Good day, dear reader. I’m writing to you from onboard what I believe to be an Avanti train. The doubt you detect arises from the simple fact that we are moving.

As a rule, I try to avoid hyperbole, reserving any euphoric or denunciatory language for the select occasions on which such embellishment is truly justified.

But it strikes me that Avanti West Coast trains might be the worst company in Britain, possibly in the history of the world.

This is a company so relentlessly incompetent it is haemorrhaging capital into its own reparations economy – a vast, ongoing transfer of wealth back to the people it fails every single day.

The Avanti Delay Repay website is one of my most visited webpages. According to my browser, it’s right up there with the recipe for Chicken Dopiaza and Mike Oldfield: Every Album Ranked.

For the uninitiated – which can only mean those of you who have never visited Manchester by rail – Delay Repay is where you go to submit a compensation claim when your train is more than 15 minutes late. I assume the scheme was set up by the regulator with the noble aim of encouraging operators to pay more attention to punctuality, against a backdrop of ever more frequent delays. By this measure, it has been an abject failure. I have  submitted 10 claims in the past six months – all of them successful. Given that I travel to London once a month, this means every journey bar two has been substantially delayed.

My latest claim should entitle me to a 50% rebate after my two hour train journey was delayed by well over an hour. This is not merely common; it has become the expected norm. It’s why I now give myself two hours of buffer time ahead of every London meeting.

I’d love to know how much Avanti makes from alcohol sales. On the rare occasions when the shop staff appear and the card machine works, booze is the only thing that makes the crap WiFi and hot, overcrowded carriages remotely bearable.

In Transport for Humans, Pete Dyson and Rory Sutherland make the case that passengers are perfectly willing to accept longer journey times in return for a better quality of service, and the reassurance that the journey time will be reliably as stated.

Avanti’s leadership team would be well advised to read this book. And then resign.

Occasional delays are understandable; some are beyond Avanti’s control. But when failure becomes so routine that customers brace for it every time, it’s misleading – bordering on fraudulent – to persist with the advertised journey time.

Manchester to London via Avanti West Coast does not take two hours and seven minutes. Passengers don’t care about theoretical journey times; we care about reality. And I would like to see Avanti taken to task for it. If criminal prosecution is not an option, then the only fair punishment is to force the senior leadership to take their own trains twice daily until the franchise expires in 2027. It’s the lenient alternative to public flogging. And they will, after all, be handsomely compensated.

Photo by Joseph Malone on Unsplash