Junkies and vandals take over stations

Bring back the staff: the disgusting, dangerous condition of unmanned halts deters travellers

There's nowhere to buy tickets at Cambridge Heath station and no one to sell them, but there is a "sharps" bin for discarded needles, thoughtfully provided by the West Anglia Great Northern train-operating company (WAGN). This is a dreary, frightening and frequently disgusting introduction to the railway network.

There's nowhere to buy tickets at Cambridge Heath station and no one to sell them, but there is a "sharps" bin for discarded needles, thoughtfully provided by the West Anglia Great Northern train-operating company (WAGN). This is a dreary, frightening and frequently disgusting introduction to the railway network.

Sometimes the addicts gather at the bottom of the main staircase where, instead of holiday ads or timetables, the walls are lined with corrugated metal. Or they choose the privacy of a stairwell, surprising travellers on the narrow, enclosed steps to the south-bound platform. Tread carefully here, as this spot doubles as a toilet. There may be faeces among the crushed methodone phials, if you're unlucky.

Cambridge Heath is a shabby, clapped-out spot, clinging to the eastern flank of Europe's richest business district, the City of London. It is just the sort of neglected area that the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, wants to redevelop. Yet the national railway system, key to any long-term regeneration, has no more than a passing acquaintance with this dark and smelly station.

There are few visitors and fewer trains so the drug users usually have it to themselves. All day and all night, there are services sweeping through to Stansted, Hertford and Cambridge, but they don't stop. The people of Cambridge Heath have no service after 7.30pm and nothing at the weekend.

"I don't think you could say British Rail was marvellous, but it has certainly got worse since privatisation," said local resident Ray King. "Once WAGN came it just wasn't interested really. It deteriorated to such an extent that the local drug addicts have just taken over, crapping on the station, shooting up on the platforms. This is a station where there should be a train running every 10 minutes."

There is no indicator board on the platform, no public address system, no timetable and, most likely, no train. If a train is late there is nothing and no one to say so. On a dark night in east London, the only contact with the human world is a yellow Help panel, but the last time Ray King pressed it there was still no answer after 20 minutes of waiting. So he left.

Cambridge Heath is an extreme example, but there are elements of its misery right across the railway system, from the crumbling passageways of darkened urban stations to the vandalised shelters and locked waiting rooms of forgotten rural halts.

The sad wreck of Carnforth, the north Lancashire station, famous for the filming of Brief Encounter, is now more chainlink and chipboard than Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard. Bordesley and Duddeston in Birmingham are bywords for dilapidation. While there are no central statistics on stations, a recent survey by Britain's passenger watchdog, the Rail Passengers Council (RPC) found that the toilets were dirty or locked in a third of East Anglian stations. More than half didn't even have a working clock and in 61 per cent of the unmanned stations there was no way of letting passengers know about train delays.

There is no reason to suppose that this is confined to East Anglia. The depopulation of the railway means that there are 1150 stations out of 2,500 with no staff and no booking office, while many hundreds more stand abandoned for all except four hours of the day. It is little surprise that the waiting room windows are smashed and the platform gardens are overgrown.

Henley-in-Arden is the sort of place that wins Britain in Bloom competitions, but even here in affluent Warwickshire the unmanned station is a source of anger. A stop on the line from Birmingham to Stratford, Henley should be on the tourist trail with its pretty, medieval main street, but the view from the carriage is disfigured by boarded-up buildings and litter. Few trippers feel encouraged to alight.

"The people who live here hate going up to meet their visitors," says local councillor Anastasia Wright. "The station has not been maintained for 10 years. You can see the remains of the flower beds, which used to be beautiful but are now covered with weeds." When we rang Central Trains, it insisted that Henley was a good station, pointing out that, with Railtrack, it had recently spent £70,000 making improvements. "I think you should ask those people who live there why they don't get a grip on their kids who go out and paint on the walls," said Gerard Burgess, the customer relations manager.

But the people of Henley insist the rot set in when the station staff were withdrawn. As elsewhere, there is no television monitor on the platform, no public address system and no information service - unless the yellow Help box is working.

The RPC believes the state of Britain's stations is a major obstacle to encouraging more train travel - even though it is often downgraded as a "soft" issue by the train companies, which prefer to talk about timetables and punctuality. The council has now mounted a campaign to restore staff to stations across the country.

"They can be quite frightening places," said Stewart Francis, chair of the RPC. "The one thing passengers feel deters them from using the railway is the lack of staff, especially at night. We have got to move to a point where, at every possible occasion, we're looking for manned stations. Without that, you're just not going to make the progress we have been promised."

Last week the government spending watchdog, the National Audit Office demanded substantial improvements from the rail companies, saying that delays have risen by 50 per cent since privatisation, despite the £1.3bn subsidy they received last year.

The Audit Office wants poorly performing companies to be expelled from the railway system and has demanded targets for improvement. Passengers like Ray King hope these apply to stations as well as timetables.