THE rail industry couldn’t have picked a worse day than yesterday to announce its flash new £4.5bn fleet of trains that will apparently cut six minutes off the trip between Oxford and London Paddington.

That announcement is unlikely to have been met with anything other than a grimace at best from the thousands of people yesterday afternoon whose trains were on go-slow orders because it got a little bit warm.

That’s right, in Britain we had what could reasonably called our third genuine summer’s day of the past three months and there were fears the rails were going to buckle near Paddington, causing delays of about an hour for some people.

But think about yesterday. It was hardly a scorching record-breaker, was it? Our temperature gauge here in Oxford hit 28C.

Why, in Britain in 2012 and just a couple of days before the Olympic Games officially kicks off, is our railway system so feeble that it grinds to a halt at the first hint of summer?

Yesterday in Athens it was 31C and Madrid 36C. As far as we could ascertain, their public transport system seemed to be coping. They may not be able to run their economies very well, but at least the public transport system is a little more robust than ours.

The investment in new trains is, of course, to be welcomed. Some of the 125 fleet they will be replacing will be 40 years old, after all.

But if the tracks they run on can’t withstand a bit of warmth – or snow, or leaves – spending £4.5bn on faster trains is ultimately a waste of money.