The latest figures on overcrowding of rush-hour trains between Oxfordshire and London Paddington from the Department for Transport make seriously uncomfortable reading.

With commuters already paying more than £4,000 a year for a season ticket — with hefty price rises in the pipeline for the next three years — the least you might expect for that substantial outlay would be a seat.

But that is clearly far from a certainty, with all ten of the most overcrowded peak trains in and out of London’s major stations last autumn, First Great Western services at Paddington.

The number of Oxfordshire trains in the top ten has risen from two to four, but it is the detailed statistics that bring home the misery that travelling by rail in the rush-hour can be.

Take the 6.37am from Reading, which arrived at Paddington with 610 people on a train with a capacity of 304. And the 6.15pm from London, which serves Goring and Streatley, Cholsey, Didcot Parkway and Radley on its way to Oxford. The train has a capacity of 533 standard class passengers, but the snapshot survey found it was leaving Paddington with 944 on board, 77 per cent more people than there was space for.

Those simple figures are a stark illustration of the case for increasing capacity on the Oxford to London routes. Long term, the electrification of the route from London to Oxford in 2016 and the addition of new electric express trains hold out the hope of adding extra capacity, but that is of little comfort to current rail travellers.

Meanwhile, Oxfordshire’s other key operator, Chiltern Railways, is embarking on improvement work to speed up its services.

As part of a £250m package of enhancements, including a proposed second rail link between Oxford and London via Bicester, the rail firm is upgrading its main line between London, Bicester, Banbury and Birmingham to allow trains to run at up to 100mph and cut journey times by up to 20 per cent.

All this investment obviously needs to be paid for and this week’s announcement of rises in some fares of three per cent on top of inflation, was bound to be unpopular with regular rail users and has unsurprisingly been condemned as unfair by rail campaign groups.

Transport Secretary Philip Hammond said that due to the scale of the deficit, rail investments would simply have not been possible without the difficult decision to increase fares. We look forward to seeing the fruits of that investment.