.