With just a few weeks to go until the end of the Arriva Trains Wales franchise, we are celebrating 15 years and thanking all our loyal customers.

[aoa id=”1″]The launch at Pontypridd on Friday, 7th September, saw Arriva Group CEO Manfred Rudhart join Assembly Member Mick Antoniw Town Mayor Cllr Linda Davies and Arriva Trains Wales MD Tom Joyner to say “Diolch” to customers. Having taken over in 2003, Arriva Trains Wales have been running services across Wales and the Borders ever since.[/aoa]

During that time more than 400 million customer journeys have been made on 4.5 million passenger services.

At the event to mark the start of the campaign, colleagues from ATW were also officially enrolled onto the company’s Welsh language scholarship programme, a continuing investment in people development. The first eight selected will shortly be heading to Nant Gwrtheyrn in North Wales to begin an intensive course.

Managing Director Tom Joyner said:

“We are proud that we have well and truly defied all expectations, growing customer journeys from 18 million to 33 million.

“We’ve overseen major investment in stations and played our part in some of the world’s biggest sporting events.

“There have been mistakes along the way and difficult situations, but we’ve come through them and come out stronger as a result and we are proud to be leaving the Wales and Borders network in a far stronger position than when we started in 2003. Our new Welsh language scholarship shows we are proud to continue our investment in people right up to the end of our franchise.”

Arriva Trains Wales facts:

Run more than 4,500,000 passenger services
Carried more than 400,000,000 passengers
Increased daily services from 620 to more than 1,000
Improved punctuality year on year with 81% arriving within 5 minutes of schedule in 2004 to 92% in 2017 whilst Right Time performance has jumped from 57% to 83%
Invested more than £33 million in improvements across the network despite only being asked to spend £400,000
Installed Customer Information Screens on 168 extra stations to ensure every station on our network has public information
Grown colleague numbers by more than 500 despite operating during one of the worst recessions in living memory