Dear Editor, With our headquarters in Birmingham, Virgin Trains is proud to serve the West Midlands.

The views expressed in your recent article (City demands to run own train stations, Post, October 14) seriously underestimate the improvements we have brought to services to and from London.

They undersell the region’s attractions at a time when we should be giving a strong message that the West Midlands is a great place to do business.

We’ve taken 18 minutes off the typical journey time between Euston and New Street during our franchise. Relative to distance from London that’s a bigger improvement than the 25 minutes we’ve taken off the trip to Manchester.

Picking on the old railway tradition of running a couple of ‘flyers’ a day to illustrate journey times is misleading – we know that our passengers want a consistent service and we offer a typical Euston – New Street time of 1 hour 22 minutes.

We now run over 100 trains every weekday on the Euston to New Street route. That’s up 50 per cent compared with a couple of years ago – an extra 7,500 seats per day. And we’re not just carrying more passengers; we’re achieving satisfaction ratings of 90 per cent in customer independent research.

We think the West Midlands is a great place and we want to continue to play a part in its economic success.

Tony Collins

Chief executive, Virgin Trains