Last week the Oxford Mail published an article about the local railway. The paper has kindly allowed me the opportunity to put pen to paper and assure you that Chiltern Railways is committed to providing the city with the best possible rail service, writes Alan Riley, Customer Services Director at Chiltern Railways.

It might sound obvious but we’re very aware of how much reliable public transport matters to people.

Trains get you to and from work, to see family and friends, to go to important appointments, to sporting events and countless other things.

We never lose sight of how much people trust us to deliver for them and we never take that trust for granted.

Since investing £130m in our line to Oxford, re-opened in 2016, we’ve worked hard to ensure Chiltern Railways’ service is the most highly-rated on the London to Oxford route.

But with passengers’ trust and relative popularity, comes a responsibility to deliver and to maintain the high standards we’ve set, and that people have a right to expect.

It was good to see that the Rail Reputation Index revealed that Chiltern Railways was the UK rail brand with the strongest reputation in London and the South East of England.

In addition, in the latest Network Rail performance figures we were the top operator with 91.5per cent of trains on time against a national average of 82.3 per cent and we were the top operator in Oxfordshire for satisfaction.

However, we know what matters to you most is being able to get a reasonably-priced train journey at the times you expected and when things go wrong, you want quality information to complete your journey.

That’s what we want as well but sometimes things happen that Chiltern Railways doesn’t have influence over and that can disrupt you, but I want to assure you that we’ll only ever change journeys when there’s good reason and we’ve explored alternatives to doing so:

•The engineering works at Oxford earlier this summer meant we carried more passengers than we would normally do to help out other rail companies and trains could only get as far as Oxford Parkway; we know this inconvenienced some passengers but now the work is complete more trains can go to Oxford each day giving passengers more choice, flexibility and reliability.

•We’ll always prioritise safety and this means sometimes when we get asked by Network Rail, who own the infrastructure we run on, we’ll slow down our trains as a safety precaution.

This happened recently in and around Oxford Station and we know it was frustrating when it affected passengers travelling on our trains. While safety must come first, we are continuously working with Network Rail to minimise the disruption that issues like this cause to passengers.

•Our teams work very hard to deliver the service but unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, there are occasions when fewer staff are available for work than normal.

When this happens, as it has done recently, we may have to amend our service but will always do our best to avoid this. Where we know we need more staff we’ll recruit for them and we’re constantly working to ensure our service is resilient.

We are committed to continuing to invest in our service and will never stop trying to improve performance for our customers, and I’d like to thank all our customers for their patience over recent weeks.