WITH reference to you columnist Pete Grant’s criticism of Merseyrail’s plans for dispensing with guards on trains in his Inferno diatribe last week, I can only say thank goodness he got a good ticking off from the top brass at Merseytravel.

In a lengthy and fascinating response to Mr Grant’s observations the two bosses of respectively Merseyrail, Jan Chaudhry-van der Velde, and Frank Rogers, of Merseytravel, certainly got stuck into the issues that matter.

First, they launched into a history lesson on local railway heritage and also claimed that “people still talk today of the Liverpool Overhead Railway.” Precisely who are these people still banging on about it? Clearly only folk over 60 as it was demolished in 1957.

And of course these are the very passengers who will find the absence of guards a little unsettling.

On and on they prattled in the same vein, in what is a glorious example of first-rate public relations puffery and obfuscation, never mind sophistry.

It was only in paragraph 14, approximately, that the response finally got to grips with the issue raised by Mr Grant, when it mentioned the dispute over guards.

Ah, but then it fell into pontificating about how any dispute would have disrupted the Open golf gathering at Royal Birkdale which is, they declared, watched by 600m people worldwide, a generous figure presumably lifted from the Open’s own website.

It is no wonder the negotiations over guards on trains is so convoluted and extended if this is the extremely poor standard of “debate” proffered by the management and owners of Merseyrail.

Name and address supplied.