Boss of worst rail service: It'll take time to improve

Andrew Haines, who last autumn was given the job of turning round First Great Western, said: "We underestimated the scale of the challenge."

He also predicted more "passenger pain" ahead and said the company's previous managing director, Alison Forster, was "unrealistic" when she predicted by this year First Great Western would be seen as one of the best operations in the country. Mr Haines, who is head of FirstGroup's rail division, recently had first-hand experience when he was stuck for 30 minutes on the 6.30pm from Paddington to Weston-super-Mare.

He told the Guardian he was subjected to one customer's bad language. He said such passengers were a rarity, but admitted he found such levels of abuse hard to take. "You feel physically sick. I didn't feel I could do anything for that customer."

FGW, which in 2005 successfully bid for the expanded franchise to run Intercity and commuter routes out of Paddington, has come in for criticism for overcrowding, unpunctuality and exorbitant fare increases.

Mr Haines said: "First Great Western underestimated the scale of the challenge. It underestimated the strength of passenger feeling ... be it timetable changes, be it fare rises, be it service levels. It was a complex task, integrating three franchises into one, reengineering and refurbishing a high-speed train fleet in three years."

Voted the worst train service in the country in a survey by the commuter watchdog Passenger Focus, FGW consistently comes bottom of the punctuality table. Recent figures showed almost a fifth of its trains ran late last year. It also regularly fails to provide enough carriages, resulting in severe overcrowding.

Since 1995 the average standard single fare has risen by 145 per cent, well above the inflation rate over the period of 41 per cent. When it raised fares for many passengers in January by 10 per cent, they mounted a fares strike in Bristol and Bath.

Mr Haines took over from Ms Forster five months ago as head of FGW, which came into being in 1998 when the bus operator FirstGroup bought and rebranded Great Western Trains.

Last year she predicted FGW "will be a very different place in a year's time" - only to be moved sideways to make way for Mr Haines. He said: "Alison was clearly setting out an aspiration that, with the benefit of hindsight, was probably too ambitious and not realistic.

"There are big issues to tackle and we are absolutely on the right ground to do that now. But I will not promise that it will be top of the league next year. It will not be. My experience of business transformation is that it does not happen overnight."

With the Government committed to slashing the subsidy to rail services and increasing the contribution made by farepayers, Mr Haines made it clear that fare levels will continue to rise above inflation. "Will there be some passenger pain? Yes."

But he also made clear that he refused to be beaten by the challenge.