Copy and paste here…Well, that is exactly how it feels at the moment as there have been more problems with the overhead of the West Midlands Metro today (Wednesday 11th July) causing yet more issues for regular and irregular travellers alike. This latest issue reared its head at the same location as just a day previously with services disrupted for several hours before a temporary fix was put in place.
The overhead problem was first reported shortly after 1100 and led to the familiar pattern of a split service with a normal service from Wolverhampton St George’s to Handsworth Booth Street from where a shuttle service ran to Jewellery Quarter. Here passengers had to change again for onward travel to Grand Central.
Then from 1300 engineers were on site to undertake the temporary repair which meant that for the following three hours there was no service between Handsworth Booth Street and Jewllery Quarter at all. With this work completed a normal service did indeed resume from just after 1600. It is planned that a full repair will be undertaken overnight on Thursday 12th July so we can only hope that the temporary fix works for the next day.
Midland Metro Limited have now issued a formal apology to all passengers: “It has been a challenging couple of weeks. We are obviously extremely sorry for the inconvenience caused to you all and we would like to thank you for your patience. We have attempted to maintain as frequent a service as possible and our staff have been working flat out to try to resolve the problems as soon as possible. We have had to deal with a number of significant issues affecting the availability of trams and the performance of the infrastructure. We are implementing plans to renew the infrastructure to ensure we can provide a resilient service to our customers. We recognise that service disruptions create difficulties for our customers and we are grateful to our public transport colleagues in the rail and bus sectors for assisting passengers in completing their journeys. We really do appreciate the patience displayed by our customers and I want to assure you that infrastructure investment remains a key priority for us as we look forward to significantly expanding the Metro network over the coming years. “
These words are fine but it is actions that are needed are hopefully they will be coming soon to bring to an end these continuing issues.